Expansion of Different Materials and Extracting the Power

[Jim Mac]

Just thinking out loud here..  We could make an extremely powerful one of these that can withstand thousands of pounds of force..

1.  Hydraulic Cylinder for a tractor.
2.  Thermal Expansion Wax

Melt the wax and heat the cylinder so the wax does not solidify on contact when filling.  Open a port and fill it up.

The outcome should be a piston that can generate tremendous force by simply melting and letting the wax solidify.  The wax can be melted in several creative ways.  Besides using electric to heat the wax, one could make a heat chamber outside that uses a small one of these to open and close the lid as the heating chamber heats up.

Essentially, we should be able to transform small candle power into tremendous force

[ovun987]

Highly intrigued by this concept, especially with how rudimentary the principles are. Excited to hear how this goes! Godspeed!

[Jim Mac]

Highly intrigued by this concept, especially with how rudimentary the principles are. Excited to hear how this goes! Godspeed!

I am also really intrigued (as you can tell)

Wax seems the way to go..  It expands 10-15% which is even more than water freezing.  And the melting temperature can be controlled by mixing Parafin wax with Mineral Oil.  Which are both pretty cheap and readily available.

One could get one of these Ram Jacks that are rated for 10 Tons..  Fill it with the right wax and possibly lift 5 cars with the waste heat generated from your Cable TV box.

   

[Jim Mac]

Well the whole idea may be a dead-end because of  Clausius-Clapeyron equation.

Take water for example.  Under a vacuum, you can get water to boil at very low temperatures.  But under pressure, it takes more heat to boil water.

Water usually boils at 212 F at standard atmospheric pressure.  But at 15 PSI (in a pressure cooker) water boils at around 250 degrees F.  

So basically the idea of this powering itself probably won't work.  The more pressure we build, the temperature required to melt and solidify the substance changes.  

This does not mean the idea is worthless.  It just means the heat difference needs to be drawn from natural sources.

[Tom Booth]

Just FYI, I started a thread on this same topic about three years ago on one of the science forums. The thread was repeatedly locked, or sent to "trash" and I was subsequently banned.

Moderator Note

And we went through this before. It ended up with the thread being closed, and you were told not to open up a new thread on it.

Doing an end-run by bringing it up in a thread on another topic isn’t allowed.
  
https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/1250...nt=1176706

The original post I made on the topic (or very similar topic) had to do with both the feasibility of such an "ice bomb" thermal engine but also with how to apply the mathematics of the 2nd "law", specifically "Carnot efficiency" to such an engine.

Since the thermodynamic "laws" and mathematic equations are calculated, to put it simply, on the basis of heat ADDED vs. power output, how is "Carnot efficiency" calculated when the power out is a result of heat removal?

https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/1249...al-engine/

It isn't apparent just by viewing the site or my profile there, but if I attempt to log in I'll be informed that I'm banned and my browser will be blocked from even viewing the site as a "guest".

Because 200 years ago heat was considered some kind of "fluid" and expansion of a substance in a heat engine was thought to be a result of a kind of fluid hydraulics that worked the same for any and all substances, so things expand when they "contain" more of this "heat"/caloric substance.

The fact that expansion and contraction are, on the contrary, the result of molecular changes, attraction and repulsion, molecular bonding and so forth was not recognized and really, in thermodynamics, is still not recognized.

You still have people who think that a Stirling engine operates by heat as a kind of hydraulic fluid pressure, and the thermodynamicists apparently don't like attention being drawn to the possibility that their theories and equations are not absolute or applicable to any and all circumstances or forms of matter, or may, in fact be entirely obsolete.

If this is off-topic, I don't mind at all if this post goes away, this thread is obviously concerned with the practical matters of constructing such an engine and I don't want to turn it into a debate about thermodynamics.

As far as I'm concerned, thermodynamics is a dead/obsolete science based almost entirely on an early misconception about the nature of heat.

[Tom Booth]

Some interesting videos:





I'm sure there are a few more but they aren't turning up in a search right now.

[Jim Mac]

Thanks Tom, your posts are definitely welcome and appreciated.

I am not as versed you you in these subjects and please don't allow my understandings to taint your understandings in your Sitrling work. But here is as I currently understand.

