Back in September 1996 Dennis Lee was telling people that
by the end of
that year his dealers would be installing combination heat pumps and
heat
engines on peoples' houses to supply free energy. I said then
this device
wouldn't work, and it didn't.
So what is Lee doing now? He's done a turn-about.
He's gone back to
the past to find a "new" impossible free energy device to push.
He's
found he can run a motor from a room-temperature tank of liquid carbon
dioxide. No surprises there, anyone can do the same -- until
the tank
runs dry. Now comes the Lee twist. If he can just take
the exhaust gas
from the motor and liquify it, he can pump it back into the tank and
start
again. Free energy on tap? No!
Things just don't work that way. The reason the carbon
dioxide in the
tank is a liquid at room temperature is that it is under considerable
pressure, at 68 F the pressure is 830 psia. The gas supplier
used a lot
of energy to pump that gas into the tank. Sure you can drive
a motor with
this stored energy but what comes out of the motor is low-pressure,
cool
carbon dioxide gas.
So how do you get that gas back into the tank? You
could just compress
it back to 830 psia but that would take as much energy as you got from
the
motor. You'd have no energy left over to use for anything else.
The
alternative is to cool the gas until it liquifies and then to pump
the
liquid into the tank. That takes much less energy. A large
volume of 830
psi gas comes out of the tank and a tiny volume of 830 psi liquid goes
back into the tank. This is exactly what happens in a closed-cycle
steam
engine. The energy needed to pump water into the boiler is much
less than
the energy which you get from the steam coming out.
Now steam condenses to water at room temperature but you
need to burn
fuel to make the water boil. A steam engine's energy comes from
the
difference in temperature between the fuel-heated boiler and the room-
temperature condenser. If your boiler is a tank of carbon dioxide
at room
temperature then your condenser needs to be well below room temperature,
about -40 F in practice. If you don't have a cold condenser,
the engine
won't run.
But the whole point of the free energy machine is that
it gets all its
energy from room temperature air. These's no way Lee, or anyone
else, can
condense carbon dioxide without either recompressing it or cooling
it.
Both these use as much energy, or more, as the engine put out in the
first
place.
On top of that, carbon dioxide is actually not a good gas
for this
purpose. Above 88 F it remains a gas no matter how much you compress
it.
Then, if you cool carbon dioxide gas at atmospheric pressure it turns
from
a gas to a solid without becoming a liquid at all. The "low-pressure"
side of the engine has to remain above 75 psia if you want to liquify
the
gas by cooling it.
John Gamgee, whom Lee is emulating, didn't make the same
mistake. He
tried to sell exactly the same machine to the US Navy in 1881 but his
"Zeromotor" used ammonia, not carbon dioxide. Of course it didn't
work
either, and for exactly the same reason. If the boiler and the
condenser
are at the same temperature there is no energy available to drive the
system.
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