The TRUTH? η = 1 – (Qc / Qh) = 1 – (Tc / Th)

[Tom Booth]

My simple experiments however must be repeated endlessly, with ever more and more stringent requirements imposed.

You sure got that right. Extraordinary claims must be backed by extraordinary scientific data. Get ready for the onslaught of all kinds of attempts to rip your theory apart ...

Double standard.

IMO the Carnot limit is perhaps the most "extraordinary claim" in human history.

But you give that a pass. No verification required.

[Tom Booth]

Now fool thinks I'll be suspected of wire fraud?

You are safe saying whatever science denial you choose, right to an opinion, right to be wrong, or correct. It's your choice. And you are protected up until you take money with a promise to produce, and then you are protected if you do produce.

Many people have made similar claims, promises, taken money, had beliefs and good intentions, were even warned, and failed to produce. No one claiming similarly has produced. There have been many claimers that suffered because of lack of production after extraordinary claims. The followers are sufferers too. Be very careful. Going safely into a business with extraordinary claims, requires extraordinary working products. Your claims, rejecting accepted science, are extraordinary. Your products, so far aren't. Be careful.

Balloney.

All I'm saying is Carnot Limit theory is completely bogus overreach.

That applies to every engine being manufactured today. Every Stirling engine model or toy.

It is virtually impossible for any Stirling engine to NOT violate the supposed Carnot limit. Whether all other engines do or not is not my concern.

The application of the Carnot efficiency formula seems limited to old steam engines. It does not apply to modern high efficiency engines IMO. And doesn't apply to Stirling engines at all.

YOU think that automatically means over unity or perpetual motion. I don't.

Even if an Ambient heat engine were possible, that is not perpetual motion

The drinking bird is an ambient heat engine.

That is not "perpetual motion" it does 't run itself, it has a heat source. It won't run forever in outer space.

It does violate the 2nd Law.

[VincentG]

Tom the gas is still at Tmax after expansion to Bdc, it is then sinked to Tmin, then "heat of compression" is sinked to Tmin all the way to TDC.

Work positive (mostly)only comes from the small amount of heat needed to keep the gas at Tmax during expansion, and not(unfortunately) from the initial energy to bring the gas from Tmin to Tmax.

[Tom Booth]

Let's just apply the Carnot Limit to our "10 units of heat" input.

Call it 10 joules input per cycle.

As a "sample problem"

If a heat engine takes in 10 joules of heat at a temperature of 333° Kelvin and "rejects" heat at 300° Kelvin what is the efficiency and what is the heat rejected?

Answer: 9.9% efficiency. (Round to 10% just for simplicity)

So for every joule converted to work, 9 joules are "rejected".

If all 10 joules are converted to work during expansion then 10 X 9 need to be rejected during the remainder of the cycle to conform to the Carnot limit.

We need to find 90 more joules to reject to the sink.

300 is 90% of 333

90 joules are "missing".

That's the given "internal energy" already present in the environment. Inside and outside the engine.

That 90 joules represents the ambient equilibrium outside AND inside the engine.

The Carnot mistakenly includes that ambient heat as "added" heat that needs to be "rejected".

A mathematical Gordian knot.

032f26_6d1fd1ff4cc8437eb444815669b4fbd5~mv2.jpg (55.21 KiB) Viewed 2046 times

Complete nonsense.

[Tom Booth]

Tom the gas is still at Tmax after expansion to Bdc, it is then sinked to Tmin, then "heat of compression" is sinked to Tmin all the way to TDC.

Work positive (mostly)only comes from the small amount of heat needed to keep the gas at Tmax during expansion, and not(unfortunately) from the initial energy to bring the gas from Tmin to Tmax.

In your imagination.

[Tom Booth]

...

The following is another experiment you won't do because it will prove you wrong:

You claim to have completely cut off the heat from escaping the cold side.

That will also mean ambient heat can't get in the cold side. It is completely cut off from the ambient temperature. It is the proverbial "cold hole". It is similar to a thermos bottle. It can be put in a hot room or car and will stay cold all day, especially if loaded with ice.

