Engineer needed to analyze a new invention

[brian3344]

I recently received a patent on a machine designed to convert gravity to mechanical energy.
The patent # is 7770389, also there is a additional patent
application. Publication # 20090084106. Both can be viewed at
the U.S. patent office.

 

[brewnog]

You've obviously put a vast amount of work into this. Unfortunately it appears to be a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. Were you looking for help to point out why the machine will not work?

 

[brian3344]

yes, please explain why the machines will not work.

 

[russ_watters]

Before even looking at the patent, the principle you describe is a direct violation of the principle of conservation of energy, which is one of the fundamental principles on which a huge amount of physics and applied physics depends. So one doesn't really even need to read it to know it doesn't work.

But I'm curious (and disappointed in the patent office), so I'll take a look. That said, typically it is against PF policy to debunk PMM's, though the fact that this one got a patent intrigues me and I'm willing to give it some slack for now for instructional purposes and morbid curiosity.

 

[russ_watters]

From the abstract:

A empty tank submersed in a body of liquid will float to the surface, as the tank floats up it will do work. It is the goal of this machine to empty the tank after the tank has been submersed, and in the process of emptying the tank do less work than the empty tank does when it floats up.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-...50&s1=7770389.PN.&OS=PN/7770389&RS=PN/7770389

The concept is breathtakingly simple and given the fact that you put years of your life into this and no doubt thousands of dollars, have you ever attempted to build a prototype or do the math to calculate the work in and out?

And again, I am so disappointed in the USPTO: the concept is simple and the statement is a clear violation of CoE and an obvious version of the common buoyancy motor PMM concept: http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/themes/buoyant.htm

 

[berkeman]

In addition to the technical problems and lack of mathematical analysis, the patent contains many grammatical and spelling errors -- so many that it is hard to believe that the patent could issue with them. For example, just in column 1 of the text description:

"accelerate do to" should be "accelerate due to"

"builds-up speed, than" should be "builds up speed, then"

"falling thru" should be "falling through"

Amazing. What are the qualification requirements for patent examiners these days?

 

[brewnog]

I'll be honest, I was having a giggle at the spelling mistakes too, but it was the sheer amount of effort (and presumably money) that had gone into this that shocked me.

 

[brian3344]

For educational purposes only it should be easy to explain why each of these three patented machines will not work.

 

[Dadface]

Brian did you factor in the amount of work needed to empty the tank? Remember that the external water level rises as the tank is emptied and just a part of the work input is needed to increase the gravitational potential energy of the water.
History has shown that all perpetual motion machines are flawed and the problem is that it can be very time consuming to locate those flaws.My advice is steer away from perpetual motion ideas because the chances of success are generally regarded to be non existent.If you are interested in energy conversions why not turn your talents to alternative energy ideas?

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi Brian,
Perpetual motion machines are not patentable, but obviously your patent has been issued so for whatever reason, the examiner must have determined it was not a perpetual motion machine. Patents can be issued on mechanisms and systems as long as the claimed utility of those is not for energy creation; that is, as long as you don't say these are perpetual motion devices, the mechanism/system can be patented. However, there's an issue of utility that must be addressed as described by the patent office here:
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/2100_2107_01.htm

What is blatently out of place here, is that the device shown in Figure 4 and described in columns 4 and 5 of the text, indicate the device is performing work on the "load" (#15 in Fig. 4) but the work input is unclear to me.

Question: Where is the work input to drive this device?

Edit: After considerable effort I found where the work input was provided, but certainly it isn't clear from the patent. This is described at the top of column 3 of the text. Apparantly, #39 (cable) pulls on the telescoping cylinder which is driven by #40 (a Wench) that pulls on the cable. So apparently, there's a wench inside the cylinder who has to pull on the cable to extend the cylinder. This would mean it's not a perpetual motion machine at all, it's powered by a wench (poor girl!)...

 

[boneh3ad]

For educational purposes only it should be easy to explain why each of these three patented machines will not work.

