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FrozenKyrie OP t1_ja68i1b wrote

Reply to comment by Caucasiafro in eli5 perpetual motion is impossible but why haven't we made something that just goes on for a really long time that we then service so it can keep going? by FrozenKyrie

that does but what I meant was something of a power source

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Caucasiafro t1_ja691g8 wrote

The entire problem is there's a set amount of energy you can get out of something. So the only way to make something "run for a long time" as a power source is to really really slowy take energy away from it. Why would we bother to do that?

There's simply no point.

Basically your question is like asking "if bank accounts run out eventually why haven't we just made a bank account we take money out of slowly?"

Because we want the money.

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FrozenKyrie OP t1_ja698pk wrote

didn't think of it like that but that makes sense

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[deleted] t1_ja6hvmh wrote

[removed]

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manofredgables t1_ja6rdg4 wrote

>Don’t listen to these guys regurgitate what their science teacher in grade 9 told them about energy.

You know... I'm pretty anti-establishment in general and mildly anarchist. I'm also an engineer. Know what I work with? Electrical motors, hybrids and generators! In semi trucks! Do you have any idea what a legend I'd be if I just did this "one simple trick" to make our semi trucks suddenly have unlimited range and energy? Yeah I'd be legendary and rich as fuck.

You think I wouldn't at least try it of there was any chance physics worked like that? There's a good reason anyone who isn't schizophrenic or mildly dumb sticks to saying it's impossible... That's because it is.

You're basically proposing a mechanism where a rock rolls down a ramp, which pushes a lever that tilts the ramp in the other direction. You just threw magnets into the equation, hoping they'd do something magical.

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Flapflapimabird t1_ja7spjq wrote

Uhh. There’s a little bit more going on but the guy who had the magnetic flywheel built a castle with it and my grade 9 science teacher did not.

Like, go see what madebyoneman on YouTube is up to. He’s a good guy. Or VinnyStVincent.

Go read the pamphlets that Ed released about magnetic energy, seems to be right up your alley.

Actually. Go and look at copper mining in the Baltic region at the turn of the century and look at their electrical systems that they used because they’re pretty much where Ed got his idea being from Latvia and all.

Where do you think Tesla got his ideas from? It’s like he was born with this preconceived notion of electricity but that’s obviously not true.

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manofredgables t1_ja7w9sh wrote

>Uhh. There’s a little bit more going on but the guy who had the magnetic flywheel built a castle with it and my grade 9 science teacher did not.

How is a perpetuum mobile related to castles?

>Like, go see what madebyoneman on YouTube is up to. He’s a good guy. Or VinnyStVincent.

I did. Looks like a dude who picks on rocks and sometimes almost makes something net positive. I dunno...

The other guy makes shitty music (???) and levitates a "rock" which is quite clearly magnetite, while obscuring parts of the shot. I mean... You can make anything seem possible with a bad enough video clip.

>Go read the pamphlets that Ed released about magnetic energy, seems to be right up your alley.

Ed who?

>Where do you think Tesla got his ideas from? It’s like he was born with this preconceived notion of electricity but that’s obviously not true.

Err, research and experiments, I would assume? Science?

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Flapflapimabird t1_ja874kl wrote

Okay so let’s take a look at madebyoneman, who is buddies with Vinny but besides the point that these two are the only two that I see that have a working model of Ed’s flywheel, madebyoneman is a retired navy electrical engineer who looks at Coral Castle (Ed Leedskalnin’s construction) with wonder and recreates his experiments. If you dive deep, you’ll find that madebyoneman explains the type of electrical system that Ed would have used, using old car parts (like the Magneto alternator from an old Ford Model T) components used in his flywheel combined with overhead wires and solenoids, using the flywheel as a power source.

The only mention of Perpetual motion is when you take a soft iron U-shaped magnet and wind copper coils around both ends, creating a horseshoe electromagnet but also a primitive transformer. When this electromagnet is charged, it is magnetic, and when you attach an iron bar across the poles of this electromagnet, it will not lose its energy. The iron bar is shown by fedora guy (another YouTuber idk what his handle is) to last at least 2 years, and when an LED is connected across both poles, when the iron bar is pulled off, it both loses its magnetic charge and lights up the LED momentarily. There is a discharge of magnetic energy. The energy goes somewhere.

This “permanent magnet holder” as Ed so happily named it, “PMH” for short, is intrinsic in his flywheel design.

The flywheel is made from Magneto alternator magnets from old Ford Model T’s stacked 5 high, and arranged in a repulse state, encased in cement. This “supercharges” or pushes the pole outward to make it a little stronger. The poles interact with the PMH to induce a magnetic charge in the system as the flywheel turns past it.

This does two things: controls the state of the current in the solenoid to be converted into reciprocating motion to do work (I.e. cut stone) and it also provides an auxiliary electromagnet with a charge, when placed on the proper angular position on the flywheel, supplies an attraction for the opposite polarity on the flywheel.

The clover cam on top of the flywheel dictates the position of the auxiliary electromagnet, as to move it away from the flywheel after it has attracted that specific pole. As the wheel spins, the polarity is reversed in the system, and the next pole is attracted, the solenoid extends or retracts, work is done, and the wheel continues to spin.

In no way is it not using energy, in no way is it perpetual motion, as energy is supplied into the system by 12v car batteries.

That being said, the wheel can return current into the batteries and return the lead sulphate back into lead and sulphuric acid. As a whole system, with one of these wheels in motion, and several batteries at opportune positions within the circuit, you can provide your cutting tools with reciprocating power, provide your lights with energy, with minimal losses.

