Tom Booth wrote:It seems that materials react physically before, or more quickly than they react thermally.
This clearly isn't the case for heat transfer from a xenon flash, which can incinerate paint from a surface almost instantaneously. Temperature difference drives heat. The bigger the difference, the faster the energy flows. Cross sectional area, sometimes called surface area, and length of heat path, are also factors.
A good analogy is a cars fuel tank. Pull into a station, there is a delay before fuel starts pouring into the tank. Going in to pay. Talking to the cashier. Getting your card out. Putting the hose into the tank. Even then the size of the hose and pump limits how fast the tank fills, 10-15 minutes, or so for 15 gallons.
Pit stop a race car, minimal delay, fast acting filling, 15 gallons in under 10 seconds. Wow!
Heats the same way, except there isn't any delay. Instantaneously, as soon as there is a temperature difference, heat energy begins to flow. So regardless how short a time, some heat will flow. How much depends on the path, and material. Short, wide, and conductive, leads to high speed heat flow. You guest it. Long, narrow, and resistive, slow heat flow.
A rubber band has a high heat capacity, and is fairly resistant to heat flow, and small surface area. Air is fairly resistant as well. Heat transfer will be slow, like a small hose, however no delay. Heat transfer begins before the band is fully stretched, just as soon as there is a temperature difference. Granted, not much, but some.
Tom Booth wrote:The "rejected" waste heat isn't there!
Where did it go?
Your experiment shows a small but significant heat rejection. Sufficient enough not to ignore. What we are now discussing is how much heat actually entered the engine, and how much work was produced. I say, zero for zero efficiency. It could be slightly more than that, but very slightly.
Tom Booth wrote:OK, well, do your own experiment
It's too hard! Experiments are really really difficult. Blah blah blah.
That is uncalled for. I point out how easy it is to do poor science, Pons and Fleischmann, not to discourage experimentation, but to encourage good practices.
To improve one of your experiments, you would want to put a thermal couple, or RTD, on the inside and outside of both the hot and cold plates. It seems ridiculous, but the degree or so would tell us a lot about how much energy is actually flowing through the heat exchangers. The measuring devices should also be field calibrated using an ice bath and boiling water before, and after the experiment. No salt.
Also mathematical number crunching, theory, needs to accompany any reported data.
It is not enough to say Captain Hook ate oranges on the voyage and didn't get scurvy. That is just statistics. Science dictates, finding the chemical, ascorbic acid, and how the human metabolism utilizes it, before any conclusions can be made. And that is just the beginnings of that science.
Please, carry on. Be meticulous. Be careful. Good work, so far. Encourage. Encourage .Thanks.
Tom Booth wrote:If you ask me, the only reason academia (or whomever) came up with this bogus, transparently ludicrous application of the so-called "Carnot efficiency Limit" formula is they could not admit any possibility of any kind of "perpetual motion" whatsoever, or even anything that looked like perpetual motion, such as an "ambient heat engine", though such things must be possible, as they DO clearly exist in actuality:
Actually it is the other way around. Lack of discovering any "real" perpetual motion, over unity, devices has lead to the discovery of the Carnot Theorem and Entropy. This has not stopped the search for free energy over unity machines. Even I continue the search. It is easier to think up some contraption that "should" work, but doesn't, than to understand and demonstrate why it doesn't. Don't let others sway you from discovering and demonstrating, why they don't work. It is fun to do, and it gets easier with more practice.
The drinking bird, and the barometric clocks both have an unusual form of input energy, both tied to the sun. Solar heat.
Without solar heat the bird would freeze up. Without solar heat the barometric fluctuations would cease.
Earth is not an isolated system, neither is the drinking bird. Put it in a sealed jar and see if it keeps going.
There are other machines working long term, and briefly, on other energy sources. It's your job, should you choose to accept it, to figure out what those sources are. Usually it's well hidden batteries, or blowing air on the device. Scams run rampant in these areas.
Tom Booth wrote:I'm not sure why such a simple common sense idea drives so many science types to absolute hysterics.
I would call it on the side of science, dismissal.
I would call it on the side of others, cognitive denial and choosing to be ignorant.
It's much easier to be ignorant than to well educate one's self. Look at how many years we've been studying this, and we still know nothing. Socrates.