Dumb question...my brain is not on tap with it though...

The perpetual motion discussion was not on my radar when I posted this, it was simply a bit of "does anyone know where i left my keys?...and the quick responses were "Have you looked in the lock?"...which I had not...but some of this is quite interesting and the main reason I dropped it in the brewery in the first place...

I wonder if we have not been going on about power from the wrong side of the equation for to long now...maybe we should be digging deeper into the road itself as a source of power and the wires we use multi-tasking transfer in different ways...surely on some level the displacement of electrons in a conductor affects more than just charges...mass or some other metric we are obviously light years from utilizing that info though...but on a larger scale the displacement of a vehicles weight on a pavement surely can be translated into tiny earthquakes somewhere...

I wonder how hard it would be to make a small section of road maybe just a car length itself and suspend it on springs with a 100 or more magnets passing through coils and each time a vehicle went over it a small amount of current is created by the weight of the vehicle...put it in a high profile traffic area...a thousand cars across it in a few hours...compensate the cpm by large enough magnets/coils...we're dealing with close to a ton of displacement each vehicle...that is a lot of mass that is being wasted on solid surface...

Matt Nolan said:

joaquins said:

You are not taking into account the battery pack...
...

Perpetual motion can't be archived, please don't get into that, I guess in this forum we respect the laws of physics as they are. Of course even less take out energy to turn on a light from it.

JS

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I'm niether pro nor against electric vehicles. I just like to make sure all avenues are highlighted in an argument. There is some hope though if, for example, graphene supercapacitors exceed the energy density of Lithium Ion batteries in a few years time. Then you'd have smaller, lighter, more efficient batteries that you could charge very rapidly indeed and they'd have no disposal pollution issues at end of life. The question I guess it how cheaply / energy efficiently could they be produced in the first place.

As for a perpetual motion machine, I said "in theory" and I meant literally a thing in perpetual motion / dynamic equilibrium, not a perpetual energy source. It would be utterly pointless though and impossible in practice. It would have to be totally sheilded from all particle rays and gravity fields. You'd have to stick it at some deep space Lagrange point to solve the gravity issue but, even then, the universe is dynamic, so it wouldn't remain a Lagrange point forever. Furthermore, particles would push on the sheilding case in a non-uniform manner, and over time it would drift or rotate so, yes, it is impossible in practice.

It is good to stay open minded, science progresses faster that way. But not so open minded that your brain falls out of your head 

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I'm not against them, I really like some of the things archived in them. What I say is in my country right now makes no sense the extra cost for the practical, economical and environmental point of view, it doesn't make sense at all, not now, not here. I do stay openminded and I'm looking forward to get more involved in automotive electronics as an industry that is growing quite a lot and will keep that way and also attracts me quite a bit. If I can't get into audio as full job, which here would be hard, that would probably be my second choice if going for a day job.

JS

Matt Nolan said:

joaquins said:

You are not taking into account the battery pack...
...

Perpetual motion can't be archived, please don't get into that, I guess in this forum we respect the laws of physics as they are. Of course even less take out energy to turn on a light from it.

JS

Click to expand...

I'm niether pro nor against electric vehicles. I just like to make sure all avenues are highlighted in an argument. There is some hope though if, for example, graphene supercapacitors exceed the energy density of Lithium Ion batteries in a few years time. Then you'd have smaller, lighter, more efficient batteries that you could charge very rapidly indeed and they'd have no disposal pollution issues at end of life. The question I guess it how cheaply / energy efficiently could they be produced in the first place.

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My objection is not against EV... They have their place. My 86YO neighbor routinely uses his little electric mobility scooter, even to do errands a 1/4 mile away. My objection is to the huge government subsidies based on political, not scientific arguments. It is the nature of political promotion to routinely forget to mention the inconvenient details.  I love the way that proponents of hydrogen powered vehicles rarely address where the hydrogen comes from.
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Yes I think I've seen some early (fairly hyperbolic) announcements about the grapheme energy storage and IIRC the energy levels are quite modest.

One less inspected issue with batteries is the bulk amount of energy they most store to meet consumer expectations of reasonable range especially for a country as spaced out as large parts of the US. All this energy, even if lighter weight than Lithium ion or other conventional battery technology, the elephant in the room is the pure energy available from an accidental discharge. Very much like a full gas tank exploding, there is a huge amount of energy there and a rapid discharge will cause spectacular fireworks and hazards for anyone nearby. We kind of take gasoline for granted because we have a very long track record of dealing with it mostly safely.

Perhaps a battery with a PTC-like internal bus technology so that too much discharge current causes the distribution bus conductor to go high resistance and self limit. Of course this might impact the nice acceleration characteristic with EV drivetrains .  :'(

My suggestion to draw energy from the roadway makes the vehicle itself less dangerous, while that much larger roadway power source presents safety issues of it's own.  Kind of like electric trains and trolly cars.

As for a perpetual motion machine, I said "in theory" and I meant literally a thing in perpetual motion / dynamic equilibrium, not a perpetual energy source. It would be utterly pointless though and impossible in practice. It would have to be totally sheilded from all particle rays and gravity fields. You'd have to stick it at some deep space Lagrange point to solve the gravity issue but, even then, the universe is dynamic, so it wouldn't remain a Lagrange point forever. Furthermore, particles would push on the sheilding case in a non-uniform manner, and over time it would drift or rotate so, yes, it is impossible in practice.

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Yes, but there is a long history of inventors trying to patent such machines with claims that they make more energy than they consume. All (AFAIK) have been discredited and explained away as measurement errors, etc.

