5 ms·

Oh man, was this the origin story of the rumor that an engine that ran on water was created by and then suppressed by the major car companies? Amazing, seeing

Oh man, was this the origin story of the rumor that an engine that ran on water was created by and then suppressed by the major car companies? Amazing, seeing this I feel like I've found bigfoot.

jiggawatts 4y ago
You've got to wonder why it never went anywhere. Economics is probably the answer, but it doesn't seem satisfying. If it can extract useful work from merely warm water, it would seem like the ideal thing to maximise the overall thermal efficiency of a large power plant.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  Why bother with a big mechanical contraption like this when you can simply stick the leads of a thermocouple in two cups of water?
  - VBprogrammer 4y ago
    Doing so efficiently is the challenge. Thermoelectric generators have very low efficiency of 5-8%. They don't extract a meaningful amount of extra energy.
    - beambot 4y ago
      Seebeck generation is indeed inefficient.... But for low temperature deltas, Carnot efficiency already implies pretty low theoretical efficiency limits.
      - mannykannot 4y ago
        True, but this means that the ROI for any method of recovering energy from any process' waste heat plunges as the temperature differential drops.
        VBprogrammer 4y ago
        Yeah, it annoys me that so little infrastructure is built with no attempt to make use of the low grade waste heat. Imagine if thermal power plants were built alongside vegetable growing greenhouses etc.
        extrapickles 4y ago
        If the thermal plant uses clean fuel (eg: gas fired) the CO2 in the exhaust would be useful for the greenhouse as well.
        bjelkeman-again 4y ago
        Many Dutch greenhouses have a CHP power plant, where the heat goes to the greenhouse, the CO2 to the plants and the power to the lamps or to the electricity network. They are swapping the heating to ground heat pumps and the electricity to renewables, so not sure where the CO2 comes from in the future other than of course a higher ambient level.
        genewitch 4y ago
        take the part of the plants that isn't used for anything else and ferment it with yeast. Free CO2. I'm not sure how old this trick is, as i used it a decade and a half ago with 2-3 liter bottles with holes drilled in the caps and a bubbler to remove solids to provide CO2 for a heavily planted aquarium bootstrap. My theory here is that running all the stems, stalks, and roots that you don't use from stuff like annual food crops through a wood chipper or something should macerate the cell walls enough to allow the yeast to feast, at least.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    I think that a Sterling engine would be more efficient.
- pas 4y ago
  > You've got to wonder why it never went anywhere material fatigue. basically the nitinol springs/belts/strips eventually breaks. so it's a high maintenance low-efficiency (hard to scale) system compared to regular steam turbines. ... though of course the latter is in development for ~250 years, so it has a bit of a head start.
  - api 4y ago
    Wonder if you could get anywhere revisiting this with modern materials science? Materials have come a really long way in the past 60+ years.
    - pas 4y ago
      the wikipedia page for nitinol is fascinating! so it seems like very much part of modern materials science. (and I'd guess bimetals are standard in many heat-related engineering applications, nitinol is just special because of how fast it changes shape, and because it's an alloy not 2 pieces of metal stuck together.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_titanium#Biocompatible_and_biomedical_applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_titanium#Biocompatible_...
