posted 9 months ago
If I sort of understand all this, then I'm sure I don't have enough electrical knowledge to fully grasp it. Amplify, rectify, switch, excite an electrical circuit enough to split a simple molecule and then recombine it via combustion combined with some vapor pressure, creating enough force to move a piston and do some work.
Tesla is a wind up car. Plug it in at night, then run it until the battery croaks.
Nobody complains about the inherent loss of power/work/potential through remote generation (from whatever fuel/energy source, carbon or otherwise), transmission, ac/dc rectification, chemical storage, ac/dc/ac rectification as voltages/frequencies are stepped up/down to spin the wheels run and all the associated systems. You will never get 100% of the work back out of that electrical system that you put in to get the car moving out of it's own driveway and off to Walmart.
Better still if you don't trouble yourself to think about where the raw materials for plastic, aluminum, electrical components of this machine come from.
I'll clue ya. It's typically poorer people, living not anywhere near you, whose rare earth metal/copper/hydrocarbon resources and labor can be stripped/cheaply purchased/colonized.
I live part time in Nevada. There are projects underway to strip the most valuable asset in the West, underground aquifers, and use them to strip the soils of ancient evaporative deposits of lithium to power those wind up cars. I don't remember anyone really asking Nevadans if they wanted to give that resource away to make EVs or cordless drills elsewhere possible.
Nobody complains about the potential inefficiency of the myriad of hydrogen fuel cells, likely because nobody here remotely understands them or has given any thought to their use.
But, regenerative fuel cells exist, turning water into electricity, then reversing to turn electricity back into water. Efficiently splitting and recombining the hydrogen/oxygen bond. A potential partial solution to the variability and intermittency of renewable electrical generation.
The densest form of energy on this planet, short of nuclear fission, is hydrocarbons. IT IS ALSO THE MOST PORTABLE. But you can't get more energy out of them than the sun and all those chemical/temp/pressure reactions put into them over the last 250 million years.
Metal/chemical electrical storage, hydrocarbons, hydrogen, wood, are all batteries, with varying efficiencies/densities of extraction/conversion.
So I fail to understand why the crying starts over the notion that the only possible pass/fail for this man's quest and therefore your judgemental approval, revolves around the idea that his system will consume more energy than it releases as work.
So?
First prove that the idea works on some scale. Then work on efficiency. If this is to be a car, then add a small storage battery to the system which could be charged at night by the same pixies winding your Tesla spring, provide regenerative braking, like any EV, or a flywheel, add a solar panel to the roof.
But don't squirt the brown lumps on this idea, like that misguided wikepedia 'article' cited, until you pause to realize that what he is really doing is trying to create a internal combustion engine that does not rely on one of the most resource intensive industries, hydrocarbons, for power.
Nobody said anything about lossless perpetual motion, medievel gold alchemy, the health of Elvis, or free energy.