It is good to stay open minded, science progresses faster that way. But not so open minded that your brain falls out of your head 

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Yes.. I worry about the low level of basic science understanding in legislators and the voting public. You don't have to look very hard to find other government policy, investing or wasting  huge taxpayer resources based on incomplete or flawed science.  My residential electric bill reflects strict EPA emissions standards that don't seem to consider actual economic costs and current technology.

JR

> a small section of road maybe just a car length itself and suspend it on springs with a 100 or more magnets passing through coils and each time a vehicle went over it a small amount of current

Draw the *whole* cycle.

Car enters this road-length. 3,000 pounds drops 1 inch. 250 pound-feet of work available. Do this every 10 seconds, I make it as 3 HorsePower (but my counting-thumb is very tired and it may be way off).

Now the car must get on the next piece of road. It dropped 1 inch, it must *climb* one inch. (Whether the next section is solid or spring-generator.) Climbing 1 inch every 20 feet is a 0.4% grade. Not steep, but not negligible. On a bicycle you sure know +0.4% from -0.4%. My road has grades around 1/2% and the car works distinctly more one way than the other.

So basically this road imposes a 3 Horsepower tax on cars.

As cars will generally cruise around 20 horsepower, this amounts to 15% more fuel consumption.

The gross question then becomes: is taking an extra 15% from already-running cars more efficient (or cleaner) than burning carbon in a boiler/turbine and hauling it toward consumers. BIG generators run very efficiently, but cars are not too bad now. Big generators are often far-away, while there is a road run right under my power-line.

Electric power delivery is complicated. Here, there may be NO traffic for an hour at a time after midnight; however my electric demand is low at that time. The BIG traffic is at beer:30 (many workers knock-off mid-afternoon and go over to the beer store); while peak demand is an hour later when they get home. (The options for *storing* utility power are pathetic... you need the power WHEN you need it, not when the sun shines, the wind blows, or everybody drives for beer.)

PRR said:

> a small section of road maybe just a car length itself and suspend it on springs with a 100 or more magnets passing through coils and each time a vehicle went over it a small amount of current

Draw the *whole* cycle.

Car enters this road-length. 3,000 pounds drops 1 inch. 250 pound-feet of work available. Do this every 10 seconds, I make it as 3 HorsePower (but my counting-thumb is very tired and it may be way off).

Now the car must get on the next piece of road. It dropped 1 inch, it must *climb* one inch. (Whether the next section is solid or spring-generator.) Climbing 1 inch every 20 feet is a 0.4% grade. Not steep, but not negligible. On a bicycle you sure know +0.4% from -0.4%. My road has grades around 1/2% and the car works distinctly more one way than the other.

So basically this road imposes a 3 Horsepower tax on cars.

As cars will generally cruise around 20 horsepower, this amounts to 15% more fuel consumption.

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Yup,, no free lunch. I had an idea for extracting energy from tire sidewalls flexing as the tire rotates. Now that energy generates waste heat (you notice how warm tires are when we park them after highway driving). Not a lot of power but like regenerative braking, currently being wasted.

The gross question then becomes: is taking an extra 15% from already-running cars more efficient (or cleaner) than burning carbon in a boiler/turbine and hauling it toward consumers. BIG generators run very efficiently, but cars are not too bad now. Big generators are often far-away, while there is a road run right under my power-line.

Electric power delivery is complicated. Here, there may be NO traffic for an hour at a time after midnight; however my electric demand is low at that time. The BIG traffic is at beer:30 (many workers knock-off mid-afternoon and go over to the beer store); while peak demand is an hour later when they get home. (The options for *storing* utility power are pathetic... you need the power WHEN you need it, not when the sun shines, the wind blows, or everybody drives for beer.)

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Ding ding ding... This is the next unintended consequence from subsidizing residential power generation. The large centralized power plants will have trouble leveling power supply/demand. Elon Musk is not waiting for breakthrough battery technology and scaling up his mega factory to supply residential battery packs using today's technology. As long as he has a government breeze keeping his sails full he'll make money. It seems the true economics of all this will remain distorted and under regulatory influence.

In Germany where they have simultaneously subsidized renewable energy and shuttered nuclear power plants, the remaining coal fired plants still have to be sized to supply peak demand when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine.

Too bad we can't send power over the internet,,, now that would be a large grid...

JR

JohnRoberts said:

...
Yup,, no free lunch. I had an idea for extracting energy from tire sidewalls flexing as the tire rotates. Now that energy generates waste heat (you notice how warm tires are when we park them after highway driving). Not a lot of power but like regenerative braking, currently being wasted.
...

JR

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Tire deformation hysteresis is hard to recover, easier and not done either is the damping of the car, using magnetic dampers instead of oil pistons could be used to recover that energy, not a lot of energy there but some. Also would allow to make it harder or softer depending on the load taken from them, make non linear damping, adding some hysteresis and all that stuff we like so much and mechanics could use them to improve performance and confort. I guess a soft portion of it could make the tires follow better the ground and avoid loosing contact in bumps but get harder after a short bit to prevent rolling and pitching, known before hand if the driver is braking, accelerating or turning hard could improve that behavior even further.

The thing with tires is that you can't recover the heat itself since you usually want them to cool down to avoid overheating, so recovering the energy before it gets into heat would need replace the rubber with a material which generates energy in a usable way instead of heat before it generates heat. Also you want a bit of heat to so they get just worm and improve traction, mostly in cold weather.

In any case braking energy is way bigger and still a lot to use out of it in most cars going around, so we still have to improve in that respect before recovering energy from somewhere else in the car, as a global energy saving at least. Making it cheaper and implementing it in most customer cars doesn't makes much sense other than shaving a bit of energy for LeMans teams to be able to refill one lap later or F1 to be able to use a bit more of fuel to power the car faster.

JS