You claim this will allow an engine to run on ambient heat indefinitely, until the ice melts from ambient heat getting to it, not from heat rejection. Something your tests haven't proven because your heat source shuts down.

This was making sense until "Something your tests haven't proven because your heat source shuts down."

How does the ambient heat "shut down" while and engine is "running on ice" ?

Try making some kind of sense. Ice is not a "heat source" so what are you talking about ?

So again: Cut off the heat with insulation on the cold side. Get it running on a tumbler of hot water.

You mean insulate the ambient side now? What about the ice ?

Is this a new experiment?

Then put it into a hot room, car, or oven at, say the temperature of the hot water, 150° F, warm enough to run but not to melt the engine. Could be 120 to be safe.

Time how long the engine runs before the cold side heats up to ambient. This will give an indication of how heat conductive the insulation is. If your theory is true it should run forever/weeks/all day. Ambient heat is cutoff, right? Try it with the engine not running.

Use that information to calculate what the temperature rise Should be if the engine is running back in ambient from one joule rejected heat. You may be astounded how many hours it would take for even one degree.

Alternately, just measure the temperature of an insulated block of steel. It will tell you how "cutoff" the heat energy is.

...

Like I said, no idea what you are proposing.

Cover an engine with insulation and stick the whole thing in the oven?

If your trying to say there is no "perfect insulation', I think we all already know that.so what is your experiment, what are you trying to to prove and what's the expected outcome?

You start out talking about running the engine on ice, then switch to running an engine on hot water and sticking it in an oven.

Sounds like complete nonsense.

[Tom Booth]

...
The following is another experiment you won't do because it will prove you wrong:

You come up with completely idiotic so-called "experiments" with impossible to follow, contradictory instructions and claim I won't do it because it will prove me wrong?

I don't even know what your so-called experiment is supposed to prove one way or the other. It makes no sense whatsoever.

You claim to have completely cut off the heat from escaping the cold side.

First of all, no I don't. And never did, I don't think. Obviously no insulation is 100% perfect.

That will also mean ambient heat can't get in the cold side. It is completely cut off from the ambient temperature. It is the proverbial "cold hole". It is similar to a thermos bottle. It can be put in a hot room or car and will stay cold all day, especially if loaded with ice.

You claim this will allow an engine to run on ambient heat indefinitely, until the ice melts from ambient heat getting to it, not from heat rejection. Something your tests haven't proven because your heat source shuts down.

So again: Cut off the heat with insulation on the cold side. Get it running on a tumbler of hot water.

You mean the ambient side?

Then put it into a hot room, car, or oven at, say the temperature of the hot water, 150° F,

So you have hot water on the hot side and hot air at the same temperature on the "cold" side.

I never suggested a Stirling engine would run without a temperature difference to at least get it started.

warm enough to run but not to melt the engine.

How will it run? You've equalized all the temperatures.

Time how long the engine runs before the cold side heats up to ambient.

What cold side? What ambient? You have an engine on hot water in a hot oven at the same temperature as the water. "Get it running on a tumbler of hot water. Then put it into a hot room, car, or oven at, say the temperature of the hot water, "

This will give an indication of how heat conductive the insulation is.

Really? How? There is no temperature difference. No heat for the insulation to block. You really expect me to take this seriously?

I'm only going over it in detail so readers can see what total bull you are running here, though that's probably obvious.

I'm not putting an engine on hot water in a hot over at the same temperature For what? May as well leave it on the table. Same situation. Same temperature on both sides.

If your theory is true it should run forever/weeks/all day. Ambient heat is cutoff, right?

Obviously not. There is no "ambient heat". There is hot water on one side and hot air at the same temperature in an oven on the other side.

Try it with the engine not running.

Use that information to calculate what the temperature rise Should be if the engine is running back in ambient from one joule rejected heat. You may be astounded how many hours it would take for even one degree.

What are you talking about? You've made both sides the same temperature.

Alternately,...