That has already been explained... they violate the first (and sometimes second) laws of thermodynamics.

 

[brian3344]

These are not perpetual motion machines.
The machines are designed to convert gravity to mechanical energy.

 

[brian3344]

Maybe the reason the patent office issued the patent is because they think the machines will work.

 

[brian3344]

Assume the second machine displaces one cubic foot of water and falls
10 ft. Water weighs about 63 lbs./cu.ft. Make the total weight of the tank
66 lbs. Put a 63 lb. lead weight in the bottom half of the tank.
The questions are how fast will the tank spin and will the 63lb lead weight
have enough momentum to expand the tank?

 

[xxChrisxx]

Maybe the reason the patent office issued the patent is because they think the machines will work.

Pattent offices don't care if something works or not. They'll patent anything that it doesn't have in its databse already.

 

[RonL]

Maybe the reason the patent office issued the patent is because they think the machines will work.

I just did a quick view of the patent and think it passed through for one reason, I did not see anywhere that #49 was mentioned as a energy transfer function.

Maybe I just overlooked it ?

Ron

 

[Astronuc]

Pattent offices don't care if something works or not. They'll patent anything that it doesn't have in its databse already.

One of three criteria for a patent is that is must be useful. A machine that requires more energ:y input than output is not useful. The fact that a working model has not been constructed or the mathematics has not been done is problematic.

With so many spelling errors - I noticed others - and missing information, e.g., no definition of Number #49, as well as no mention of (49) in any of the three machines would be sufficient grounds to reject the patent. It is beyond me why this so-called invention was awarded a patent.

 

[brian3344]

# 49 was not allowed by the patent office.

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi Brian,
Can you explain why this is NOT a perpetual motion machine and doesn't violate conservation of energy and conservation of momentum? Being the inventor, you must understand your invention sufficiently to do that, and then explain what the invention is intended for. Once you do that, you will quickly get help in working out details around the invention, and you'll make us all feel bad for misinterpreting your work. At the moment, everyone thinks your invention is just a perpetual motion machine that *somehow* got patented.

 

[brian3344]

Perpetual motion machines make energy, my invention does not make energy. It converts one form of energy into another. Gravity energy into mechanical energy.

 

[Q_Goest]

But a dam (hydroelectric power) also converts 'gravity' to power in a sense. It takes the potential energy of the water and converts it to electricity, at a loss of course. There are always losses due to friction and conversion of energy to heat, so what is the purpose of your invention? Is it to store energy and then release it (at a loss) when needed, like a battery or putting water into a reservoir above a dam? Why is your invention unique? What makes it better than simply pumping water into a reservoir and then removing that energy at a loss later? There has to be some other purpose to all the mechanisms shown in the patent that somehow provide a benefit. What is the benefit?

 

[boneh3ad]

Perpetual motion machines do not necessarily have to "make" energy. That is impossible after all. You can never recover all of the energy you input into a system, which is what your device seems to do.

 

[Turbodog]

Gravity is not energy. It makes no sense to say "convert gravity to mechanical energy". Gravity is an acceleration which causes a force on a mass.

 

[brian3344]

Gravity has the ability to make a machine do work, that makes it a form of energy.

 

[boneh3ad]

Gravity is not an acceleration. Gravity is a force, and a conservative one at that. It can be represented, therefore, as a potential. It is perfectly reasonable to have a machine that converts gravitational potential energy into mechanical or electrical energy (hydroelectric dams, water mills, grandfather clocks, etc).

The problem with the invention is that the way you describe it, you make it sound like it will continue to operate on its own without putting any work or energy into it. That is why it is a perpetual motion machine.

 

[Q_Goest]

Gravity itself is no more a form of energy than an electric field is a form of energy. Both provide a gradient within which energy can be converted from one form to another such as potential energy to kinetic energy, but they are not considered to be energy in and by themselves. The field doesn't contain the energy, it is only something within the field that has energy. So removing "gravitational" energy from a field or converting gravity to energy is incorrect. We have to remove energy from something that uses the field to change its energy state such as the change in energy state of a mass in a gravitational field when it moves from one location to another.