Pressure is not "Power" but it is "Potential Power".   No power is extracted till some "work" has been done.

Taking boiling water for example.  We apply exactly as much heat required to keep water boiling.  We then place an air-tight lid on the container.  Some pressure will build but the water will Stop Boiling in short order.  We may have a few PSI to extract into work, but not that much power can be drawn.  When we do draw that power, the water will start to boil again because the pressure opposing expansion has been relieved when we used it to do "Work".

Now we boil water again with the exact heat requirement to stabilize at 250 degrees and place the air tight lid.  The water stops boiling again as soon as the pressure starts exceeding 15 PSI or so..  But the temperature to create that 15 PSI of potential power increased that from standard 212 boiling.  

So we can "ASSUME"  the potential energy output is proportional to the heat requirement to create the phase change. BUT we CAN change or alter the materials so the phase change occurs at ambient temperature so we do not have to waste energy getting the temperature to the critical point where energy can be tapped.

Now this does NOT mean the methods are a "Dead End".  Because our environment supplies us with temperature differentials daily that can be "Leveraged" immensely.  A simple rotating Fresnel Lenz and a Shade Cloth could create a large temperature variation and would cost us a fraction to rotate compared with the potential power the heat differential could provide us with.

There is another aspect to all this that I cam not convinced the mainstream understanding is correct, which may have large implications. 

"Is The heat Really "CONVERTED" and "LOST"

This is the part I am not on-board with..  

As an example..  We supply 50 watts to a resistor and get 50 watts worth of heat (100% efficiency)..  Now lets assume at that power level, the resistive filament turns red and glows, thus producing LIGHT..  Are we still getting 100% heat efficiency + the extra added bonus of Light?  Or is it as mainstream says, are we getting roughly 90% heat and 10% light.   

I asked GEMINI and CHATGPT this EXACT same question below and got 2 opposite answers.

" if I took 2 identical boxes in the same ambient temperature. In 1 box 1 powered a pure filament resistive light with 50 watts. The other box I powered a simple resistor with 50 watts. Would both boxes have the same temperature?

This also applies to the subject of expansion of materials to harvest energy..  If I am paying for heat for my house, does it really "Disappear" heat by harvesting it's phase change?  Or does the heat still make it to the environment either way..  If the latter is true, then this would be "FREE ENERGY".

[Jim Mac]

Another thought on the subject...

Taking what was stated above,  my whole temperature jargon did not consider the equal and opposite reaction  -->  The Contraction"..  

POWER IN -->  EQUALS  -->  POTENTIAL POWER OUT

100 watts of heat is used to create a maximum power potential of 100 watts from the increased PSI..  But the retraction cycle can also produce 100 watts if no losses were assumed.

So we have a maximum power potential of 200 Watts Total. But it only costs us 100 watts of input.  The actual cost of the full process is 200 watts (equal to the output)  but if we let the environment do 1/2 the work, we don't pay for that part.

So in summary, it appears this may be a feasible way to harness power from the environment.  The key is,  we need to let the environment do half the work.  

[Jim Mac]

So I got this 3000 PSI, 16" stroke never used Hydraulic Cylinder I had stored in the shed for the last 12 years.  It doesn't fit my current tractor so it can be used for this project. I also  got Parafin Wax coming this week.

   

I plan to fill this sucker with wax/mineral oil mixture and mount this sucker outside.  Start gathering some data on outdoor throw measurements and such with the gradient temperature change for my area.  

I figure I can attach a pencil on the shaft and have it draw lines on a board as it expands and contracts while I am not home.   If all looks good, I will consider chain-gearing to turn a generator, then go from there.. 

If the results are worthy, I can investigate options how to increase cycles in a day, like (as mentioned) rotate a Fresnel lenz and shade cloth, or open and close the lid of a heat chamber with logic controls, or maybe even a small greenhouse actuator.

We will see how far I get..

[unimmortal]

I remember seeing a video of a guy using (insert gas here) with a boiling point below 0° C. Plumbing it through stands outside to collect radiant heat energy even in the middle of winter, and then transfer that to an exchanger that could boil water. I'll have to see if youtube remembers me watching that.