  - fennecfoxen 4y ago
    It’s not the 250 year head start that gets you. It’s the temperature differential.
- jkqwzsoo 4y ago
  I think the ultimate answer (for all kinds of waste heat recovery, or "heat economizer" technology) is that waste heat streams simply don't contain enough energy to invest in recovering (otherwise, we'd probably deploy ORCs everywhere). This device seems more useful for generating mechanical motion at the point of use, rather than generating electrical power. I'm envisioning solar and hydro-powered pumping systems that operate in remote environments, like the third engineer interviewed in the video. He proposed that the engine could be used to pump water solely due to the temperature difference between the pumped fluid and the air. Another interesting thing would be to run the system in reverse to turn mechanical energy into a hot and cold fluid. I haven't thought it through deeply, but it seems superficially similar to elastic band refrigerators[0,1]. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax6182 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax6182 [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/fridge-made-rubber-band-twisted-elastic-fibers-could-cool-your-food https://www.science.org/content/article/fridge-made-rubber-b...
- credit_guy 4y ago
  Nothing can beat the efficiency of the Carnot engine. That's one of the equivalent ways of stating the Second Law of Thermodynamics [1]. Just like you can't create a perpetual motion machine, you can't extract more energy from warm water than a Carnot engine. And the efficiency of the Carnot engine is 1-T_cold/T_hot, both temperatures expresssed in Kelvin. Room temperature water is 300K (that's by convention, this translates in 27 C or 80 F). Let's say warm water is at 333K (that's more like scalding hot, at 60 C or 140 F). The Carnot engine efficiency is then going to be 1 - 300/333 = 10%. So, not engine can exceed 10% efficiency when using scalding hot water, for merely warm water it's probably going to be 5% or less. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#Carnot's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#C...
jeffrallen 4y ago
At 35 watts, it was more like "microfoot".
zardo 4y ago
It was a carburetor that ran on water "I heard about in the 70s" when I first heard that story in probably 2006.
- genewitch 4y ago
  there was a guy in southern oregon 10 or 12 years ago that had a bronco or similar he claimed ran on water. The propane tank on the front seemed suspicious, so i asked, and he said that he first had to convert the gasoline engine to run on propane, and showed me the modifications needed to the spark plugs for that. Then he had an hydrolysis controller mounted in the footwell of the passenger seat up front. None of what he showed me made sense, so i wrote it off. I know hydrogen power is a thing, i just know that you can't generate enough power with hydrogen to crack water into hydrogen at the rate needed to sustain that, so having all that crap in the vehicle - assuming it worked at all - seemed dangerous, at the very minimum. Now, i'm sure if you had solar panels - at home[ed.] - and a safe way to compress the hydrogen into small tanks somewhere on the vehicle, you could get a few dozen miles probably fairly safely. And i'm not sure if anyone has patented this yet, but resin/epoxy/plasticize/rubberize the exterior of a carbon fiber tank to store the hydrogen eliminates most of the safety issues, i think.