So if your device is said to convert "gravity" to energy, then we have a problem.

Take a look at Figure 4. It shows a load being applied to a belt within a chamber. That load takes energy from the movement of the buoys, not from gravity. Energy is transferred from the buoys to the belt (load) and that energy must then go somewhere. It either is removed from the contents shown in Fig. 4 or is added to the water to heat the water. But the energy to move the buoys must come from somewhere. It can't come from the water or gravity, so energy must come from outside the contents shown in Fig. 4 in order to drive the assembly. I don't see where this energy is coming from. If it were shown coming in from outside (such as the repeated filling and emptying of the water) then we would be able to show energy going into this chamber, energy removed by the conveyor belt that's driven by the buoys, and some additional energy that either heats up the water or is removed as heat energy. In other words:
E_in = E_out + heat

We can see the E_out; it is coming out from the conveyor. But no E_in is shown in the patent as far as I can see - albeit, I haven't studied it sufficiently to know for sure exactly what is being done by the device. Can you explain where the energy is coming from to drive the buoys that drive the load?

 

[brian3344]

The energy being adding to the system is from gravity.

 

[boneh3ad]

So if all of the energy from gravity is used to fill and empty the tank, what energy is being turned into mechanical energy?

 

[Q_Goest]

The energy being adding to the system is from gravity.

Sorry Brian, but as mentioned, gravity is not equal to energy. If no energy is added to drive the buoys, or at least raise/lower the water, the device will not rotate.

 

[brian3344]

When the submersed tanks are empted they than float up doing work.

 

[brewnog]

Having read the patent I've already wasted enough time on this. Enjoy boys, I'm out...

 

[boneh3ad]

The tanks floating up are having work done on them, not the other way around. Then, when they get to the top, what causes them to fill back up?

 

[brian3344]

The water pressure pushes the pistons back in.

 

[boneh3ad]

But at the surface, there is no water pressure, so what fills the tank? Then at the bottom, you need to do work to empty the tank, which hasn't been addressed.

 

[stevenb]

Then at the bottom, you need to do work to empty the tank, which hasn't been addressed.

Yeah, not so easy to empty a tank at depth, is it?

 

[stevenb]

I recently saw an application of this principle. They used bladders filled with an oil that has density less than water. Pumps were used to fill or empty oil from the bladder to change the average density of a chamber by pumping water in and out via displacement of the volume of the oil filled bladder.

The application was to make an underwater glider which had wings. The glider tacks vertically (up and down) using buoyancy changes, and the up and down force gets directed into forward thrust by the wings and angle of attack which is controlled with weight distribution controlled by a linear motor.

The nice thing about this is that it uses energy very efficiently, but it does not give a free ride. A battery is used as the energy source.

 

[Dadface]

I recently saw an application of this principle. They used bladders filled with an oil that has density less than water. Pumps were used to change the average density of a chamber by pumping water in and out via displacement of the volume of the oil filled bladder.

The application was to make an underwater glider which had wings. The glider tacks vertically (up and down) using buoyancy changes, and the up and down force gets directed into forward thrust by the wings and angle of attack which is controlled with weight distribution controlled by a linear motor.

The nice thing about this is that it uses energy very efficiently, but it does not give a free ride. A battery is used as the energy source.

That brings back memories.It reminds me of the "Cartesian Diver" which is often used as a toy.

 

[RonL]

The water pressure pushes the pistons back in.

You have the correct basic idea.

Sounds to me like you are working in a reverse order, also the mechanics are too complicated.

A Ferris wheel like structure with drums that have ends that can be sucked in towards the middle of the cylinder, when they are at the surface, and then air pressure at bottom center will push the ends outward, which will give a... dead weight fall on one side, while the expanding volume on the other side gives a lifting force... Both sides become positive forces to the rotation of the wheel.
A large volume air mover and tank at center of rotation will control a delicate balance of pressure/vacuum from bottom to top.