LOL. You mean there's more?

just measure the temperature of an insulated block of steel. It will tell you how "cutoff" the heat energy is.

?????

And you expect me to give you my phone number?

[Tom Booth]

....

The following is another experiment you won't do because it will prove you wrong:

You claim to have completely cut off the heat from escaping the cold side.
...

Just another point about this.

You say: "You claim to have completely cut off the heat from escaping the cold side."

What are you even talking about here?

Actually, my "claim" if any, is that the engine converts most, if not all of the heat to mechanical "work". So I'm not actually cutting off the heat. The engine itself is simply not passing the heat through, it's CONVERTING the heat into the mechanical motion of the engine; spinning flywheel etc.

So it doesn't really matter much if the cold side is insulated or not. The insulation just helps to demonstrate that there is not much if any heat trying to get through. Take it away and the "cold side" is still cold either way.

But of course, the engine body needs to be made as non-heat conducting as possible. If the engine is made of ordinary steel or copper or aluminum, the metal will conduct heat without the heat ever going into the working fluid at all.

The point is that it seems, the working fluid expands and does work pushing the piston using up all the heat/energy it took in so doesn't contain any additional "waste heat" to transfer.

Of course the hest can go AROUND the working fluid, through bolts, metal parts etc.

Before I did ANY experiments I first eliminated as much of the heat conducting parts of the engine that could pass heat through from the hot to the cold side as possible.

I'm not actually blocking much if any heat with insulation at all. The point is the insulation makes little difference, the engine is converting nearly all the heat, using it up to produce "work" anyway.

So, you really don't even seem to understand the first thing about it.

[Tom Booth]

...
You have chosen to disregard most thermo science simply because it doesn't fit your agenda.

What agenda?

As I've said many times, my only "agenda" if you want to call it that, originally was to survive out on some land off grid.

I looked into solar, but not very consistent sun in the NE US. No stream or river on .my land for hydro. PV panels + batteries + inverter were too expensive for me at the time. Then I saw a Stirling engine made of scrap metal and wood cobbled together out of junk running on a can of sterno or some such and suddenly there seemed hope.

Maybe I could run one of those Stirling engine things on my wood stove through the winter and maybe solar in the summer.

I think I borrowed $20 from my dad and sent for a little sunnytech LTD and put it on my wood stove and watched it run like crazy, until the plastic and foam rubber parts started melting.

I'd, of course, need something bigger and more heat resistant but there was nothing on the market but these little toys, but historically, they were once viable engines. Workhorses for pumping water etc.

I couldn't buy one so I'd have to figure out how to build one. Before I could do that I'd have to learn something about how they work

I found this forum and started asking questions:

viewtopic.php?t=77

The rest is all history here on the forum.

Your grasp of engines and HVAC is lame, but your grasp of cryo sucks (probably due to poor grasp of PV=nRT).
...

Just out of curiosity, could you elaborate or be more specific about your reasons for reaching these conclusions about me?

Can you point to something I posted here on the forum that reveals such a lack of knowledge, know how or understanding of these things.

You make a lot of criticisms and insults of this nature. What exactly do you base it on?

[MikeB]

Tom,
If all you want to do, like most of us, is build a 'good' Stirling, then why do you care about Carnot? I would only really regard it as a guideline, a source of a "sanity check" for efficiency claims, and potentially as a very high-level comparison of completely different types of engine, e.g. Wankel vs Otto. Everyone who uses it, seems to be aware that it ignores real-world issues of friction etc., indeed that seems to be part of the point - it gives you an upper-limit to what is achievable with a 'perfect' example engine, so that if a designer is working on an engine type that has a Carnot limit of 20%; and the actual engine achieves 19.9% he knows that he has done an incredible job.

For people like you and me, we need to optimise every little bit of the engine, but knowing the limit doesn't help us with that in any way whatsoever.

[Tom Booth]

Tom,
If all you want to do, like most of us, is build a 'good' Stirling, then why do you care about Carnot?

Honestly I don't.

I guess it goes back to years ago when I had correspondence with a friend in California who was apparently bidding on a government contract to build solar Stirling engines. I think, along with Infinia and SunPower I think.

