Canned Thunder

this information is censored by status quo forum

2011-10-30T22:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I received a link to a thread I'd started at http://physicsforums.com in the "Skepticism & Debunking" section. Posting there was like diving into a shark tank and then cutting your finger. I tried to be vaguely civil with my responses to the attacks, until I could see that it wasn't helping. As usual, the omniscience of the kneejerk skeptic stands above common standards of decency, critical listening, looking at something before judging it on its own merits, etc. When someone suggested that I was interested in perpetual motion and suggested that the thread be closed, I let him have it, which just gave him the excuse he wanted to whine to the moderator about an outsider having something to say. Later when I got an email link back to the forum and checked it, I was told that I had been banned from the whole forum forever for being a "crackpot". I was going to complain but first I read the rules and lo! discussion about unpublished new technology is against the rules at http://physicsforums.com! Also, anything that Anybody could construe as conspiracy theory is not allowed to be discussed.

Well bust my buttons, I thought forums were for talking about stuff!

And talk I had. I don't have a copy of any of the drivel that the Discouragement Fraternity had posted on my thread and the whole thread was deleted. All that's left of the conversation is the post that got me banned. Here are excerpts:

"The Bob Neal compression unit was built and tested in this (the 21^st) century, and the results were good.

"I have made every conceivably necessary noise to the effect that there is an energy source for this and I do not believe in denying or avoiding or going around any law or principle of science... If you woke up on the wrong side of your b.s. degree then sorry you were having a bad day, now please try to stay on topic as I have put a lot of effort into this and I don’t need to hear from people who aren’t interested in digging into my work to find its specific strengths and weaknesses.

"Generalities (especially framed as threats to have me banned from your omnipotent presence) are religious assertions based on meta-physical interpretations of laws and principles. I don’t mind generalities when there has been some thought put into them so that they are applied correctly to the question at hand, but what you are doing here is trying to beat me at the altar of your omniscience...

"By meta-physics, what I mean is that certain kneejerk skeptics Truly Believe that all they have to do is quote some Law of Physics (or even have one vaguely in mind) and once they are thus armed, they become the Fundamentalist Army of the SCIENCE IS PERFECTED religion, shouting slogans like “It’s all been done before,” and “If it would work you could just buy one at Wal-Mart.” In other words, your presumed education plus some law you imagine to apply to a theory you haven’t studied towers over empirical findings and new applications, canceling all, and elevating you to the status of Forum Gods..."

(The thread had been started to attract criticism of the constructive kind to material that is being posted at my new blog http://selffilling.blogspot.com. Obviously I should have stayed out of the conversation as nothing was being said anyway and it could have died a natural death instead of my getting myself thrown out for disagreeing with consensus opinion. Oddly enough, being threatened is my least favorite thing in the whole world! Except for pig intestines cooked in pig blood and octupus cooked in octopus ink!)

New Blog on Bob Neal, the Neal Tank, and the Self-Filling Air Tank

2011-10-25T23:47:00.000-07:00

I have been getting detailed reports from an engineer who has become interested in evaluating Bob Neal's compression unit, US Patent 2030759.

The engineer believes that resonance is the principle of operation, but unlike the assumptions of myself and others, he thinks that the working wave is a traveling wave, not a standing wave.

I have started a new blog to deal exclusively with this engineer's work, pro and con. He is especially keen to hear from devil's advocates because he started out to prove his idea wrong and can't find any evidence against it. The new blog with all his writing is here:
http://selffilling.blogspot.com

My page on standing waves is here:
http://aircaraccess.com/resonance.htm

In case you're new to this, Bob Neal was an Arkansas shoemaker who built a self-filling air tank in the 1930s, and took it to Washington DC to show it to the patent office, forcing them to give him a patent since his machine worked. He invented a way to put fresh air into a pre-charged compressed air tank without working against the pressure that was already in the tank. The result was a compression unit so cheap to run that it literally made extra air. The energy source is the ambient heat already in the air, being upgraded to a useful condition by being inserted into an air tank many times more cheaply than by the conventional means of being pushed in laboriously against resistance.

I have been researching this device since 1988, when another engineer first told me that the device must have been a tuned resonance circuit of some kind. In other words, it works by acoustic power; the air is hammered into the tank by sound waves, and the mechanical compressor only has to keep the air moving.

More Power to Us All

2011-10-22T06:35:00.000-07:00

This is dedicated to the brave patriots who are standing up against the banksters, the fundamentalists, the war mongers, and the status quo.

Free subscription to Neal analysis

2011-10-19T22:13:00.000-07:00

Currently an engineer is analyzing Bob Neal's compression unit from the perspective of resonance as its anomalous operating principle. He is working hard and producing documents that deserve to be studied line-by-line. For your consideration and comment, if you would like to have copies of his papers, please send me an email request with a subject line like "subscribe to Tom's analysis on Neal".

Tom has a lot to say on the topic of compressing air with acoustic power and how Neal might have been doing it. One of his ideas is that Neal might have been using traveling waves instead of standing waves as I have suggested at my page http://aircaraccess.com/resonance.htm

If the demand for this is very high, I will make a pdf of everything he's sent me and post it on the website so anyone can download it. Tom and I would very much like to hear from anyone who has comments, opinions, or suggestions. He is just as interested in criticism as anything else, as we don't want to waste our time going down any blind alleys.

Thanks and stay in touch.

Luther

Cheaper Way to Compress Air

2011-07-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

Help me teach google a new search term! Yesterday I googled "cheaper way to compress air" and got zero hits! You can now go to http://aircaraccess.com and CLICK THE TANK. That will take you to my new page on how Bob Neal's self-filling air tank worked because of resonance. It's a work in progress and suggestions would be appreciated at
freeair-at-aircaraccess.com

Teach google about:
compressing air with resonance
compressing air with standing waves
using resonance to compress air
using standing waves to compress air
cheap ways to compress air
cheap way to compress air
cheaper way to compress air
alternatives to the conventional air compressor
unconventional air compressors

Bob Neal's Secret

2011-07-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

http://aircaraccess.com/resonance.htm

Part 1

US Patent 2030759 was granted to Bob Neal after 2 or 3 rejections because the inventor took a working model to Washington Town and proved the damn thing worked. So let's talk about why it worked.

When the late Bob Neal's friend, Mr McDonald, heard about my research he drove to my town to meet me and then started sending me money to try and prove Neal’s device, which he said was a way of building up air pressure in a valve inside the tank so the compressor’s job would be only to keep the air moving instead of resisting the whole tank pressure. I worked hard and learned a lot about how not to do things, but didn’t have enough time and money to complete my education, so Mr McDonald’s whole contribution pretty much went to a partial education for me and we got nowhere of substance with proving Neal’s machine.

Once we had found Neal’s patent, one of the first things I did was to show it to my landlord, a retired mechanical engineer named Irwin. Irwin immediately said, “This will work, it is like a pulsejet. It has to be tuned very precisely or it won’t do anything.” He drew me a diagram of how waves or disturbances of odd quarter-wavelengths reflect and compound in a cylinder with one open end and one closed end, and likened the tailpipe of Neal’s equalizer to such a resonator. He explained how resonance could build up a very intense pressure and rarefaction wave in a resonator. He also understood why Neal used several compressor cylinders to one engine cylinder, instead of what’s done today with one or two cylinders laboring and providing a more steady flow.

Based on the word “pulsejet” I dove in and spent my milk money on photocopies at big libraries in Berkeley and San Francisco for a couple years, creating what is now the acoustic power section of the Pneumatic Options Research Library. I also strayed far afield of Irwin’s suggestion and got distracted by the large variety of acoustic power devices that seem to indicate that pressurizing fluids with waves is not only possible but done every day.

The resonance explanation for Neal’s device was always the best, but I didn’t really understand it, so therefore I couldn’t quite believe in it, and because of this and other reasons, I didn’t test it out properly in the workshop. Eventually I posted an in-tank injector on a web page I called “Neal Tank” and from then on everybody has been effectively distracted from really looking at Bob Neal’s patent, which I now believe is virtually complete as is.

