Its a shame

[atferrari]

The rodin starship thing I saw dosnt do what the guy thinks it does, but as a piece of engineering its fabulous!

A pathetic waste of time nonetheless.

 

[tcmtech]

So what exactly are you wanting to discuss relating to less conventional power sources and or fuel uses?

I have had a number of vehicles that I set up to run on propane as their primary fuel.

For a time I experimented with running small engines on hydrogen. Literally blew a few up too!

I made a small thermo electric generator out of a pair of heatsinks and and old CPU cooler for a local elementary schools science room. All that needed was to place the small heat sink in a pan of hot water and drop a handful of crushed ice or snow on the larger upper heatsink and it would put out the same power as a common D battery fro a about 5 minutes!

I played around with ambient RF energy harvesting years ago and found that it is doable and to some extent practical as a small sub watt power source if yo have a high powered AM radio station nearby.

I have played with wind power off and on for about 25 years now as well.

So what exactly are yo looking to discuss here?

 

[4pyros]

I played around with ambient RF energy harvesting years ago and found that it is doable and to some extent practical

I remember some guy doing this using the chain link fence in his back yard or a tin roof or something, getting a small LED to light dimly and thinking some day he would be able to power his house. It was good for a laugh.

 

[large_ghostman]

A pathetic waste of time nonetheless.

That is actually incorrect, I also said it had one property that was very useful in some circumstances. If you build a starship coil carefully then its magnetic field is much more 'defined', what I mean by this is.
Take a normal round coil and place paper on to, sprinkle iron filings on top and energies the coil, do the same with a starship coil that has the round part in the center the same size. What you see is in the normal coil the magnetic field spreads over a larger area and its concentration is fairly uniform. With a starship coil the field is much tighter and dosnt spread out as far, also its much stronger around the circle part then suddenly drops in strength fairly quickly as it spreads out.
When I was trying tto build my spinning floating globe that was really handy, the starship coils I wound to rotate the globe gave me the ability to have coils close together without there fields overlapping.
So they are far from useless, they just do any of the magic things that get claimed for them.

Energy harvesting I am very into, I have several kits for it, and some of the 32 bit energy micro DEV kits run really well from tiny thermal electric generators, ok its not free energy in the excepted sense but it uses energy that is free (if you see what I mean). Also my aquarium lights use this to good advantage, I have 3 watt LEDS in the hood and they get really hot, too hot!
So i put a small peltier cell with the cold side against the Led back plate, then put a large P4 CPU heat sink on the other side of the cell, this has a small 12V 10mA CPU fan on it wired to a Linear technology energy harvesting chip that connects to the the peltier cell, so now as the Led get's hot it produces energy that is converted and boosted in the LT chip and it powers the fan on the heat sink! So as soon as the Led starts to get warm it powers the fan and this cools the Led, when the temperature drops right down the fan turns off.
I think thats a great way to use energy harvesting! As for mobile phone charging thats easy, I have a Dura patch Piezo flexible strip, they cost huge money but using another LT chip I can more than get enough current and voltage to charge and power a phone! I posted details in another thread, but I will over the weekend show you pics of it and the scope trace from it, the patches are so flexible you can bend upto a 21mm radius. Mount the patch on a plastic ruler and make it BOING (you know what I mean?), then with just a 4mm deflection of the patch I get around 70V for 35 mS, this is more than enough with a harvesting chip and cap storage to do a phone. I will post a vid of it so you can see it work, the down side is I got 2 patches as samples (via dad), otherwise these small patches are around £90 each!!!!!!!!!.
Free energy I love, but again my definition of free is as KISS describes. Linear Tech have so many excellent energy harvesting chips, that there are many many things its now possible to run from very tiny amounts of energy. The technology is here and I think should be used more.
Take my Fish tank, the main problem with Led lights is the heat and them burning up, use the TEG cells and a fan and heat sink and you get what I would call free energy, or energy you dont want (heat) to produce power to get rid of it lol, Weurth Elecktonika has a great energy harvesting kit, I use it alot for experiments.

Steam power is still widely used if you think about it! much of our electric today comes from steam . I have seen a small working frenzel lense steam boiler (thats why I wanted the lense a little while back) that runs a steam turbine in the uk on a medium warm day.
So alternative energy and energy harvesting is just something I am interested in. What I HATE!!! is the muppets that claim you can get more out than in! because its turned a good phrase and description into a dirty word.

very Best
LG

 

[tcmtech]

You are way more into the small scale energy harvesting than I ever got!

For me if it couldn't produce at least a few hundred watts of electrical power or at least 50K BTU thermal on average it wasn't a serious thing for me to play with.

Still wouldn't mind trying to make a multi hundred to kilowatt plus RF energy harvester to tap into the local country/western AM station that is about 10 miles from me. To me they have a lot of wasted power doing nothing good for society!

 

[4pyros]

You are way more into the small scale energy harvesting than I ever got!

For me if it couldn't produce at least a few hundred watts of electrical power or at least 50K BTU thermal on average it wasn't a serious thing for me to play with.

Still wouldn't mind trying to make a multi hundred to kilowatt plus RF energy harvester to tap into the local country/western AM station that is about 10 miles from me. To me they have a lot of wasted power doing nothing good for society!

Stick your crome dome closer! LOL

 

[throbscottle]

Wow LG, I love your LED cooling scheme! I hadn't heard of energy harvesting chips before. I'm a fan of micro-generation so loving this thread.

On the subject of over-unity, John Bedini's motor (his original one, not the numerous (and expensive looking) attempts to follow his design) is interesting to read about. Whether it really works as advertised - well it seems unlikely but I'm keeping an open mind. Considering that in a vacuum the size of a domestic lightbulb there is a huge amount of energy locked in the fabric of space, it's not surprising people want to tap into it.

I haven't read it but "The Scientist, the Madman, the Thief and their lightbulb" looks like a very good read on this subject.