He knew I was enthusiastic about Stirling engines and asked me to design one and gave me some basic specifications. If he got the contract he'd fly me out to his factory.

(He didn't tell me it was a government contract at the time, I figured that out after he said it was rejected)

So I spent maybe a month working on this project. I thought I had a great design based on all my research.

Well, the design was rejected, be said, because upon review it was determined that what I had put together, if it worked, would violate Carnot. So, on that basis alone, apparently the conclusion was it wouldn't work.

Well, I thought I had come up with a really great design. It was a combination of a Stirling engine and air-cycle heat pump.

The review he told me, said it violated the second law of thermodynamics.

I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought it was a "perfect" design. I was rather crushed. My new life in California working for a millionaire government contractor overseeing the construction of Stirling engines was canceled.

So, what was this "second law" and who is this "Carnot". What was wrong with my design?

So, in the course of researching that, I came across Tesla's article, where be described what was essentially my engine.

Tesla's article basically said that Carnot was wrong. The second law was wrong, and Tom Booth had a great design after all.

So naturally I was interested to know who was right. Tesla or Carnot.

BTW up until then I didn't know anything about Tesla beyond that one article about his ambient heat engine.

So I started coming up with some actual experiments to determine which theory about heat engines was correct. Carnot or Tesla.

I could not find any historic record of the Carnot efficiency limit having ever been experimentally verified.

It seemed like an important issue that needed to be resolved one way or another, aside from the impact it had on my life personally.

I would only really regard it as a guideline, a source of a "sanity check" for efficiency claims, and potentially as a very high-level comparison of completely different types of engine, e.g. Wankel vs Otto. Everyone who uses it, seems to be aware that it ignores real-world issues of friction etc., indeed that seems to be part of the point - it gives you an upper-limit to what is achievable with a 'perfect' example engine, so that if a designer is working on an engine type that has a Carnot limit of 20%; and the actual engine achieves 19.9% he knows that he has done an incredible job.

For people like you and me, we need to optimise every little bit of the engine, but knowing the limit doesn't help us with that in any way whatsoever.

The "limit" dictates that anyone with an engine design that is better than complete garbage can't get any backing and is doomed to failure.

Peoples lives continue to be ruined and the world is missing out on a potential energy resource for no reason.

I may be biased due to my own engine design having been rejected, but I don't really think so.

My video recorded experiments are as objective as anything ever could be. Anyone can do these experiments and see the results for themselves.

I think it is a tragedy how this Carnot limit is used to crush people who think that maybe a heat pump could supply the heat to run a Stirling engine.

Has anyone ever actually tried that?

No,

Nobody would ever invest any time or money because the very idea of it is contrary to Carnot.

But I've seen probably at least a dozen or so cases of someone floating the idea on a science or physics forum and getting roundly ridiculed and pounded over the head relentlessly with lectures about the Carnot limit and the second law and "entropy".

Objectively speaking, I think so far, my experiments tend to demonstrate that Tesla was mostly right and Carnot was mostly wrong.

So perhaps all the strict censorship of any discussion of the topic within scientific circles is not entirely justified.

Why should Carnot be accepted and rule all our lives if it has never been conclusively proven?

To say nobody has ever done it so it can't be done is no real argument if nobody is even allowed to try or even DISCUSS the subject.

[Fool]

Tom, you apply the Carnot limit improperly. The mathematical proof for the efficiency of any engine is sufficient to inspire scientific scrutiny. The Carnot limit has been scrutinized for over 100 years, by scientists and charlatans. It has come up against every engine, heat pump, and cooler, ever built. It continues the pass those tests.

Now someone has said he's taken some temperature readings that prove Carnot wrong.

