Transcending the Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Charliebrown]

Air conditioning in the diode array world will go beyond free; it will produce electrical power. Food keeping will be cheap. Energy not being created or destroyed and being always entirely useful will be the norm.

 

Ambient temperature experiments with tubes are possible and more convincing so I'll avoid high temperature experiments. Allies may want to do these experiments so the project as a whole can focus on buying C60 / n InSb prototypes.

 

A magnet initially at a similar strength but decaying over a couple of days would be a good control.

 

Aloha, Charlie

[nkt]

Ok, so... You are trying to do the trick with the tiny cog and rachet, are you?

 

Take a cog with a rachet, and a set of paddles. Now scale it down to a size small enough that the bumping of the air itself moves the cog. Of course, the rachet ensures it can only turn one way, and so, despite the constant pushing from all sides, the cog will turn only one way - energy from noise!

 

The snag is, at those scales, the noise hits the cog and the rachet. The rachet has to be lighter than the cog, and so it gets hits harder, and so the archet isn't any use any more, as it keeps getting bumped into the off position...

 

You are doing exactly the same as that, no?

 

The rachet is, in this case, a vacuum gap or a diode junction. I asked why this couldn't be done way back when at University, but sadly, although the answer was negative, I don't recall why.

 

However, I would point out that you are going to have a temperature gradient anyway, if you are causing local cooling by pumping energy out - it will get colder - and hence there will be temperature gradients.

 

Of course, if it works due to thermoelectric effects, or whatever else, who cares? If you can produce them cheaply and they will give out a reasonable power, you will get rich very rapidly.

See solar psp testing on Flickr - Photo Sharing! http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmtorrone/8940596/in/pool-make/ for an example of why!

[Charliebrown]

I'm used to different names in this example from Richard Feynman. To me there's a paddlewheel on a shaft to a ratchet wheel with a pawl on the rim riding the asymmetrical teeth. Feynman had a spring on the pawl to push it to the teeth and then said that it would drive the ratchet wheel backwards. I think the spring would push the ratchet wheel to the next insurmountable edge and stop. So omit the spring. A pawl will then sometimes lift away from the wheel. So have multiple pawls. The reliability of a multiple pawl system increases geometrically with the number of pawls. At least one pawl will then usually keep the wheel moving intermittently one way under random thermal impact.

 

A temperature gradient is created when the diode array absorbs heat. If the diode array is the most effective part than the temperature gradient shouldn't be burdened with other heat conversion devices.

 

Aloha, Charlie

[Qfwfq]

However, I would point out that you are going to have a temperature gradient anyway, if you are causing local cooling by pumping energy out - it will get colder - and hence there will be temperature gradients.

That's obvious but it isn't really the point, to check for entropy violations one would have to check there wasn't a temperature even lower than that from where heat is being absorbed, as well as other things.

[CraigD]

I think the diode array heat engine Charliebrown describes is a form of Maxwell’s demon, which, I believe, has been convincingly demonstrated to be impossible.

 

This reminds me of Sizlard’s engine, Leo Sizlard’s thought experiment answer to the Maxwell’s demon thought experiment question. I first encountered this in the 11/1987 Scientific American article ” Demons, Engines and the Second Law”. This article remains the best treatment of the subject I’ve read, and provides a far more compelling explanation of why I believe this thread’s proposed engine can’t work than this short post.

 

Summarizing the article, the conclusion reached by Rolf Landauer around 1982 is that Sizlard’s engine does not “transcend the second law of thermodynamics”, because the information it uses to transform heat (with no differential between 2 well-defined volumes) must itself have a physical form. The “forget” memory erasing operation of the engine requires organized physical energy equal to or greater than that the engine produces.

 

An interesting historic note is that while Sizlard’s engine provides a neat and compelling resolution of the Maxwell’s demon paradox, it wasn’t fully articulated until the 1982, 53 years after Sizlard published a paper describing his engine, and 111 years after Maxwell first suggested that his “demon” might actually be able to provide a practical, nearly unlimited source of energy from ambient heat. Prior to that, it was widely believed that the possibility of a Maxwell’s demon pressure engine had been disproved, even though later analysis would show these disproofs to be flawed.

[Charliebrown]

Smoluchowski's trapdoor seems workable too. One example of Smoluchowski's trapdoor is a one way check valve using a ball between a seat, < (imagine a coller of a truncated open coanical collar with minor diameter and major diameter ends), and screen, X, we can draw as < O X . It will pass fluid moving left because the ball, O , in the device will be carried left to where it is blocked by the screen, X , with only a little obstruction to the fluid flow; if the fluid moves right the ball will press to the seat, < , which blocks the flow. Entrainment relates the ball to the fluid and the ball has no movement on its own. The valve operates by cause and effect. The device can work on a nanometer scale. I do not see a need for more energy to assure that the device works. The device imposes a burden on random energy to rectify it but there is a net product. The Chinese may break the paradigm logjam with their clearly operational at low power device.

 

Aloha, Charlie