For about the past three years, a machinist in the US has been working to get back to basics and build what Neal actually patented: a compression unit with seven compressor cylinders to one engine cylinder. In various experiments using a variety of equipment, none of which was ideal, he was able to prove that Neal’s concept is in fact real, and that it is a tuned resonant device. The machinist’s device was not built well enough but cost him a lot of time and energy, and he has now turned to trying to come up with his own simpler invention, since he is now well convinced that the principle is sound, in both senses of the word. I have decided to try and put his results out there, without revealing anything about who he is or what he is working on now. His statement to me is that he won’t build another 7 cylinder compressor because he’s burned out on dealing with the cost of fixing it when something goes wrong.

What he didn’t realize when he designed the machine is that it has to be very stout so that it can function as a typical brute force air squeezing machine until its rpm’s match the resonant frequency of its delivery pipe. So he broke underbuilt piston rods trying to get past the hard work of making 100 psi the old fashioned way, but several times he was able to get the machine into the power band or sweet spot where resonance kicked in and made a huge difference in how the compressing of air actually got done.

Neal’s patent states that the compressor only has to resist 15 psi so I’d never thought through it well enough to realize that the pipe has to have serious pressure in it, say 100 psi, before resonance is going to take over and get the air into a 200 psi tank. Since it’s a single-stage compressor, no more than 100-120 should be expected from the compressor, ever. But resonance is like water hammer, in a house where the plumber got unlucky with pipe lengths and a fast-flush toilet sets off resonance in a pipe length. It goes on with its thumping and jumping for quite a while with nothing but a single driving disturbance having set it off, and sounds like the pipe is going to break out of the wall. I don’t think that would happen if the water in the pipes weren’t under some pressure before the sudden disturbance took place in the line.

If you look at the patent, part number 49 is a resonator. It appears to have two closed ends with all the individual compressor discharge pipes entering it at evenly spaced intervals and the exit pipe to the tank (probably purposely) hidden from view. I am indebted to my machinist friend for helping me to understand the material he found on my own site. Until I was told that there had to be about 100 psi in the pipe already for there to be any hope of resonance generating pulses of 200 psi, I didn’t get it.

Part 2

Bob Neal’s compression unit had to be strong enough to function as a conventional single-stage compressor. It had cooling water, a water pump, and a fan. It was not a screwed-together gizmo, it was a custom engine block. It took Neal a long time to get it right, and once he got it right he was able to reproduce his results in a small working model which he took to the patent office and demonstrated: a working engine putting air into a 200 psi tank without having to resist the 200 psi to get it in. A new, cheap way to compress air.

The delivery pipe or resonator, part no. 49 in the patent, had to be the right length so that the frequency of the wavelength generated by the pulsations from the compressor would trigger resonance in the pipe. If not then the compressor would just stall, because the tank was pre-charged with 200 psi, and a single-stage compressor cannot put air into a 200 psi tank by any conventional means.

Resonance in compressor discharge piping is common, and the usual idea is to get rid of it since it is a sound wave, and causes vibration in equipment. So what I’m talking about here is not that exotic. Creating resonance in compressor discharge pipes is done every day, by accident.

Everything including a column of air has a frequency at which it wants to vibrate, its natural resonant frequency. Pulsing the air into a discharge pipe at this frequency or one of its harmonics can cause pressure to build up on account of wave reflection. The forward wave, headed downstream, is driven by incoming pulses or disturbances from the compressor pistons. It bounces off a closed end in the pipe, a sudden turn, a restriction, that sort of thing, and while air continues to flow through the pipe in one net direction, the disturbance or wave reflects back upstream, traveling against the air flow at the speed of sound. The forward and backward waves tend to cancel each other out or disrupt each other unless the discharge pipe is the right length to function as a tuned resonator, and then all hell breaks loose.

The amplitude of a disturbance in a pipe whose air would be 100 psi if it weren’t moving varies because of the wave or disturbance. The peak of the wave is over 100 psi and to make up for it, the pressure wave is followed by a rarefaction wave of pressure less than 100 psi. If the waves fit perfectly into the pipe because of the pipe being a tuned length with the pulses entering it, the forward and backward waves will match each other and add to each others’ amplitude. The amplitude is the distance above and below static pressure (100 psi) that is reached. With this process going on, a standing wave is the result of the forward and reverse wave adding to each others’ pressure changes.

The seven pairs of compressor discharge pipes in Neal’s machine entered pipe no. 49 at pressure antinodes, that is the spot in a standing wave where pressure changes are the most intense. At the trough or lowest point of each pressure wave, the air from the compressor could easily enter the pipe at around zero gauge pressure or a little more. Then inside the tank at the entrance to the equalizer, the first of a pair of check valves is positioned also at a pressure antinode where the seven successive pulses per crankshaft cycle in turn feed a high pressure wave into the equalizer, the space between the check valves. The pressure builds up in the equalizer with each successive pulse and after seven pulses, pressure in the equalizer is almost 200 psi, and something happens inside the tank. A blast of air leaves out the far end of the tank going to the engine. This is also in phase with the compressor cylinders, so the compressor is essentially generating the 7th harmonic of the fundamental wave generated inside the tank by the pulses of 200 psi air leaving the tank for the engine.

The air in the tank is also vibrating, and the tailpipe of the equalizer is another resonator. The sudden cyclical lowering of pressure in the tank generates another intense standing wave in the tank which assists the built-up air in the equalizer into the tank, in a sudden blast. Everything has to be tuned and position correctly and that’s why it took Bob Neal a long time to figure this out. He probably got the idea when he got his first flush toilet and asked his plumber why the pipe was drumming on his walls. He probably went to a local university professor to flesh out a series of experiments he could perform to test his idea.

Part 3

My machinist friend built a seven-cylinder compressor and ran it with a drill motor. He chose a pipe length for his discharge resonator based on wavelength calculators available online. He did not put his double check valve equalizer in a tank, and that was a stroke of intuition that would have increased my knowledge and saved my backer a lot of money if I’d tried doing it that way instead of first building expensive flanged tanks sealed by big o-rings. He ran it till it stalled, broke piston rods, and eventually burned up the drill motor, but not before getting results that made him a believer.

The compressor was balky and hard to run because it was homemade and working against full resistance of building pressure. Actually I believe the second check valve was replaced by a solid cap because the pipe was used as the tank. I’ll have to check my notes. The compressor got hot, like any compressor would. It stalled and stumbled and complained.

Finally after many tries and repairs, the machinist got the machine up to the rpm at which resonance kicked in. At this point, the functioning of the compressor smoothed out. It ran very cool. Pressure built up in the equalizer ABOVE the pressure being made upstream in the compressor. The end of the pipe where the equalizer was got VERY HOT.

He proved that we can compress air in the pipe, in the tank, instead of the compressor. There IS another way to compress air.

That makes all the frivoulous fluff about “when will MDI make me an air car” irrelevant. In fact if I believed in conspiracies, I’d say that maybe Negre was hired to pretend he was going to put an air car in every driveway so no one else would bother. While we sit on our duffs watching cable tv shows and You Tubes about new technology, new technology is not out in our three-car garages building itself.

I am working on a new page about this concept if anyone cares to see it. It has animation created by me and borrowed from other websites trying to show how resonance in piping works.

http://aircaraccess.com/resonance.htm

Zippy’s Bopo

2011-05-29T19:49:00.000-07:00

His granddaughter Zippy called him "Bopo".

His son-in-law, the most famous literary editor who ever lived, called him Mr. Saunders. All the civilian engineers who served the war effort during WW I called him their boss, and every employee and director at Ingersoll Rand, the world’s largest compressor builder, must have called him Sir, if it’s possible to say that to your friend.

William Lawrence Saunders wasn’t just a somebody, he was a Somebody’s Somebody. You had your Paul Warburgs making federal banking policy, you had your Edisons in the lab ambitiously overseeing the creation of new technology. You had your Woodrow Wilsons running a world war out of the White House, you had your Herbert Hoovers trying to feed the world with mining profits, you had your Max Perkinses helping untamed geniuses like F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway into a condition that would build publishing empires. Later there was Arthur D Whiteside, running Dun & Bradstreet with one hand and trying to rebuild the economy of Europe with the other, based on the early influence of his mentor, W L Saunders. Looking each of these world makers right in the eye, working literally side by side with them, never quavering in his certainty, and seldom wrong about anything, you had your one-and-only William Lawrence Saunders, the king of compressed air, one of the most productive and influential of the 20th century industrial giants.

