Stirling Engine Suppression.

[Fool]

Stirling Engine Suppression.

It is my belief that Stirling Engines are being suppressed, but not for the reasons or by the 'people' you might be thinking.

The following link is for a Sefton Motors - Melvin engine that is available for purchase:

https://seftonmotors.com/products/volo-one-engine

It has a higher cost per power output than readily available IC engines 1/2 to 1/4 the price and 3 to 5 time the output.

There are several ways ideas get suppressed:
Logical - nature won't let it work.
Practical - it won't work well enough to warrant the trouble of building it.
Constructable - can't be built with the tools and materials we currently have.
Financial - cost more than the work it does, or more than acceptable alternate and currently available machines.
Political - someone of significant power or position suppresses the product because they like someone else better.

There may be more, and finer breakdowns of those given but the idea is that there are many ways to kill an idea.

My point here is that most ideas, that sound good, die in the first logical stage. The person with the idea realizes why it won't work. You can't build an airplane out of water ice and fly to the sun. Sometimes an idea is suppressed in this stage because someone else points out how it is prevented by nature. Your ice wings will melt long before you get to the sun.

Ultimately bad ideas die in this phase because they never will work. I call this a failure. I recognize at this stage failure may mean your idea is completely bogus, or with simple modifications it would work. With a failure it is often hard to tell the difference.

More knowledge can help flush out which way to go, however, a little bit can be dangerous, and a little more can make the true answer clear. Trying to squeeze gold coins out of a sponge fails for very minimal amount of knowledge. Why humans would or wouldn't be able to fly, not so clear nor easy. Birds fly. A little knowledge, birds have wings, humans don't. A little more knowledge, humans are way heavier than birds so need proportionally more wing area, etc...

I started this thread because I felt it was necessary to address the following post by Jack. I'm not picking on you and believe what you have said:

Unfortunately his experiments seem to have ended in failure, otherwise we would have them running for everyone today.

I can't bring much knowledge into this discussion, but you mention this point twice and I felt the need to say something about that.

This is a bit of an innocent view of the world.
Having worked at Asml euv, Samsung R&D, and Pfizer I can assure you technology is suppressed left, right and centre. Companies with vested interests have a big inventive to keep the status quo going. One of my projects in Korea was a victim of this. A clear step ahead in technology and Samsung bought it and stalled it. Never to be seen again.

And this was only about led screens, imagine any bigger markets, like engines, and the forces at play there.
Tesla even mentioned this himself in many of his writings.

So no, absolutely not. In no way would a breakthrough mean that years later we all know and use it. It's just not that kind of world.

At this point I don't have enough information to make specific comments, I will any way LOL, on Jack's personal experience. So I'd like to politely ask for more information. Can you please clarify on the above with a little more detail.

You seem to be hinting that the only reason for the suppression is the political one? Someone had a product that was earning money, so that a better product woud threaten those people's profit?

The problem I have is, that there are so many other reasons for a product to fail that political suppression is probably very rare, and after the patent runs out, open for anyone.

So in the case of the Zeromotor and Tesla's cold hole plan it's more likely to be the logical reason for failure. This is especially likely because of the more recently known laws of nature preventing it from working in any conceivable way.

The lure of 'free' or at least inexpensive power is too grate for a device to be suppressed by politics. Someone would be building them, similar to the Melvin Stirling above, even though it has massive financial reasons for suppression.

This leads us to niche reasons a suppressed product might still be valid. Even though it is a mechanical and financial nightmare, it still might be able to solve a problem in certain niche.

[Jack]

I hate to be one of those guys, but I can't go into too much detail. For personal and NDA reasons.
But I'll try to explain the situation.

First, I wasn't implying that all technology that doesn't make it is being suppressed. But you were, as I understood, implying that if we didn't have a certain technology by now it is certain proof of it not working.

This capitalist system we live in has kind of backfired. It used to promote innovation and competition. But nowadays, and I'm sure this was always at play, there are big players that have big agendas.
Without trying to get all conspiracy theory on us here, but the biggest agenda is beating as much money out of the common man as possible. You just have to look around and connect the dots, especially nowadays.

My personal experience in big business is just that. New innovations are subtly slowed down or stopped in their tracks. A big step forward means missing many incremental steps that also earn money for them. Or in my case, the technology is slowed down, the innovating company is bled out in the meantime and then the technology is either bought or abandoned. The R&D department there is riddled with stories like these.
Asml is even worse, they are so big they determine exactly who is allowed to work for them and how much profit the subcontractors can make on that.

Again, I'm sorry I can't provide specific proof, I hate that as much as anyone. But in the end it was the main reason for me to leave the business. As an engineer I want progress, but seeing that smothered like this just rubs me the wrong way.
I'm fully aware that I might have just gotten unlucky or something and saw a scale of this that doesn't represent the true scale, but it left me with a sour taste for this system we live in.

[Fool]

I figured there was a nondisclosure involved. I do not know how long or what rules apply to nondisclosures.

