Perpetual Motion Delorean? 569
An anonymous reader writes "An electric-powered Delorean that can supposedly go "hundreds of miles" at speeds over 100MPH without stopping to recharge will be tested today beginning at 8am at the Nashville Superspeedway. They claim the vehicle uses 12 standard car batteries, so the invention appears to relate to recharging the batteries." I found a website offering current updates on the demonstration of this perpetual motion device: it appears they've suffered mechanical difficulties and cancelled the test.
Re:But.. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What is this? Hoax? No Details? (Score:5, Informative)
"...can run coast to coast without ever relying on the battery being charged from an outside source."
and
"The very essence of the technology to be demonstrated is the capability to keep the batteries "topped up" at all times with the "on board" device invented by Carl B. Tilley."
and most importantly
" In fact, as the demonstration will prove, at the end of the allotted time period the battery bank will still register a FULL CHARGE condition!"
This is not a solar vehicle, people. This is a perpetual motion machine, and it's a sham.
Tesla (Score:1, Informative)
I seem to remember that Tesla had some big plans for putting large Tesla Coils everywhere so that electricty could wirelessly be transmitted to devices (maybe even planes?). Downside is that if the coils (or whatever) go offline, the plane goes down.
Re:Perpetual Motion (Score:2, Informative)
The magnetic force is much like using a rubber band in reverse. Lets say you had a gun with a permanent magnet. It would take a significant amount of force to load the projectile into the gun (forcing two similar poles near each other). This stores potential energy. When you then fire the weapon, the potential energy that you gave it while loading the projectile then becomes kinetic energy. (ie, the projectile is ejected).
Alternatively, using an artificial magnet, you can load the projective with little or no effort and then input a large amount of electrical current which then creates a magnetic field, launching the projectile. In any case, you don't get something for nothing. You always get back less than you put in.
Re:Perpetual Motion (Score:2, Informative)
At least for the "complex scheme of magnets" option, see this page [phact.org], particularly the "Machines which use magnets" section.
As to the rail gun version, you'll end up giving less kinetic energy to the projectile than you put into the magnets (resistive and heat losses, friction, etc). When the projectile hits something, some of the energy will be lost in friction, heat, coulomb damping in the projectile, etc.
Plus, if you were talking about kinetic energy as far as exponentially increasing velocities are concerned, I think you mis-remember the equation: K.E. = 0.5*m*v^2 ; or, put in rail-gun form, v < sqrt(E/(0.5*m)), that is, it takes 4 times the input energy to double the speed of an object.
I'm pretty confident that any perpetual motion or free energy method that ever becomes workable will be using situations not covered in classical physics: Casimir effect, or whatever.
More info on another website... (Score:4, Informative)
I was at the Nashville Superspeedway today ... (Score:5, Informative)
First, a little background. Tilley's "miracle" electric vehicle has been getting a lot of media coverage here in Nashville over the past week, and it's been a topic of conversation at work. One of my colleagues and I decided to check it out for ourselves, out of pure curiousity.
This is not the first time Mr. Tilley has been in the Nashville news. About a year and a half ago he got some publicity by claiming that he and another inventor had created a "free energy" machine, a la Tom Bearden, Dennis Lee, and Joe Newman. When people tried to follow up on his claims, he dropped out of sight. Now he had resurfaced with a claim that he was using this machine to power an electric car. What really made it interesting was that Bobby Allison was apparently promoting Tilley's claims, both on his own web site (http://www.bobbyallison.com), and by driving the car at the Superspeedway.
Being firm believers in the second law of thermodynamics, my co-workers and I expected one of three things to happen:
(1) Tilley would attempt to hide an internal combustion engine somewhere in the Delorean, and prevent people from examining it up close (unlikely, as people would hear the engine running). He might also hide extra batteries to extend the running time.
(2) The car would make very frequent pit stops in a screened area (so as to prevent the "secret" from being stolen, of course), during which the batteries would miraculously recharge themselves.
(3) The car would suffer an unfortunate "breakdown" well before the distance limit imposed by the maximum energy storage of the twelve lead-acid batteries in his vehicle.
As it turned out, #3 was the winner. In the middle of the 13th lap, the announcer suddenly announced that the vehicle had a bad rear wheel bearing. It looked to me as if the batteries were quickly reaching the end of their charge, as the car was running very slowly on that last lap. In the 12th lap, the car had zipped by fairly quickly, about 60 mph on the track, with no visible problems. Amazing how quickly a wheel bearing will go out on you, and how some people can diagnose it while the car is still moving.
Once the car had coasted into the pit, I left. I knew the demo was over, although some people in the crowd didn't (and apparently stuck around for hours afterwards!).