Now Zippy’s Bopo is nearly forgotten. Why?

In 1930 he was visiting the west coast, staying at the Biltmore in Los Angeles, when the census taker dropped by. Asked what his occupation was, he could have provided any number of impressive credentials, not the least of which would have been his status as founding president and still chairman of Ingersoll-Rand Company, Inc. I don’t dare suggest that he was travelling incognito, or that he needed to. Is it possible that this mover and shaker among industrial giants was not interested in building a monument to himself? He told the census taker that he was an employer, the manager of a glove factory. That’s possible; he could manage a dozen projects with one finger. Why even speculate?

One of William Lawrence Saunder’s younger brothers set a high standard when he sold his used bookstore and opened a small, finicky publishing house in Philadelphia. The goal at Walter Burns Saunders Publishing Company was to produce medical texts written only by current top experts in their fields, to manufacture the books using the best materials and workmanship, and to get the information to its intended audience quickly while it was still current. The company he started is still in existence, because of something that doesn’t run in every family: competence.

William L Saunders couldn’t have achieved one percent of what he did if he was the sort of person who would let himself be eaten alive by any one project, mired in the details. He was the opposite of a specialist; he was interested in everything. During World War One while he was running the Naval Consultants Board, he put up a $50,000 reward for anyone, doctor or layman, who could invent a significant and universally applicable cure for cancer, and he offered the same reward for a way to prevent the same disease. When women fought for the vote in North Plainfield, New Jersey where he served twice as mayor, he was on the front line with them. When Arthur D Whiteside, the chief of Dun & Bradstreet, was younger, he and his family went on a cruise with W L Saunders to the Bahamas. The two men shared the philosophy that financial monopolies were counter-productive. They believed that what was good for the world was good for America. That sort of goodnik thinking couldn’t get them a job as an assistant manager at Burger King in today’s shark-eat-shark, “conscience is stupid” business environment.

But getting back to that brother of his, the well-known and highly reputable technical book publisher. This is back when $5 was a high price for a textbook. I’m going to go way out on a limb here and assert that W L Saunders had connections in the world of technical book publishing. I’ve been asserting it for years, and now I have evidence. But from all indications, few of his descendants know anything about him.

Several or maybe all of Saunders’ siblings were well-off, and he seems to have been particularly close to his youngest sibling, his only sister Jennie Morton Saunders of Philadelphia. As a little girl, Jennie had no mother to take care of her and only a busy Episcopal minister for a father, as well as her mother’s unmarried sister who lived with the family and later with Jennie and her partner in Philadelphia. Jennie was the first of the family to move from Florida to Philadelphia. She was born in Marietta, Georgia during the Civil War, and never got to know her mother. At the age of six she was sent to a boarding school in Philadelphia, and the rest of the family soon followed her up north. Jennie lived her whole adult life in Philadelphia, always had money because of her brothers, and she never married because her life partner was named Stella M Pinckney and why would two women want to get married? In his will, W L left them the property he owned in Philly, the two of them. On the 1920 census Jennie listed Stella as her Partner. Not business partner; they reported as their occupations, “None.”

Here is what I’m getting at. The Reverend Doctor William Trebell Saunders, who had an honorary degree from William and Mary College in Virginia, raised his children to be liberal free thinkers. This was a century ago; don’t jump to conclusions about what a “liberal” was back then. This is not in reference to the so-called kneejerk liberal of today, the sloppy-thinking happy-happy joy-joy New Ager with a big black SUV and a guilty conscience and a stock portfolio. Or else dred locks, a customized VW bus, and Mommy’s credit card in back pocket. Other than having ten fingers and ten toes, the liberal of 1876 and the liberal of 2011 bear little resemblance to each other. Back then being a free thinker could make you rich, because the world was wide open. New and exciting world-changing inventions like W L Saunders’ underwater rock-drilling rig created new millionaires regularly.

What was W L thinking, as a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a cub reporter with a technical degree, when he climbed into a hot air balloon, ascended to three-and-a-half miles above the face of the earth, and spent the night there? Did he have any idea what he was going to do with his life? Maybe or maybe not, but the adventure of that night was a symbol for all that would follow.

In 1930, the world’s largest publisher of engineering books came out with the fifth edition of mining engineer Robert Peele’s Compressed Air Plant. This book made it perfectly clear to anyone who cared to read it that the compressed air locomotives then proliferating in coal mines all over the world could cut their fuel costs a lot, by absorbing free ambient heat from their surroundings. This was no big surprise; the technology was already over twenty years old. But this particular textbook marked the end of an era. Something about textbooks which were written to be read, understood, and used--no longer needed or welcome. By 1945 it was a new world order, when it came to the dissemination of information.

The next year, W L Saunders, chairman of the board at the largest compressor company in the world, set out on a leisurely trip around the world. In March of 1931, his two married daughters met him somewhere near the coast of Morocco or Spain, and then headed back to New York. Three weeks later, Saunders died suddenly and the cause of his death was not mentioned anywhere in print.

The instructions for how to design compressed air engines that could purposely use ambient heat to expand their fuel supply were never again included in any engineering textbook. With Bopo gone, the world was finally free to go to hell in a handbasket.

Volume One is finished

2011-02-09T19:16:00.000-08:00

Air Car Hall of Fame is going to have to be a lifelong project, I can see that. Almost every time I get on the internet and start searching keywords through old newspaper archives, I find another air car inventor ready to revolutionize the world's industries.

Volume one of what is turning into an Encyclopedia of compressed air inventors--their personal stories with my own opinions thrown in--is now available for anyone who makes a donation of any size. I won't give this one away to anyone who doesn't ask for it. The cost of carrying on this research is substantial, more than I can afford, so I have to be reimbursed for some of it.

My new book is a lot of fun, it's about people, it's about me too since I can't seem to stop injecting my political viewpoints, and it also has technical information about self-fueling air cars, self-filling air tanks, and the like, which has not been included in any of my other books. Not because I was saving it, but because I just learned about it.

Air Car Hall of Fame includes a chapter on one of the most interesting inventors of the early 20th century, Roy J Meyers, and this information is BEGGING to be made into a Hollywood movie. Or a documentary or both.

Lewis C Kiser was once an old man in a Popular Science article, now he is a flesh-and-bones lifelong compressed air fanatic. A family man, a skilled carpenter who passed his skill on to his sons. A very serious inventor.

That mysterious Lee Barton Williams and his unknowable air car are not so mysterious anymore...Read this book!

New discovery due to this research project: William A Rohr might have inspired many other air engine projects. Back then it wasn't about how much air you could get into a tank, it was about how cheaply you could get it in by re-designing the air compressor from scratch!

To get the chapter links, go here:

http://aircaraccess.com/achfbook.htm

Luther

2011-01-05T20:06:00.002-08:00

Cancelling Compression Heat

2011-01-05T20:06:00.001-08:00

Regarding compression heat, there are inventors who have built engine/compressor units that apparently eliminate compression heat beforehand instead of trying to conserve it. Eliminate is the wrong word. The reason the heat is lost is that we start compressing from a baseline of ambient temperature, so all compression heat is subject to loss by dissipation to the cooler surroundings.

The other way is supposed to be this. A tiny squirt of high pressure air in a mass of air about to be compressed might expand and refrigerate the whole thing, so that compressing is done to a cold air mass and the same compression heat now raises the temperature of the air to around ambient. So no radiation of heat.

I don't have time for math right now but in the past I thought I saw this refrigeration happen in a spreadsheet and someone else (a die hard skeptic by the way) agreed. Pressure equalization heats the air being compressed temporarily till thermal equalization is reached. But the very first squirt of high pressure added to a lower pressure air mass makes the receiving air colder for a split second. That is the principle to use to conserve compression heat. Keep the unit at a temperature below or around ambient.

Now where does the energy come from to get this squirt of expansion air? It already exists (regarding piston compressors) in the clearance space of a piston that has just delivered a cylinder full of air to the tank. Improve volumetric efficiency in addition to conserving compression heat by equalizing the small amount of high pressure air in a cylinder that has just reached the end of its stroke, with the ambient air that has just been taken into a cylinder about to start its compression stroke.

Lewis C Kiser had a patent that might apply. Obid M Smith was probably doing something similar in 1937. In regards to turbines, a man named Joseph M Berger had an air car in 1949 that used a turbine engine.