I will admit that I learned early, working for Boeing that, "managements job is to find out what you are doing and to stop it.". You obviously got caught up in that law of society. Sorry. Been there many times. Don't have much love for management.

Patents are for seven years, with potential extension of seven more, (I think from memory). After that anyone can build and sell them.

Depending on the patent small changes to the device changes it enough to allow the same machine to be sold by the second party. The Wrights fought that process with Curtis. Ailerons verses wing warping.

The device must have a patent application submitted within a year of any public demonstration or it can't be patented.

The technology from 2009 and before can't be suppressed, except by no one knowing about it. Since the cold hole Tesla and Zeromotor are allegedly simple enough systems that if they worked someone would be selling free energy by the truck load today.

I stand by my claim that if those engines work we would all be using them today. There is no way to suppress free energy. There are too many garage builders that could build them that are every bit as smart as Tesla and cohorts.

I'm well aware of historic and modern suppression. It only works for a relatively short time.

Case in point. A boy invented a safety feature for match books. His dad helped him get a patent. They tried to sell it to certain matchbooks companies. No sale. After the patent ran out, 7 or 14 years. All the matchbooks began coming out with the new safety feature, the striker was moved to the back. It was cheaper to wait for the suppression to go away.

Product suppressed by a boy patent holder. But it did not last for over one hundred years.

My implication is that if enough time goes by all things suppressed come into light.

All the free energy devices claimed are simple enough and been around long enough that there is no way that it can be from suppression, conclusion the claim of them being possible is wrong, the claim of them working is fraudulent. Belief in them working is cognitive denial of the laws of physics, and economics.

Yes, if I investigated a working model, I wouldn't deny it. Fraud is rampant in modern times investigations would need to be exceptional. Claims don't cut it. The fact of the first and second laws, leaves me very skeptical of claims. Facts of mathematics against claims, lack of evidence or mathematics for those claims, equals denial of claims.

There are enough fraudsters and ignorant inventors on our Earth that claims are typically a waste of time. In fact they are almost always a waste of time. Claims of breaking the laws of thermodynamics are doubly so.

I only ask that they tread lightly on making any claims.

P.S., you are reasonable. Thank you.

[spinningmagnets]

I don't think there is a lot of profit in making Stirling engines for sale to the public. There is no way to patent any part of it, so a premium price cannot be charged to early-adopters. Even if someone tried to make and sell them...who would buy it, and what would they use it for?

One possible answer is as an electrical generator during a power outage. Natural gas, Propane, fuel oils, and even a wood fire could provide the heat, however, a Stirling the size of the average refrigerator would only be able to charge a battery bank large enough to keep a laptop and smart-phone charged up, along with a few rechargeable flashlights.

Small gasoline generators are readily available for $500-$1000, so the major benefit would be that at least during the day when the sun is out, you "might" be able to design a solar concentrating dish, so the fuel would be "free-ish".

Not to be negative, but if anyone reading this thinks there is profit in building a Stirling generator, they are fairly easy to construct using basic skills and tools. In fact I feel that is one of the issues. If you come out with a Stirling of a certain design and size that proves to be popular, some Chinese company will copy it, and it will be produced and sold cheaper than your price, at Harbor Freight. There is nothing exotic or special about these that precludes anyone from building one, or copying one that they saw.

For me, these are fun. I may be wrong about some of the opinions expressed above, but if someone here is selling Stirlings, I haven't seen them. If there is a link to one for sale, its expensive and has a low power output. Any "successful" Stirling producer is not scaling up the factory to make thousands of them to keep up with the demand...

[Jack]

I know this is a Stirling engine forum, but I feel this whole discussion everywhere went far beyond that.

When talking about this suppression topic the Stirling engine wasn't the one that came to mind for me. And neither the Carnot limit or second law.
I had the Tesla turbine in my mind, which I think is massively suppressed/misunderstood/ignored/whatever.

I agree with what spinningmagnets says above.

[matt brown]

I don't think there is a lot of profit in making Stirling engines for sale to the public. There is no way to patent any part of it, so a premium price cannot be charged to early-adopters. Even if someone tried to make and sell them...who would buy it, and what would they use it for?

Basically, low power = low sales = low profit and likely due to lame design. Any patent is useless unless practical, but any practical design "novel" enough to secure a patent does not guarantee commercial success. Nope, any success will more likely depend upon application than 'perfect' design. My long time ECE focus has been auxiliary power for sailboats. This overlooked niche market could easily support any credible design before venturing mainstream.

The whole free energy dream is crazy and typical anti-oil buzz isn't far behind. The best ECE spin is simply an alternate engine that allows various source inputs vs single source input. Originally, Ford intended his cars to run on both alcohol and gasoline since alcohol was more widely available during the early 1900s. Later, as gasoline became widely available, ICE became optimized for it to increase car sales vs favor Big Oil. After decades of Big Oil conspiracies, I'm waiting for Big PV to become the next urban legend.