shinobi909

I know this quirky guy who always talks about "vortex energy". It's supposedly a type of free energy, which is something I don't belive in. When he tries to explain it, he uses a lot of chemistry jargon, which he may be doing to conceal the fact that his argument has no substance. Chemistry is not a field I have done much reading on, so I don't really understand what he's talking about. I'm not going to say much about his character, but he is anti-scientific in his views and he belives in some very wired things. I can't find anything on the net about it. Has anyone ever heard of vortex energy before? If I remember corectly the theory was formulated by a guy with a germanic name like Shopenhauer, or something like that. To me, It sounds like junk science.

Answerer

Can you explain more?

MadMordigan

It's supposedly a type of free energy,

There is your first clue.

The Other Michael

<a href="http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/1135/victor.htm" target="_blank">Victor Schauberger</a>

cheers,
Michael

shinobi909

yeah, that link Michael posted is the stuff he was talking about.

AdamWho

<a href="http://members.tripod.com/~SDAI_labs/AVT.html" target="_blank">Here </a>is an interesting (cranky) site that might be related. It at least attempts to look like science.

liquid

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

I've just been studying vortices, turbines and pumps as a part of my masters degree in aerospace engineering. Vortices have energy in the same way that anything in motion has energy. There is nothing special about them, at least not in this sense.

This is the biggest load of rubbish since squished bread. So yes, it is junk science.

And free energy is not something you 'believe in' or not. It's not a matter of faith. Free energy is quack.

shinobi909

Liquid, can you explain in simple terms why it's bunk? I'd appreciate that.

liquid

OK, I'll give it a go on a fairly restricted level. It might well be bitty because I am in the middle of exams (as I have been for the past month) and so will write in between questions.

The other problem is that there are no centralised specific claims, so I will probably have to talk in generalities. There are also a lot of unsubstantiated and off-topic ramblings. In fact, I'm not convinced I've actually seen any claims at all, so actually getting maths involved is probably quite impossible, except to say that by the 2LoT

dS&gt;=0

Any claim of free energy violates this and so is to be dismissed.

The second source is dealing with quantum physics, and therefore I won't deal with it.

Right, as I have noted, not all of this is rubbish out of context. For instance, vortices do have kinetic energy, just as a moving car does. That is nothing special.

Claim 1: Lights in stream.

This is quite plausible. Strike quartz together in the dark and you will see a glow. Alternatively, it might be phosphorescing bacteria. Either way, it has nothing to do with 'vortex energy'.

Claim 2: Log chutes.

This too is quite plausible. I have no idea what the '90% savings' are meant to be though. I am sceptical about the 'negative views' of the 'engineering experts'. Oak and Beech can and do float. One can only presume that they had some other more realistic complaint about the feasability of the proposed solution, or that this story is somewhat apocryphal.

And no explanation is made about why the cold nights are important either. Again, I can assume that water becomes most dense at around 4C, and this would aid flotation.

Neither is there any particular revelation involved in the 'rifling' of the flow...

Even in a laminar (straight) flow, a log is only in equilibrium in two conditions. Either the log crosses perpendicular to the flow, in which case the equilibrium is unsteady and is not held in practice, or the log lies axially to the flow. So the log would head in the correct direction in any case, assuming a reasonable degree to care in the loading. Log chutes of this manner have been used for millenia. It's the same principle as a windsock seeking the lowest energy configuration, just as anything in nature.

Now, an axially spinning log has angular momentum - it is essentiall a gyroscope. As momentum is a conserved quantity, it becomes difficult to alter the direction of the log with minor pertubations. Again, this is pretty much the same as any bullet, and I would be surprised if this was an original idea. Especially as Schauberger was born after rifles were created (guessing from the chronology clues on the page).

But this still has no sort of relationship to a free energy device. It is just using good old falling water possessing gravitational potential energy. Just like every waterwheel in existence.

Claim 3: Flying saucer.

Gyroscopic disc aircraft are interesting in a number of ways. I can understand that there might have been some NAZI effort to research and develop them, and there certainly has been in the US, although nothing particularly commercial, or practical for that matter, has come out of it (ignoring the fact that all jet, prop engines etc contain significant gyroscopes - their rotating parts).

However, the earlier claim that this man was a 'forester' does not sit well with him suddenly becoming an experimental aerospace engineer. NOT a realistic career change. Then we see he was admitted to a mental asylum... that speaks for itself.

Claim 4: ????????

I actually have no idea what this means. As someone who has studied thermodynamic cycles to a reasonable degree, I can't even begin to understand what it is claiming, except some vague concept of 'working with natural laws' (One of which, by the way, is the 2LoT, which prohibits free energy).

Claim 5: The generator machine.

OK. All this is, is a rather stupid looking radial pump. As far as I can gather, it uses a motor to eject water with a whirl component. The water then spins some kind of ring, which drives a generator.

Firstly, this violates the 2LoT and all of its corollaries. Drawing a control volume around the machine system boundary shows one input - energy from the motor, and one output, energy from the generator. Now, as no energy transaction is 100% efficient, we can see that less energy is being produced than is put in with the motor, and the whole thing is not a net generator, but a power consumer, and useful only as a garden ornament.

From the point of view of these overall thermodynamics, it doesn't even matter what happens inside the machine, whirl or no whirl. However, the broad effect of inducing turbulence is likely to lose you performance, and I estimate this device is actually looking at an efficiency of only about 15 to 20%, or something similar.

Additionally, I noticed a claim that 'very low pressures' on the undersides of the blades aid efficiency. In fact, they have the opposite effect in every pump known to man, when you want to minimize the pressure difference over the blade surfaces, because this creates a retarding force by F = dP*A.

Finally on this section, there is no such thing in reality as a centrifugal force, but I'm not even going to get into that.

Claim 6: Wind tornado.

Without drawings, I can only comment broadly. Whilst tornados and hurricanes can easily involve more energy than lots of nuclear weapons, they seem to have forgotten that the energy does not arrive free, but is provided by evaporation caused by the sun. If one is to be created and sustained artificially, the energy input will be greater than the useful energy output by the 2LoT.

Whilst cyclonic air flows do have certain applications in power generation etc, they do not give you free energy. Nothing does.

Claim 7: The Egg

I'm bored with this crank now! Bascially, the egg does do what is stated, but there is nothing interesting in that, and nothing relevant to free energy. Again, there is a larger energy input cost due to the falling water. And that would not be a very efficient turbine design, because, simplistically speaking, you want to convert as much as the g.p.e to k.e then to e.e. as possible. The stream after the egg has lost very little energy, showing that very little has been 'usefully' harnessed and that the whole idea is very inefficient.

The Other Michael

Hi Liquid,

as an aside, are you familiar with Henri Coanda (Coanda Effect) and his design for a "lenticular aerodyne"?

cheers,
Michael