Scott Robertson
Pneumatic Options Research Library
http://www.cannedthunder.blogspot.com

2010-11-14T22:30:00.000-08:00

Meet George Heaton, air car builder

2010-11-04T21:06:00.001-07:00

I want to say a few words about the George Heaton I knew so briefly, in hopes that his family, who knew him so well, will add something, either privately to my email or right here where my readers can see it.

I have been saying for 30 years that George put me on the right track when it came to looking for the best way to run cars with compressed air. Oh yeah, he touched my spirit too but he didn’t have time to solve my problems for me or even convert me to his way of thinking. But when someone touches your spirit you never forget them.

I hope to get some photos of George from other parts of his life, in particular when I knew him in 1980. If you look into the eyes of the 18-year-old George in the photo, maybe you’ll feel some part of what I’m about to say. First I’ll quote his daughter, who said this about him just the other day:

“…glad he changed your life...he did that to more people than anyone will ever know…”

THAT is the book I wanted to write, from the mouth of someone who knows what she is talking about. I met his daughter when I met George, Halloween of 1980. I’ve told the story many times of how he took me aside and gave me just enough information about compressed air cars to permanently hook me on the idea.

My forthcoming book, like my “career” or lifelong hobby as an air car researcher, was inspired by this short meeting with George, as well as two long phone conversations with air car inventor Bill Truitt, and a phone interview with the son of air engine inventor Bob Neal. If not for the assurance of real people who had experience in the field, I would have given up. Because what these men claimed to have done is considered unlikely by fair-minded engineers and impossible by those whose minds are closed.

It wasn’t just what George Heaton told me that made me want to believe him. It was George’s person, his presence. I don’t want to use the word “spirit” too many times in one day or people will think I’m religious about this. I didn’t believe him myself for a long time, but there was a big problem with not believing him: I had met the man, and the man was for real. I have also met pranksters, gangsters and several kinds of con man, know-it-all, sciolists who know everything before having studied it. I have studied personality my whole life. I have studied cults, con artists, and religious fervor. I know the True Believer syndrome inside out.

George Heaton was for real. He had absolutely nothing to sell me. His wife had to talk him into having the conversation with me. He would not tell me his secrets but he was diplomatic and he was being cautious since he didn’t know me. I was a young hippie, he was a serious person, active in the community, and well respected by all who knew him. Why should he tell all in our first conversation? I was too naïve to understand this at the time, and there are other reasons why I didn’t follow up on our converstation, which I won’t go into here.

I don’t want to make this too long, as I tend to go on too long. But here is my general impression of George.

As far as I recall, I only met George twice. I worked with his wife at a book binding shop so I talked to her every day since our desks were next to each other. She was a speed reader, an extremely gracious and sweet person, very sensitive and considerate. She even read a series of five books I liked because I wouldn’t stop talking about them. (The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, beats the pants of Harry Potter). She would remember me as an obsessive young know-it-all, stuck on the same repetitive thoughts, and kind of annoying.

The second time I met George was by accident. He was retired, I think he’d been a Navy officer, and he had the bearing of one. His retirement work was driving a Cadillac he owned and used as a taxi cab. I was walking home from work one day when he passed me in his taxi and offered me a lift to my bus stop. As before, I was impressed with the levelness and calm that I felt from him. I was not surprised to learn in my current research that his father had been a conductor on the railroad; his “bedside manner” betrayed long practice at treating people right.

I’m kind of a Buddhist, or Taoist, and there is this thing called the Middle Way. George was probably a Christian but he would have made a good Buddhist, because he was not extremely this or that, he exuded balance. I’ll try to explain. He was thoughtful without being preoccupied or obsessed. He was intelligent but not a know-it-all. He was well-spoken but didn’t run off at the mouth. He chose his words carefully, but he was not shy. He was cautious but unafraid. He was friendly but not slaphappy. Get the picture? His friends were the same way. I didn’t at that time qualify to call myself his friend, but I wanted to be.

The whole point of my book Air Car Hall of Fame is to respond to the skeptics who say that air cars with compressors on board won’t even get out of the driveway. Here are some quotes from George Heaton, as close as I can remember to his exact words.

“We drove our air cars from coast to coast.”

I asked him if he was claiming that the cars never ran out of air, and he said, “No, I wouldn’t say that exactly.”

The thing he said that has cost me so much money at the library because I have found thousands of pages of evidence that this is possible: “There’s a way to put low pressure air into a high pressure tank.” He thought a little and went on; his wife had coached me to ask no questions or he might clam up: “I don’t remember exactly how we did it, maybe it went into the tank at an angle or something, and there was something about little pulses or spurts instead of a steady stream of air going into the tank.” (I feel that he was being careful but I tend to take people literally and actually believed that he had forgotten how his own invention worked.)

I could go on but I have a book to write and I’d like to talk with his family more before I decide what my approach should be. There are dozens of inventors going into my book, and if I hadn’t met George Heaton there would be none.

Scott Robertson

just stopped in to say hi

2010-10-25T01:39:00.000-07:00

I see there has been some interest in this blog in the past several months while I haven't had time to look at it. I just scanned the contents and decided it should be left as is for people who are serious about thinking through the possibilities. I still believe in the ram pump theory but still haven't studied it. I have more or less finished the research for Air Car Hall of Fame and hope to post the book on my site this year.

Thanks to those who've contributed to the blog with your comments.

Luther

Ram Pumps and Momentum Valves

2010-05-26T22:01:00.001-07:00

Right now I'm interested in the idea of using a ram pump kind of cycle to get air into a tank. I don't have time to go into a study of it yet, but it will be an interesting thing to research.

Just for the sake of conversation, what if Bob Neal's double valve worked like a ram pump? I'm not saying it did, but what if it could be done this way?

The first check valve would be normally open by spring pressure, or held open by a weight, or something. When the air in the drive pipe attains the required momentum, this valve slams shut and the momentum of the air suddenly trapped inside the equalizer changes from kinetic to potential energy and the static pressure of the air rises sharply. Some of the air goes into the tank.

The key to why the ram pump could use a head of water to pump water to a higher head is that only a part of the drive water could be pumped uphill that far. There was also waste water, which wasn't pumped anywhere, it was rejected. But water is incompressible. So if air could work this way, maybe the air that can't be pumped doesn't have to be vented. Because it's compressible, it can be out of the way. Obviously I haven't worked out the details.

The ram pump works by purposely generating water hammer, the sound in the walls when the pipes vibrate for a long time. It goes on and on because resonance in piping is non-dissipative. I think that means that sound waves under resonant conditions are sort of self-sustaining or maybe thermodynamically reversible.

So-called water hammer or resonance in piping can cause failure in compressed air piping. Or in this case, what if we can create it on purpose?

The intake to the equalizer is a momentum valve, that's like a check valve that's normally open. The discharge from equalizer to tank is a normal check valve but expect that the port size and spring weight as well as ball weight will all be part of tuning it to get it to work. I talked to someone who learned how to tune a ram pump once. He said he just had to fiddle with it, turn something a little, a little more, turn something else, then when it works it just keeps on going till something throws it out of adjustment of the flow changes.

I am inspired by the patents of Alexander S Cardella, who apparently designed manually operated pumps that used the ram pump principle so that the pump could deliver to various elevations. I am not clear on any of this as I don't have time to study anything in depth right now till I get my book finished. But it looks like Cardella was able to pump to an unusually high elevation or like Bellocq, pump from above, a greater distance than allowed by Torricelli's Law.

Floyd Neal told me that the equalizer pipe looked like an "extremely long skinny plumb-bob". So a tapered pipe. That makes sense, it would maybe convert pressure to velocity.

Luther

Arm Yourself with Knowledge

2010-05-16T20:51:00.001-07:00

This is a call to arms.

I have testimony from over 100 inventors who claimed to have done, or to know how to do, the so-called impossible with compressed air.

Some of these inventors were just wanna-be’s, exaggerating to attract funding so they could finish their working model.

Some might have been deluded, looking for perpetual motion.

Some might have been committing fraud, lying on purpose.

But it defies the imagination that all of these inventors could have been wrong. They all said that they had a machine that took its power from the air, and some said outright that the machine ran by itself day and night without any energy except what is already in the air.