Oh man, was this the origin story of the rumor that an engine that ran on water was created by and then suppressed by the major car companies? Amazing, seeing this I feel like I've found bigfoot.

jiggawatts 4y ago

You've got to wonder why it never went anywhere. Economics is probably the answer, but it doesn't seem satisfying. If it can extract useful work from merely warm water, it would seem like the ideal thing to maximise the overall thermal efficiency of a large power plant.

tedunangst 4y ago
Why bother with a big mechanical contraption like this when you can simply stick the leads of a thermocouple in two cups of water?
- VBprogrammer 4y ago
  Doing so efficiently is the challenge. Thermoelectric generators have very low efficiency of 5-8%. They don't extract a meaningful amount of extra energy.
  - beambot 4y ago
    Seebeck generation is indeed inefficient.... But for low temperature deltas, Carnot efficiency already implies pretty low theoretical efficiency limits.
    - mannykannot 4y ago
      True, but this means that the ROI for any method of recovering energy from any process' waste heat plunges as the temperature differential drops.
      - VBprogrammer 4y ago
        Yeah, it annoys me that so little infrastructure is built with no attempt to make use of the low grade waste heat. Imagine if thermal power plants were built alongside vegetable growing greenhouses etc.
        extrapickles 4y ago
        If the thermal plant uses clean fuel (eg: gas fired) the CO2 in the exhaust would be useful for the greenhouse as well.
        bjelkeman-again 4y ago
        Many Dutch greenhouses have a CHP power plant, where the heat goes to the greenhouse, the CO2 to the plants and the power to the lamps or to the electricity network. They are swapping the heating to ground heat pumps and the electricity to renewables, so not sure where the CO2 comes from in the future other than of course a higher ambient level.
        genewitch 4y ago
        take the part of the plants that isn't used for anything else and ferment it with yeast. Free CO2. I'm not sure how old this trick is, as i used it a decade and a half ago with 2-3 liter bottles with holes drilled in the caps and a bubbler to remove solids to provide CO2 for a heavily planted aquarium bootstrap. My theory here is that running all the stems, stalks, and roots that you don't use from stuff like annual food crops through a wood chipper or something should macerate the cell walls enough to allow the yeast to feast, at least.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  I think that a Sterling engine would be more efficient.
pas 4y ago
> You've got to wonder why it never went anywhere material fatigue. basically the nitinol springs/belts/strips eventually breaks. so it's a high maintenance low-efficiency (hard to scale) system compared to regular steam turbines. ... though of course the latter is in development for ~250 years, so it has a bit of a head start.
- api 4y ago
  Wonder if you could get anywhere revisiting this with modern materials science? Materials have come a really long way in the past 60+ years.
  - pas 4y ago
    the wikipedia page for nitinol is fascinating! so it seems like very much part of modern materials science. (and I'd guess bimetals are standard in many heat-related engineering applications, nitinol is just special because of how fast it changes shape, and because it's an alloy not 2 pieces of metal stuck together.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_titanium#Biocompatible_and_biomedical_applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_titanium#Biocompatible_...
- fennecfoxen 4y ago
  It’s not the 250 year head start that gets you. It’s the temperature differential.
jkqwzsoo 4y ago
I think the ultimate answer (for all kinds of waste heat recovery, or "heat economizer" technology) is that waste heat streams simply don't contain enough energy to invest in recovering (otherwise, we'd probably deploy ORCs everywhere). This device seems more useful for generating mechanical motion at the point of use, rather than generating electrical power. I'm envisioning solar and hydro-powered pumping systems that operate in remote environments, like the third engineer interviewed in the video. He proposed that the engine could be used to pump water solely due to the temperature difference between the pumped fluid and the air. Another interesting thing would be to run the system in reverse to turn mechanical energy into a hot and cold fluid. I haven't thought it through deeply, but it seems superficially similar to elastic band refrigerators[0,1]. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax6182 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax6182 [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/fridge-made-rubber-band-twisted-elastic-fibers-could-cool-your-food https://www.science.org/content/article/fridge-made-rubber-b...
credit_guy 4y ago
Nothing can beat the efficiency of the Carnot engine. That's one of the equivalent ways of stating the Second Law of Thermodynamics [1]. Just like you can't create a perpetual motion machine, you can't extract more energy from warm water than a Carnot engine. And the efficiency of the Carnot engine is 1-T_cold/T_hot, both temperatures expresssed in Kelvin. Room temperature water is 300K (that's by convention, this translates in 27 C or 80 F). Let's say warm water is at 333K (that's more like scalding hot, at 60 C or 140 F). The Carnot engine efficiency is then going to be 1 - 300/333 = 10%. So, not engine can exceed 10% efficiency when using scalding hot water, for merely warm water it's probably going to be 5% or less. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#Carnot's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#C...

jeffrallen 4y ago

At 35 watts, it was more like "microfoot".

zardo 4y ago

It was a carburetor that ran on water "I heard about in the 70s" when I first heard that story in probably 2006.

genewitch 4y ago
there was a guy in southern oregon 10 or 12 years ago that had a bronco or similar he claimed ran on water. The propane tank on the front seemed suspicious, so i asked, and he said that he first had to convert the gasoline engine to run on propane, and showed me the modifications needed to the spark plugs for that. Then he had an hydrolysis controller mounted in the footwell of the passenger seat up front. None of what he showed me made sense, so i wrote it off. I know hydrogen power is a thing, i just know that you can't generate enough power with hydrogen to crack water into hydrogen at the rate needed to sustain that, so having all that crap in the vehicle - assuming it worked at all - seemed dangerous, at the very minimum. Now, i'm sure if you had solar panels - at home[ed.] - and a safe way to compress the hydrogen into small tanks somewhere on the vehicle, you could get a few dozen miles probably fairly safely. And i'm not sure if anyone has patented this yet, but resin/epoxy/plasticize/rubberize the exterior of a carbon fiber tank to store the hydrogen eliminates most of the safety issues, i think.