A few comments: my co-worker arrived earlier than me and got to see the car up close before the demo. According to him, two men with guns were standing guard and preventing anyone from looking UNDER the car. He took that as a sign that either extra batteries or an internal combustion engine must be visible from the underside.
I was in the stands with a crowd of about 50 to 60 people, maximum. Judging from the conversations around me, many of them were either investors or True Believers. I heard the usual claptrap about conspiracies, death threats by oil companies, etc., that get tossed around by the proponents of these scams.
What troubled me, of course, is that many of the investors looked like normal middle class folks, using their own savings and hoping to cash in on a world-shaking invention. They, and people like them, were the true targets of Mr. Tilley's exhibition.
As for Bobby Allison, he was there at the beginning and drove the first couple of laps, then apparently left. For his own sake, I hope he distances himself from Mr. Tilley as quickly as possible.
Finally, for those who are interested, I made a Quicktime movie of the car making the final lap (out of the pit, around part of the track, and back into the pit). You can see for yourself how slowly the car was going before the "breakdown".
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/wthwthwth/tilleyd
Someone please mirror this! I have no idea how much bandwidth Comcast will let me have, but I'm willing to bet I'll find out.
Re:Perpetual Motion (Score:3, Informative)
One simple early proposed perpetual motion machine had a small ramp, with a hole at the top, and a groove for a ball bearing to ride in. The idea was to put a strong magnet at the top of the ramp, the ball bearing would roll up the ramp, attracted by the magnet, then fall down the hole at the top, and roll back to it's initial position to be drawn up the ramp again, forever.
Unfortunately, magnets do not work this way. Magnets are, as someone else pointed out, like rubber bands. Any energy you get from two magnets attracting each other (or in this case, attracting a ferrous metal) must be spent at least equally in energy to seperate the two. Friction and other real world losses guarantee you will never get overunity on a device like this, and even if you could eliminate all parasitic losses, they best you would ever get is unity, which is useless.
Already debunked (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How It Works (Score:2, Informative)
Hey everyone, please get your crackpots straight. Perpetual Motion crackpots just want their devices to keep spinning constantly. Give them a maglev bearing and a vacuum chamber and they're happy forever. It's only the "Free Energy" crackpots who want their devices to keep going faster and faster (or to drive uphill, or to drive against friction, etc.) I should know; I'm a FE crackpot myself. See http://amasci.com/freenrg/fnrg.html [amasci.com]
This current inventor is making the usual mistakes: doing everything but PUBLISHING. He seems to start out right: trying to get his idea out into the public. Yet nobody else can build a test model, since the critical parts simply MUST be hidden inside a wooden box... to prevent all the idea thieves from taking the secret and becoming billionaires! :)
So let's see... the goal is to convince the disbelievers. Yet the critical parts must remain secret. So we can show "convincing demonstrations" and give explanations to the experts, but we simply HAVE to keep those experts from ever learning the details, otherwise they'll find out how to build their own version.
Isn't there something wrong with this picture?
If a "free energy" inventor comes up with a genuine discovery, he won't need any oil companies to suppress him as long as he follows the usual path and keeps the critical details a secret.
Note: "pseudoscience" doesn't mean making up your own terminology. After all, most cutting-edge advancements will require some new words to be coined. Pseudoscience means "fake science;" something that gives the surface appearance of science, yet is nothing of the sort. I certainly agree that this battery-car is pseudoscience, since a central goal of a genuine scientist is to teach colleagues how to do it. Hold nothing back. No excuses, no paranoia, no "naive experimenters might hurt themselves." Explain in great detail how the actual device in use was built and adjusted. If there are "idea thieves" trying to steal the device, make damn sure they succeed!
As for me, I don't want the problems with my own demonstrations to be weak wheel bearings. I want to have problems with incoming guided missles as I'm demonstrating my antigravity ideas by buzzing the White House in my plywood/duct-tape flying saucer!
Re:It's called an "Alternator" (Score:2, Informative)
Adding an alternator would be of no help whatsoever in keeping the batteries charged. They would actually cause the batteries to drain faster because the energy the alernators put out would never be equal to or greater than the energy drain the consumed from the batteries (via the motors).
As for "making up the difference via solar...." Not any time soon....And also not ever on earth moving a vehicle of that weight/drag at 100 MPH. Even if we could make solar cells that convert the entire spectrum of solar energy that reaches the surface of the earth at 99% efficiency there would still not be enough power available to keep the batteries charged. In reality, peak conversion efficiency on these things is actually somewhere around 20-25% right now.