They all had a goal like this, or even a finished machine, and most of them vigorously denied having any interest in perpetual motion. Some of them were engineers, not wanna-be’s but real engineers who worked with compressed air every day. Mining engineers, air brakes mechanics, railroad engineers. Confederate captains and Union privates, family men who owned businesses as well as two-time losers at the marriage game. It takes all kinds to chase down a dream. From house carpenters to barbers to encyclopedia salesmen, it takes all kinds.

I want you to be the next Henry Ford, the next Galileo, the next Bill Gates: the next world changing, history making billionaire. This is a call to arms. Our success is not guaranteed.

We are bucking the current and need to be armed with real knowledge. There is nothing about swimming upstream that makes us look right to anyone, and no one is going to listen to fancy claims.

We need knowledge, and we need a working model. So we need to work hard.

Any wanna-be can have a dream.

Luther

Level Out the Playing Field

2010-05-10T02:34:00.000-07:00

We think of compressors as taking in ambient temperature air and squeezing it into a smaller volume, while in the process the air gets very hot.

This new idea isn't new, I've been hearing whisperings of it. Inventors hate to tell their secrets but they love to drop hints. Someone said it was the secret purpose of Lee Rogers' puff of 600 psi through the spark plug holes of his converted engine.

I'm not saying it's free to use tank air to refrigerate the air being compressed. That isn't the point.

The point is to conserve compression heat. Normally it's all lost.

The reason it's all lost is that there is a big difference between the hot air inside the compressor cylinder and the ambient temperature outside. Heat wants to move quickly to a colder space when the difference is large like that. It literally walks through walls. Good thing or the compressor would be destroyed.

Too bad about the wasted energy. What if it could be kept in the system? I'm not talking about some cumbersome heat exchange and storage facility. I'm talking about something simple.

When I was doing spreadsheets for pressure equalization, for example filling scuba tanks, I found a seeming anomaly. It is correct, not magic, it's just odd.

When you start filling a low pressure vessel from a high pressure vessel, the first little squirt of air that enters the low pressure vessel LOWERS its pressure because of the extreme expansion producing cold. Very quickly this phase is over and the vessel being filled starts heating up.

This leads to the suggestion that a normal compressor would still work normally if a little leak-size squirt of high pressure air were entering the cylinder during the compression phase of the power stroke. Normally except for one thing. The air leaving the compressor for the tank would be around ambient temperature, maybe slightly warm, but not hot enough to encourage a lot of dissipation to the surroundings. A little insulation on the tank could keep it all in.

I'm not talking about compressing the air by equalization. I learned that the problem with that is a lot of extra air has to be compressed to get the combined mass back into the tank. I'm talking about keeping the temperature fairly even throughout the compression stroke. Not to achieve isothermal compression which is supposedly more efficient; this is true only in certain contexts.

It reminds me of another related concept. If the air leaving the tank is cooling the air that remains in the tank by lowering tank pressure, then that is also a heat sponge that can absorb the heat in the incoming air.

Remember that heat and temperature are not the same thing. I'm talking about air eating heat. Temperature is kept from fluctuating a lot during the compression process. I have an article for my new book in which the inventor said he was doing this--dropping hints, he didn't say how. He drove his air car 9000 miles through 11 states (USA) back in the days before people had been re-educated about compressed air.

Another article I have for the new book states that it is the air leaving the tank, on its way to the engine, that gets the exhaust from the engine back into the tank. Timed pulses in and out; special shapes in the pipe; who knows?

My greatest fear is that no one is trying to build this stuff. Internet chit chat is not the point. Cars that go a long ways or forever between fillups is not the point.

Saving the world from automobiles is the point!

Luther

Cold Eats Temperature; it doesn't Touch Heat

2010-04-29T00:38:00.000-07:00

TRYING TO GROK BILL TRUITT'S AIR CAR DESIGN

This is just a quick note, hope it's not too confusing. My brain is stirring itself too fast to come to conclusions right now.

The idea is to take into account what air is and how it works, then stay with the real nature of air and do something it wants done with it. Squeezing it into a tank and throwing away the resulting heat is a big favor to the electric company but it does nothing to favor the potential of air.

Compressing air for free is not the idea. Compressing air without high net temperature is the idea. Do any amount of work compressing air and then keep all that heat in the system. A circuit of 1000 psi air is set in motion, that is all. Truitt: "It's all high pressure."

A "constant pressure reserve" (Neal) is a fluid flywheel. The reason Neal used 28 compressing cylinders might be that he was pushing up to 225 psi in a single stroke. The reason conventional compressors can't do that is they have only a few cylinders, they're using useless crank angles against a perfect spring (compressed air)!

"It works because the car is already moving." (Truitt) You're not compressing air without work; you're working as hard as necessary and then conserving all the work plus added ambient heat.

COLD EATS TEMPERATURE, NOT HEAT.

Cold is not the opposite of heat. Heat is energy, and there is no such thing as the opposite of energy. You can't get rid of energy, but you can hide heat by putting it into a cold sink so it won't want to dissipate.

"Compress air in the pipe, in the tank, not in the compressor." (me)

I have a sketch I didn't have time to scan, showing a 2000 psi tank feeding air to a 1000 psi circuit, as needed, to keep the pressure in the circuit steady at 1000 psi. A moving weight (car) runs hydraulic air pumps which can make 1000 psi like cutting butter on a hot day. This comes in at a T into the circuit, with a possible venturi effect(?). Downstream is a 1000 psi tank. Inside the tank, the circuit discharges through a double check valve. Air is taken from the 1000 psi tank to run the car (if expanded from 1000 to 150 psi, and run through a passive heat exchanger, the atmosphere will contribute to recouping that loss). If the pressure tries to go over 1000 psi in this tank, air leaves through a safety valve and goes back into the circuit, which lowers the draft on the 2000 psi storage tank.

What makes this 1000 psi circuit move is heat added between the two check valves in the 1000 psi tank. The setting on the discharge check is tensioned to keep the pressure in the equalizer till the space between the check valves reaches a much higher pressure than 1000, then the equalizer contents all blast into the tank at once. There is your cold sink, and that should make the whole circuit move.

MORE DISORGANIZED NOTES

The heat of compression is completely conserved by pumping into a cold space. It can't dissipate. The cold space is created by HEAT--the wheel pumps push hot air into a partial suction which is cold because of wind chill (Bernoulli's Law).

The Kadenacy effect of 1000 psi suddenly blasting out of the equalizer should be EXTREME and refrigerating.

The admission of ambient air and its internal energy into the tank plus the production of a cold space for the compression heat to hide in kills two birds with one stone. The check valve pump uses high pressure air e.g. 1000 psi to pull at the compressor cylinders. The purpose of the check valve pump isn't to pump air as such, but to generate a cold space or partial suction for the pump to discharge into.

A cold sponge will absorb heat from different sources and the output is only slightly warm, so normal insulation will conserve it all. Math still has to be used to confirm any of this thought experiment.

1. Ambient heat is already in the intake air going into the compressor.
2. Compression heat is added to the air by hydraulic air pumps which raise it to a very high pressure.
3. Electric heaters add more heat to the compressor output air, and Truitt's special heartlike valve is a double check that generates a suction for the pumps to work against. The hot air enters the very cold suction in the equalizer and all the heat is folded into the circuit, only slightly warm, but heat and temperature are not the same thing.

Still not getting that book put together, I don't have time for this blog...

Luther

Interviews with Bill Truitt

2010-04-25T19:59:00.000-07:00

(first written from telephone notes in 1986, most recently augmented in April 2010
Bill Truitt died in 1989)

After more than six years of collecting information on compressed air and air cars, I sat down with my files to start putting a book together. In going through what I thought at the time was the a vast array of research findings in my collection, I ran into some flyers that a friend had sent me, which described the work of Willard "Bill" Truitt of McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. Bill Truitt was a retired designer and builder of race cars. He had also invented a flamethrower and a wind-indicator for artillery during World War II, and had a career in radio broadcasting.