And he refuses to even measure the efficiency, let alone, work, heat, and temperature properly. His documentation is sadly lacking, and lacking any standard laboratory practices, and write-ups. And his defenses are devolving into a den of logical fallacies centered around ad hominems. (Libel)

He doesn't even acknowledge that his LTD test engines will at most output 0.010 Watts of shaft power, meaning no more than 1 Watt will be absorbed by the engine. He ran one engine on an 85 Watt steam generator convinced that 99% was converted to work, enough to light a chain of Christmas lights, or seven 9 Watt house lightbulbs. Where did that work go? Your data is substandard, and falls far short of extraordinary.

The data supporting the Carnot Theory, contrary to your opinion is scientifically immense. Even the mathematical proofs have been pored over, and over again. There is no double standard here. There is a clear preponderance of evidence supporting Carnot.

Please try to learn what extraordinary data is. It's not what you will except, it is what the people you are trying to convince will accept.

It ultimately would lead to a libel case against you, if you start taking money under those promises. It's happened to other people making similar claims. The least you could do is give some work-out measurements to support your cause.

During the time when those theorems were discovered, by the evidence at that time, steam engines had efficiencies of 1% or so. The Carnot theorem showed several things. Higher efficiency are possible, 100% wasn't, and that higher temperatures would help those engines. They applied higher temperatures and it worked, efficiencies rose.

Since then people have designed engines with ever lower temperature differentials. They are not wondering why they have low efficiencies. They just enjoy the energy they do get. The Carnot theorem has been a boon to thermodynamics.

The Drinking Bird is not strictly an ambient heat engine, it is a low temperature differential engine. It requires heat in and heat out. It requires input/replenishment of water to be evaporated. It's a steam engine. It has the maximum power output and efficiency both close to zero. It probably takes more energy to fill the glass than it gives back. So the second law is verified yet again.

The Tesla cold hole ambient engine, talks of building its own cold hole through the expenditure of its own work. Clearly a second law violation. You will need very meticulous scientific data to claim such a device. So far no one has. So we have another Carnot verification.

[Fool]

The "limit" dictates that anyone with an engine design that is better than complete garbage can't get any backing and is doomed to failure.

If you actually had an engine that was better, you would get all the funding you would need.

Your fantasy, isn't new. As you've said lots of people come up with that idea and discuss it.

My guess is the reason you don't hear about it is that they have all failed. Of course, YouTube is full of magic shows like that. But failures are reported, if you know how to look for them.

To say nobody has ever done it so it can't be done is no real argument if nobody is even allowed to try or even DISCUSS the subject.

If nature is preventing it, wouldn't that be difficult to prove? The idea of proving a negative? That is the problem with "proof". Only in Pure Mathematics is there proof. And all mathematical proofs appear somewhat circular. 2+2=4 so 4-2=2 and so on. Pure Mathematics can only be backed by tests, or refuted. Tests won't prove mathematics.

The real efficiencies tend to be half the Carnot limit. Ask yourself, how it roughly predicts that. Interesting that higher temperature differential real engines have higher efficiencies, just about as the Carnot Theorem predicted. And lower temperature differentials have lower efficiencies.

Lastly, you were rejected because they knew about that idea, it's an old one. They know it won't work. They have mathematics leading to the failure conclusion. You had zero mathematics saying it would work. They did not feel the risk was warranted. Lots of people have lost lots of money in the past investing in that idea. Some of those promoters suffered suits for their delusions. You are welcome to try. Trying will help you learn why.

[Tom Booth]

...
The data supporting the Carnot Theory, contrary to your opinion is scientifically immense. Even the mathematical proofs have been pored over, and over again. There is no double standard here. There is a clear preponderance of evidence supporting Carnot.
...

What mathematical "proofs"?

So far you have cited no clear or coherent "proof" of the Carnot limit equation, which is nothing more than the temperature difference, or its wild interpretation that that ratio somehow controls how much heat supplied in joules can be converted to work.

Only your own made up "derivation" which you've already revised several times which does not agree with any accepted, published similar derivation, because there hasn't ever been any.

So how can the "mathematical proofs have been pored over, and over again" when nobody can even find one?

You posted a bunch of links but reading them I could find only general information about heat engines.

Empty words.

[Fool]

Words without Mathematics scientifically are empty.