And yes...gravity makes it happen.

Ron

 

[russ_watters]

Locked pending moderation. I still intend to post an analysis, but the thread is a little out of control right now.

 

[russ_watters]

Ok, this is going to hurt - a lot - but you need to hear it.

First off, with all the time and money you spent on this, you would have been much better off taking a freshman physics class - and an English class - at your local community college. Your utterly basic misunderstanding about "gravity" being a type of energy is easily solved in the first few weeks of a freshman physics course --- as long as you are willing to listen/learn. That's a big open question here, though, because based on your responses so far, it doesn't sound like you have any interest whatsoever in learning. You have your ideas about how the universe should work and are utterly uninterested in how it does work. Ordinarily, that's harmless, but in this case, you've spent time and money developing something that is just complete nonsense. And now that it has a patent, I suspect you are going to waste more time and money trying to sell the idea. Thats a lot of damage to you (not to mention to the integrity of patents) and that's the reason I'm still working on this rather than just deleting the thread.

Anyway, a good intro physics course always includes a few sample problems relating gravitational potential energy and kinetic energy of a dropped object, which shows how the energy is conserved. It also shows - using the definition of work - why there is no energy input required for a table to support a book, which is an obvious way of illustrating that "gravity" is not an energy source.

In the description of Machine #1, you talk about momentum. Momentum and energy are two different things and momentum is irrelevant here. The weight of the device itself is also irrelevant: when you lower it and raise it, the GPE is the same and no energy is gained or lost. For the actual function, though, we have to change the idea a little bit because the way it is described, it won't even be able to stop sinking. Water is very viscous and dense and you are going to lose most of your GPE to hydrodynamic drag. You dismissed that with a hand-wave, but you really can't - presumably you've been in a pool at least once in your life, so you should already know that when an object is dropped, it falls to the bottom very slowly. So we'll need to change this device to one that captures and stores the GPE as it falls, reducing the loss to drag. The actual mechanism for capturing the energy is irrelevant and there are a lot of ways to do it. What is important is that we assume all of the GPE can be captured while it is falling.

So let's throw some numbers at it and see what we can get. Let's say you have a 10kg mass device of arbitrarily small volume (so virtually no buoyancy itself). If you lower the object 10m into the water, you recover E=mgh=10*9.8*10=980J of energy. Now you use that energy to pump out the water/create a void. Again, the mechanism is irrelevant: the pumping energy is just E=pv. The pressure is p=rho*g*h where rho is the density of water (1000 kg/m^3).

So you have 980J=(1000*9.8*10)v...or v= .01m^3

Now remembering that your object is 10kg, this .01M^3 tank has a net buoyancy of (1000*.01-10)*9.8 = 0

So as you can see, the theoretical maximum performance of such a device isn't that it will come back to the surface, but rather that it only can generate enough energy with the fall to give itself enough buoyancy to halt its own fall. Now since it is at this point neutrally buoyant, you could always raise it back up to the surface with almost no input of energy and restart the process...if your machine is efficient, you haven't lost much energy, but clearly you haven't gained anything.

This analysis forms the foundation of all buoyancy motors and is the sort of analysis a freshman physics prof might put in the first test as an extra credit problem (prove that this PMM works/doesn't work...). If that sounds condescending, it is meant to: you need to start accepting that the concepts you are dealing with here are so simple that you should learn them instead of spending years ignoring them while wasting your time on a hundreds of years old failed PMM idea.

The analysis of the other buoyancy motors you "invented" works pretty much the same way. I'll get into some more specifics later (thread remains locked for now).

BTW, I couldn't view the photos on the USPTO's viewer, so if anyone else is having similar problems, here's a pdf: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7770389.pdf

 

[russ_watters]

The OP does not wish to discuss this further, so the thread will remain locked.