I had first heard of Bill Truitt's Pneumatic Electric Air Car when I read a book on alternative cars, Auto Engines of Tomorrow by Harris Edward Dark, a technical writer. H. E. Dark included a paragraph on Truitt's air car towards the end of his book, but said nothing about how far the car could go between fill-ups. I always assumed that, since the car used electric pumps to make its fuel or part of its fuel, it would only be able to go a few miles before running out of air. This is what an engineer would tell you on first thought, and most engineers would refuse to give it a second thought. One time I had gotten Bill’s phone number from Information but never called him. I saw no reason to research designs based on hope that perpetual motion might be found in compressed air. For years I'd been looking for practical ways to increase the efficiency of compressed air used in motors, and ignored any theory or claim that seemed to contradict the accepted laws of thermodynamics.

So on March 30, 1986, when I decided to go ahead and call Bill Truitt, in case I had anything to learn from him, I almost forgot to have a pencil along for taking notes. When Bill started talking about his sixty-six years of off-and-on experimentation with air cars, I was surprised to find myself writing as fast as I could, trying to get every concept down, and wondering why I even cared about recording what I thought had to be exaggerations.

But as Bill continued to spontaneously reel off what sounded like a description of a real machine, I felt more and more strongly that I wasn't talking to a con man. There was no pushy come-on, nothing for sale. He openly admitted that his air car did what engineers thought to be impossible, and I felt he was trying to inform me if I wanted to learn, but he wasn't trying to convince me of anything. He urged me to call him regularly, build something small first, and he would talk me through the tough spots. Unfortunately I only called him twice, and that is my fault. He was very courteous at all times and although he was considered a colorful character in McKees Rocks, he was not a liar or a con man.

The only time I thought Bill 's answers ware vague was when I asked about the laws of physics. His explanation of "how he got around the Law" was that his system comprised three separate units—engine, compressor and electrical charging system—whose separateness somehow made possible the anomaly of a car filling its own tanks on the fly. I didn’t understand his separateness principle at the time, but after many years of trying to devise a self-filling air tank I would guess that he meant the car was easy to design and build without a lot of engineering because the main component categories within the design functioned independently of each other. For example, by not putting his air engine and his main compressor on the same crankshaft, he ended up having a lot of flexibility. One component could be adjusted for speed or some other parameter without throwing everything else off. Wanting to combine every known advantge into one Rube Goldbergesque component is a beginner’s mistake, the wanna-be inventor’s ego trip. Bill had three main systems that didn’t depend on each other’s characteristics in order to function properly. Bill’s “keep ‘em separate” principle has been very instructive for me.

Another explanation Truitt offered was that "it isn't horsepower", though he didn't know what else to call It. He responded positively to my suggestion that maybe It was torque, since air cars—like steam cars—transmit torque more effectively than gas cars, and therefore can get more out of an engine that is smaller in terms of its power rating. However the highly advantageous torque characteristic of air engines isn’t enough to explain self-filling air tanks.

Another place Truitt indicated I could look for explanations was in his leakproof valve, without which he said the car couldn't work. After all these years I still don’t know what to make of Truitt's valve. He sent me a picture of an ordinary spool valve, a control valve on an engine cylinder. But his statement that his secret valve "works like a heart" tells me that it might be some kind of two-stage pump that injects pulses of air into a circuit of moving fluid. This makes me think of Bob Neal’s equalizer valve, a double check valve. The heart is a double check valve, with flexible chamber walls that themselves do the pumping.

If you look into the compressor he used, a three-stage compressor pump 13-1/2 inches square, and the power required to run it fast enough to fill up three welding cylinders in 14 minutes to 5000 psi (as per Truitt’s claim), this kind of task cannot be done by two car batteries! It might take a dozen car batteries to run such a compressor. So it’s likely that the valve did something to lower the resistance of the tank air so that the compressor could run fast without having the normal amount of work to do. Remember, it’s the ambient heat entering the system that provides the pool of thermal energy for all this work to take place.

Bob Neal’s equalizer and the “heart like a valve” that Bill Truitt would not describe further led me into an unusual research finding. Another air car inventor had said he got his idea for the self-filling air tank or whatever he did from the famous pilot Charles A Lindbergh who was forced to invent something mid-flight to solve a fuel reserve problem. I haven’t found the reference to this event yet, but while looking for it I learned that one of Lindbergh’s obsessive interests was a glass pump he invented for the culture of living tissue. The device would hold a liver or heart or whatever in a chamber which would be supplied with fresh nutrient fluid through its artery by pulsations of compressed air. The device was called an “artificial heart” by the press, and it included another chamber comprising two check valves that was called an “equalizer”.

Another interesting device I’ve learned about is the pulse fuel pump. This device has liquid fuel on one side of a diaphragm and pulsations from the engine’s crankcase or intake manifold on the other. Two check valves in the fuel line on either side of the pump create a positive flow in one direction with no other power than the existing pulse from elsewhere in the system.

As for Bill Truitt’s pairs of hydraulic air pumps, I ignored that hint till recently because I wished he had not used hydraulic anything! I have finally seen the light and tried to learn what kind of pump this is, and I can’t find any such thing on the market. Sure there are lots of patents, but is there one you can buy? I don’t know yet. Other air car inventors have hinted at some anomaly in the difference between air and hydraulics that opens a door to super-efficiency if you combine them. Especially Jerry Coren of Bronson, Florida who claims outright that there is an overunity effect of some kind. Other inventors that thought highly of combining hydraulics and pneumatics included Kevin Brainard, Samuel David Todd, and others.

So I thought about it, and I think there’s a real advantage to pumping air into a tank with hydraulic pressure. I don’t see any overunity in it, but for cars it might be very helpful in keeping the equipment compact and adding flexibility. The notion is this. Air is compressible, hydraulic fluid is incompressible. The next thought is this. Piston rods are heavy and more or less breakable. Imagine pushing an air piston with fluid pressure instead. If the hydraulic piston and the air piston are on a common shaft, the hydraulic piston could probably be the diameter of the rod only, because higher pressures are common in hydraulics so the smaller piston will push with the same force as a larger air piston at pressures commonly used in pneumatics.

But the main idea is this. When the compressor piston is being pushed by hydraulic pressure, its resistance through the first ¾ or so of the stroke is constantly increasing. To a piston rod that means increasing, uneven stress; to hydraulic fluid it would, in my opinion, actually work in favor of getting the compression stroke done. I’m saying that, for the sake of brainstorming only, it seems like increased resistance in the air cylinder would push back on the hydraulic cylinder. Hydraulic fluid is incompressible, so any push on it that succeeded it moving the piston backward should cause the hydraulic pressure to tend to go up. I wouldn’t say this amounts to overunity because that would be against the law, and anyway, the air will not succeed in pushing the piston backward. But what it means is that a hydraulic push on an air cylinder should be absolutely invincible and very flexible compared to doing the same thing with a crankshaft and a piston rod. I have nothing against piston rods, it’s the associated bearings, guides, lubrication and especially the crankshaft that we could all live without. So in spite of my not liking hydraulic fluid, I do like the idea of a hydraulic air pump.

The reason I don’t like hydraulic fluid is that every drop of it that’s ever sold will find its way back to the earth where it came from. So why not leave the petroleum in the ground, if at all possible, instead of getting it dirty and then dripping it back on the ground anyway?

An engineer told me that water is the best hydraulic fluid, but only if it is perfectly clean. Moving around inside erodable machinery the water will not stay clean long, but it might be worth a try. In the field of irrigation there is a very large machine, half the length of a cornfield, called the “pivot system”. This is a big long pipe connected with a swivel fitting to the well, which is at the center of the pipeline’s radial sweep. The sections of the pipe are each supported on steel frameworks mounted on wheels, and the wheels move very slowly so that the entire pipe pivots around the well and covers the whole field with water in one slow revolution. The work of making the wheels turn is done by a water motor, one for each set of wheels. So the pumped water that irrigates the field also makes the huge apparatus rotate around in a bumpy, muddy cornfield. The hydraulic pressure is so great that if one set of wheels gets stuck in the mud and the farmer tries to override the safety “off for trouble” feature by holding his thumb on the ON button, the water motors will bend the huge pipe and tear it in half.

So hydraulic power can be silently unstoppable, depending on the situation, and I think we should look seriously at using it to compress air. This might have been part of Truitt’s secret.

The other clue Bill gave me in response to my annoying repetitious requests for lawful explanations was that the key was in how once the wheels are going, you have the whole momentum of the car to tap into. Once again, a statement I didn’t appreciate at the time, but have since come to respect as enlightening to a certain degree.