In Ed’s pamphlets, he states that he believes that the batteries are made lopsided. In that the cathode is bigger than the anode, and he sought out to fix this problem. While writing this about his wheel, I realized that the batteries within the system were going to produce a one sided charge within the system, but I also believe that Ed solved the problem of the one-sided batteries by creating a larger anode, which would impart a state of equilibrium to the system as a whole which would allow the solenoids to operate off of the charge that the wheel supplied to the system as a whole.

Low frequency alternating current.

As I said, go find what you can about copper mining in the Baltic region at the turn of the century. If you’re focusing on Vinny St. Vincent’s rock levitating experiments, you’re missing out on madebyoneman’s tripods. One is more likely than the other.

Fedora guy who did the PMH experiments is Russ. This guy does all sorts of cool shit, great channel. I think he’s an engineer in Nevada or something like that. His videos on making a cnc coil-winder from a 3D printer are great.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=832qz3s1M-s

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manofredgables t1_jacn468 wrote

>When this electromagnet is charged, it is magnetic, and when you attach an iron bar across the poles of this electromagnet, it will not lose its energy.

Yes it will. The magnetic field generated by the electric current will collapse, but to whatever extent the iron bar was magnetized there will be some remaining. It can no longer be considered energy, however, it's just a magnet.

>The iron bar is shown by fedora guy (another YouTuber idk what his handle is) to last at least 2 years,

Sure. Permanent magnets are just that, permanent.

>and when an LED is connected across both poles, when the iron bar is pulled off, it both loses its magnetic charge and lights up the LED momentarily.

This is no mystery. That is the basic principle of a generator. Apply a changing magnetic field to a conductor, and electrical current is produced. Since you are removing a permanent magnet from an iron core, you are suddenly lowering the magnetic field from the conductor's vicinity.

If it loses any magnetism(it won't lose all of it), it's due to hysteresis loss. This is to be expected with soft iron which easily gets both magnetized and demagnetized. It's a real headache in transformers.

>There is a discharge of magnetic energy. The energy goes somewhere.

No, there is not. There is a conversion from the kinetic energy(removing the iron bar), into magnetic energy(suddenly changing the flux), into electrical energy(as the field has nothing to sustain it, it is "absorbed" into the conductors), and finally a sheer inefficient loss of potential energy as the fragile magnetizing of the iron bar goes down. That is lost as minor heat in the iron bar.

Nothing remotely interesting has happened in this sequence. Take that horseshoe transformer thing and attach a proper neodymium magnet instead of the iron bar and you'll see quite a bit more power when it's removed.

Or better yet, put the magnet on a rotating thing so that you repeatedly spin it past the horseshoe! Oh wait... That's a normal generator.

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Flapflapimabird t1_jacvhbq wrote

Don’t format your posts like this. I don’t read it.

I’m not shilling free energy, you can relax. Lmfao.

We’re also talking about two different things.

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En_TioN t1_ja6n8ow wrote

Lmao dude.

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Flapflapimabird t1_ja6o2qn wrote

Edward Leedskalnin - Homestead Florida.

Take a look, the wheel spins and spins and spins, constantly alternating the current for his solenoid. It’s not perpetual motion, it’s a machine that returns energy back into its source and does work.

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En_TioN t1_ja6ou05 wrote

You can build systems where unused power can be returned to the power source - take regenerative braking in EVs for example. This helps prevent the unnecessary loss of power, and can substantially reduce consumption.

However, you will never return 100% of the energy you extracted back to the power source. The energy used for work can't be returned because you just transferred it somewhere else! Plus, you'll lose energy to heat.

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CyclopsRock t1_ja75mga wrote

>So the only way to make something "run for a long time" as a power source is to really really slowy take energy away from it. Why would we bother to do that?

I agree with everything you're saying, but there are some fairly obvious answers to this question, because there are plenty of things that require very little power but that are difficult or impossible to service and thus you want to last a very long time - pacemakers, for example, or certain robots designed for space that use very low power, very long lasting nuclear power sources.

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twelveparsnips t1_ja68xpb wrote

Because using it to power things adds drag to it and makes it eventually stop.

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A_Garbage_Truck t1_ja6adov wrote

the issue with this is that the most energy you could harness from it would still need to be lesser tha nthe energy you spent to keep it moving(otherwise you are slowing the system down and will have ot service it again).

you didnt generate energy , you just transfered it(and evne lost some due ot the inneficiencies involved)

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fables_of_faubus t1_ja6bdw7 wrote

The fly wheel is as close to this concept as we can get. The problem is that for an almost perpetual system to be worth engineering and building, we would need some way to use/remove energy from the system. A fly wheel will spin for a long time with current technology used to reduce friction, but who is going to pay for it to be more and more efficient if it's not going to do any work? And doing work is removing energy from the system, thereby making the whole adventure obsolete.

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greenspotj t1_ja6ghit wrote

Motion itself is caused by a form of energy(kinetic energy). So extracting energy from the system would just cause it to slow down.

The reason you can't gather an infinite or "close to infinite" amount of power from a machine, is because to do so, would require the machine to create energy from nothing, causing it to not slow down as energy is extracted from it. But that is not possible as it breaks the laws of energy conservation (energy is neither created nor destroyed).

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gronstalker12 t1_ja6pk8w wrote

Are you asking about something travelling through space?

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CliffExcellent123 t1_ja7335h wrote

That is what our power sources already do.

That's what a wind turbine is

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firebat45 t1_ja6caqb wrote

We have, but lobbyists have convinced politicians that it (nuclear power) is unsafe and that we are better off using fossil fuels.

Sure,there have been a few nuclear disasters. We should not view those as acceptable, I am not saying that. But fossil fuel use has harmed humanity on a much larger scale.

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