Billy wrote;
>P.S. I'm curious...would Wally Minto's Power Wheel generate enough power
to
>heat the water 3degrees F and still produce more power than it takes to
run
>it?
My understanding of Minto's wheel indicates it doesn't actually heat
anything. It relies on the heat of the ambient atmosphere and cooling by
the water.
Dr. Jones wrote about heat pumps;
> They gain their efficiency by pumping fluid around a circuit and
allowing
> the difference in the ambient atmospheres to do all the work. They are
up to
> 800% efficient, although they can be bulky. Mainly used by fridges and
> aircon units.
I'm sure you know this as do many on the list, but for those who don't, the
efficiency term for heat pumps is COP (coefficent of performance) and has
always puzzled me because of its use.
Griggs of Hydrosonics fame, was at a conference a few years back and
explained it to some degree. I was very confused because it seemed like a
semantics point that did not reflect the reality. Efficiency to my
understanding is an expression hinging on 100% as being perfect, i.e. at
unity, where the amount of work supplied to the load (as expressed in
horsepower or watts) is exactly equal to the amount of work done by the
device (again expressed in horsepower or watts).
BTW, one horsepower is equivalent to about 780 Watts, so to some degree you
can interchange the term.
So, anything that puts out MORE energy than it REQUIRES to run is over
unity because unity is 1:1. To the best of my knowledge, no one has even
achieved UNITY, let alone OVER unity.
The claims about Minato's self-running bicycle wheel are that of UNITY,
since it runs itself without powering anything else....I'll settle for that
as a stepping stone to useful OVER unity. Though Minato's patent claims
about 50 Watts in to produce neary 500 Watts out and was supposedly
demonstrated February 1998 in Japan, and videotaped by CNN, Nippon TV and
others.
Since you know something of this, could you please clarify in this forum,
as simply as possible, what is the difference between COP and true
efficiency?
You said 800% efficient for heat pumps. When Griggs was asked about this,
he said yes, they knew his counter-rotating drums with circulating water to
produce a shearing effect that produced heat were in fact way overunity,
but they did not express it as efficiency but as COP.
I'll stick with the use of straight efficiency for now, unless COP has some
bell or whistle that helps to clarify the issue. But I hear all kinds of
neat things about heat pumps being overunity, so I assume (mistake #1) that
they are fed with energy and producing more out, but CONVERSION to a form
that would let the heat pump run itself completely independent of outside
power would be so wasteful that it would not be practical, much like the
incredible waste of energy when DC is transformed to AC and used in that
form.
Thanks.