It makes us take a closer look at what makes a car roll and what makes a car stop. I’ve gone into detail on that in Compressed Air Power Secrets, but here I’ll just mention that Detroit has us completely bamboozled with hundreds of horsepower, to the point that we have forgotten our instinct about wheels, which is that they make it easy to move heavy things. My main point here is that any heavy thing that is pushed to make it start and then continues for a ways under its own momentum is like a flywheel: its motion or kinetic energy is a way of storing work that has already been done. Bill was adamant that there was an advantage to the fact that “the car was already moving” and I could tell that he was trying to get through to me about something. Another air car inventor came right out and said that his system would not work in a stationary application. And air car inventor Obid M Smith came right out and said that a car is running on momentum almost half the time! So you see, it’s not so much about overunity or proving science wrong, as it is not taking for granted that things have to be done as the status quo would have us continue to do things. Everything has to be questioned and looked at upside-down and backwards.

Bill Truitt said that his system was easy enough to design once he learned how air worked. How does air work? It’s about energy. Is this “pressure energy” we’re talking about? No, pressure is not energy. Air compressors convert work into heat, and air engines convert heat into work. Even that simple statement, if literally interpreted, would throw a roomful of engineers into a tizzy of denial, but the math doesn’t deny it and the textbooks prove it: compressed air power is heat energy manipulated through time. I believe there is a strong likelihood that compression heat must be conserved in order to make a system go overunity. Bill’s air tanks were lined with cork to conserve heat. At elbows in piping, where the air would encounter a pressure loss, Bill wrapped the pipe with an electric heating pad. He mentioned this more than once, it seemed to be important to him. Why are there so many companies these days doing consulting on how to make your compressed air installation run more efficiently? Because the difference between air used stupidly and air used smartly is big. Not we just need to up the effort and use air ingeniously.

Inventor Obid M Smith also said that he had a way of keeping his system at a more or less constant temperature. Think about it. Instead of trying to capture compression heat, which isn’t easy, isn’t there some way to prevent high temperatures to begin with? I didn’t say prevent compression heat, that’s impossible; I said prevent high temperatures. I haven’t gotten this research underway yet, but compressed air is a refrigerant. If the air is 10 degrees below zero when it enters the compressor, its temperature when it comes out of the compressor is going to be that much less and that much less likely to escape. The only reason heat escapes from the system when air is compressed is that the high differential of ambient temperature and compressor temperature makes the heat flow fast into the cooler surroundings. Some say that this is how Leroy Rogers’ 4-cycle air engine worked.

It’s just something to think about.

The components I describe below are the ones Bill used in one or more of the three vehicles he converted to run on compressed air.

His first air car, which he built in 1920, had started life as a Stanley Steamer, and Bill gave it an air engine made from a motorcycle engine. He also converted a Buick Skylark and a Rolls-Royce. Though all of these cars were self-fueling to some degree, his designs improved over the years till held gotten it "pretty well whipped" from 1974-1980.

For an engine, Bill recommends a two- or three-cylinder refrigeration compressor from a large refrigerator truck. He replaced the steel piston rings with neoprene rings, which he said would last 60,000-80,000 miles. I tried this, converting a compressor to an engine, and had a machinist make new grooves on the pistons for big neoprene O-rings. The rings never gave me any problem.

Bill said his engine could be installed in 35 minutes. The special valve could be changed in 30 minutes. The engine ran on 86-125 psi. The car was so fast it was scary to drive; Bill once had it up to 136 mph. (Remember he had been in the race car business.) It was extremely powerful and accelerated too quickly for someone used to driving gasoline cars, so Bill put a limiter on it so it couldn't go over 55 mph. The engine drove the axle through a turbine clutch, a hydraulic drive invented by a friend of his that slips at speeds up to 300 rpm. I think this was a fluid coupling, which works like a torque converter. A closed housing containing hydraulic fluid has two fanlike rotors in it which face each other but do not touch. The input shaft turns one rotor, and after it gets above the slipping speed, the hydraulic fluid turns the other rotor which turns the output shaft. It gave his car perfectly smooth starting so the high torque available from the air engine wouldn’t alarm the driver.

Top engine speed was about 1200 rpm. The engine used air non-expansively, that is, the air entered the cylinder throughout almost the whole piston stroke and still had pressure in it when it was exhausted, like a commercial air motor. When I asked him why he didn’t use a closed cycle or expansion air engine, he said it wasn’t necessary. This is the “work smart early” principle in which you must not go into energy debt with an expensive, conventional air compressing machine and then expect a real nifty air engine to pull you out of the poorhouse at the last minute so you can achieve overunity. The best air engine for cars is non-expansive because it is very small and extremely torquey, but without a special way to compress the air such a thing would be much too wasteful. A good compromise is partial expansion, but for every bit of expansion you have to make your engine bigger to get the same amount of power, so there are diminishing returns involved in expansion engines for a vehicle as small as a car.

The engine did not idle. It went right in front of the differential. The compressor was the heart of the machine. It went under the bood where the gas engine had once been. It was run by a 24 volt DC motor which got its power from two 12 volt car batteries which were charged by two automotive alternators, which were run by pulleys from the engine shaft. The compressor was three-stage, capable of pumping the car's three "acetylene-sized" tanks up to 5000 psi in 14 minutes, but in practice it was used to fill them to only 2000 psi. I’m pretty sure this performance from a 13-1/2 inch square compressor would be impossible if he hadn’t altered the compressor cycle or augmented it in some secret way. His valve probably had something to do with it.

A pressure switch would turn the compressor on when the pressure in the tanks got down to 1000, 1250, or 1500 psi, depending on terrain. In hillier driving, the compressor came on more often, with the pressure switch set to maintain a higher minimum tank pressure. The Mako compressor he used cost him about $1600 at the time (1970s). It ran at about half the speed of the engine, and only about a tenth of the time the car was running.

There has to be some significance to the fact that he never let the pressure go below 1000 to 1500 psi. The secret valve might have been driven by high pressure air straight out of the tank—not regulated down to the low pressure that the engine used—and who knows exactly what it was used for, but the point is that if it was used to do any work at all, that is more than a typical regulator system would allow for. Here are some possibilities. A short spurt of high pressure air could have been used as a refrigerant to both raise the pressure and lower the temperature of incoming air before it was compressed. There could have been some kind of mixing going on. The high pressure air could have been used in any sensible way, we will probably never know. Jets aimed at each other can generate high temperatures—just get busy and dream it up, we aren’t really trying to figure out exactly what these inventors did, we are just letting them inspire us.

In my interview with air car builder George Heaton, he had made a point to mention that his car had tanks at two levels of pressure: a storage tank at about 1000 psi, and a drive tank at a lower pressure. On the other hand, Bill said, “It’s all high pressure.” Oddly enough, he never mentioned a low pressure tank. Either there wasn’t one, or it was so essential that it was secret and he didn’t want to talk about it. What if it was a big heat exchanger? Does he have any grandchildren out there who can try to get these questions answered? Or maybe the US Army will send me a set of plans so I can sleep better at night.

Truitt used several small worm-drive hydraulic air pumps. These pumps were easy to replace, as they slid onto a shaft run by the differential’s ring gear. These pumps put air “directly into the main tanks” at all times while the car was running. More pumps were required in mountainous terrain, the maximum being 10-12. Because it seems unlikely to me that these pumps could put air into 1000 psi tanks, some possibilities are suggested: maybe the pumps were so strongly built that the hydraulic power literally pushed the air all the way into the tanks, either in one stage, or else maybe the pumps were two stages or the pairs of pumps were used in a series somehow. In mountainous terrain he had to keep a higher pressure in the tanks, which is itself a clue, but it might just be because air has less power per volume at higher elevations. The pumps apparently came in pairs, I don’t know what he meant by that. At that time I didn’t know what questions to ask. The pairing might have been referring to a hydraulic pump and air pump in each unit. Or it might have been a two-stage system, run very slowly by means of the worm gear, to get up to tank pressure. Or even more radical: maybe the hydraulic air pumps were just hydraulic pumps, all piped into a central reservoir, and the power taken out of there to operate the compressor hydraulically. With the electrical kicking on only when needed. That is actually my newest idea.

Still more possibilities: the secret valve was used to get low pressure into high. Or the high pressure air refrigerated the air being compressed. There are so many details known about Truitt’s design, but so many unknown, that we can only get frustrated trying to guess what he did. The point is to use his information as a springboard to your own unique design.

When I asked if I could visit him in McKees Rocks, Bill changed the subject and started talking about harrassment he’d gotten from the powers that be, including oil companies and car makers. He said the Japanese car companies had sent spies to accost his friends and try to get his secrets out of them. The U.S. car companies had his phone tapped. Finally to stop this harrassment he sold the car and the right to make the car to the U.S. Army and NASA, for a 0.1% royalty for himself or his heirs. The Army has built air powered tanks, jeeps and a helicopter using Truitt's designs. The helicopter was only able to get 50 feet off the ground. Bill said the Army generals who are working to develop air powered weaponry have decided that the public isn't ready for cars that have an unlimited range between fill-ups with no cost for fuel. He thought it would hurt the auto and oil companies too much if air cars were introduced now, and wanted to give the U.S. automakers a chance to catch up with Japan so Japan wouldn’t corner the air car market. He dreamed of a future where we could have Chrysler air cars, Ford air cars, etc. Bill was satisfied to let the revelation of his secrets happen at the government's pace. The Army was supposed to build a model air car for the automakers to copy. He’s told me in writing and over the phone, when I asked for the whole truth, "The rest is Top Secret."

When Bill Truitt was about 17 years old, he built his first air car with his father's help. His father owned a service station in Huntington, West Virginia where they lived at the time. When the car worked, Bill's father asked him to keep it quiet, because it might hurt business if word got out. Although there have been times when he was getting sacks full of mail wanting to know about air cars, somehow Bill did what all air car inventors have done, and took his secret with him to the grave.

Scott Robertson

Nitpicking Ambient Air’s Contribution to Compressed Air's Energy

2010-04-21T20:46:00.000-07:00

In my last post I brought up what looked like a contradiction in Simon’s book which, if it was really a contradiction, might raise doubts about the use of ambient heat as an energy source. Here are the two quotes again:

First quote:

It may be asked: What becomes of the energy contributed by the atmospheric air toward compression and delivery…? This energy is actually stored up in the compressed air when the latter leaves the compressor. It could do useful work if it were practicable to exhaust the air from the engine into a vacuum. But since we must exhaust against atmospheric pressure, the energy is consumed in the process of exhaustion and is therefore not available for useful work. It is not included in the formulas expressing power to be furnished by the compressor because it is furnished gratis by the atmosphere; and it is not included in the formulas expressing the useful work which a volume of compressed air can perform, because it is not available for such work.

Second quote:

The answer to the question, why energy still remains in the compressed air after all the heat of compression has been dissipated, is that a certain capacity for work resides in the air which is due to the latter’s ability to expand when the proper conditions prevail.

Such conditions could be brought about by confining a volume of atmospheric air in a cylinder under a piston and then create a partial vacuum on the other side of the piston; the atmospheric air in the cylinder would expand and push out the piston, that is, perform work. But creating a vacuum requires extra work, and is therefore not of practical application in air engines.

As a matter of fact, after all the heat generated during compression of a volume of air has been dissipated, the compressed air possesses no more energy than it did before compression, but part of the energy which it did possess has, by mechanical compression, been made available for doing useful work.

To do work, however, the air requires energy in the form of heat and while expanding, it consumes heat that was contained in its mass before compression. As a consequence the temperature of the expanded air falls below that of the surrounding atmosphere. The amount of heat consumed is equivalent to the amount of work performed and equal to the amount of heat that would be generated in compressing this air from the pressure at which it exhausts from the air engine to the pressure at which it enters the same.

The consumption of heat from the mass of the expanding air is manifested by the cold created in and around the cylinders of an engine using air expansively. Theoretically this is exactly the reverse of the generation of heat in the air cylinders of a compressor.

To summarize:
• First quote:
o “…the energy [negative work of intake during compressor’s cycle] is consumed in the process of exhaustion and is therefore not available for useful work…”

• Second quote:
o “…why energy still remains in the compressed air after all the heat of compression has been dissipated, is that a certain capacity for work resides in the air which is due to the latter’s ability to expand when the proper conditions prevail…”

The key to it is that the two quotes are referring to different things, so they are not contradictory.

Count the number of times the word “heat” occurs in the second quote: 8 times. In the first quote: 0 times. The word “temperature” occurs once in the second quote, but 0 in the first. So that is the first clue and I’ll try to expand on it.

Also the first quote can be illustrated with a PV diagram and the second can’t. They’re not the same topics of discussion. In the first quote, reference is being made to a compressor and an air engine cycle, and the abstraction is made that the negative work of one cancels out the negative work of the other. The air left in the tank by the compressor is not mentioned. But that air is the main topic of the second quote.

I would also take exception with the abstraction which Simons offers, in which the negative work load of compressor doesn’t contribute to the work done by the system because its potential contribution is canceled out by the negative work contribution of the air engine. The compressor’s intake is supposedly used to overcome the air engine’s exhaust against the back pressure of atmosphere. While he has spotted a definite pattern between the PV diagram of the compressor and that of the engine, I don’t see his conclusion, for a few reasons.

1. The negative work of the air compressor is already cancelled out in the compression process so isn’t available to be invoked in the air engine. The compressor shaft is already under power from an outside source when the intake stroke begins, and the tendency of the intake air to contribute to the work of pushing the piston as if it was a piston in an air motor already uses the negative work or positive contribution of the intake air. I don’t think you can use it twice.
2. The compressor and engine, unless one is operated by the other, don’t directly influence each other. One doesn’t know that the other exists.
3. There’s nothing to say that the contribution of the compressor’s intake is ever going to see the inside of an air engine. The two are completely separate. Does that mean that, in such a case, the compressor works differently? No, the two don’t plan for each other one way or the other.

The second quote isn’t really about the compressor work, it is about the work that the air in a tank can do; but not necessarily do in an engine. It’s about the heat content of the air, whether you use it to drive an air engine or blow the sawdust off your jeans.

Back to the first quote, I wonder if this is what motivates those who design air engines with pressure on one side of the piston and suction on the other. They claim the gain offsets the investment but I don’t know why it would.

That’s it for now, I’ll keep thinking about it.

The main point of this discussion is to take this blog back to where it should have started: with the basics. I’ve been using this chapter from Simons for years and only now have properly gone through it and checked his logic. I see nothing wrong with anything he said or with his proofs regarding his main points.

Luther

proof that compressed air is solar energy

2010-04-19T00:09:00.000-07:00

I need to move this blog to a place where formatting tools are provided so I don’t have to send people to download the version that looks right. In the meantime, here is the URL so you can read the correctly formatted version:

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-DQiVAbbA7WNTA1MWE1YmUtMzQ4Yy00ZjNiLTkwYzktYjY2OWEyN2JkMWVi&hl=en

The associated spreadsheet is at this URL:

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-DQiVAbbA7WNzU4ZDZkY2ItM2IyYy00OTA3LTkyMzctNWEzNTc0YzA1YjE1&hl=en

Regarding the controversial “lost information” that compressed air can be manipulated to make free energy available. When dreamers and doers come together to shout at each other in the heat of mutual intolerance, they should remember these things so their conversation has some hope of having something to do with compressed air:

The three-part assertion is this:

1. All compression work is lost as heat. (CONTROVERSIAL)
2. After cooling, compressed air still has pressure to expand and do work. (ACCEPTED)
3. This availability of usable energy is accounted for by the fact that the air contained thermal energy before it was compressed. (CONTROVERSIAL)

It is not the textbook writers who find points 1 & 3 above to be doubtful; it is the uneducated including engineers and sciolists who assume they know something about compressed air but are, in reality, effectively uneducated as to compressed air theory in regards to points 1 & 3 above.

1. All compression work is lost as heat.
The wording of the first part of the assertion is critical. It says “compression work”, not “the compressor’s work”. The compressor’s work has three parts: intake, compression, and delivery. It is the compression work—not the intake work or the work of delivering air into the tank—that is, according to the assertion, all lost as heat. “Compression work” (NOT “the compressor’s work”) is the work required to squeeze the air into a smaller volume. During compression work, the compressor cylinder is closed. Nothing is entering or leaving the cylinder. In adiabatic compression, not even heat is entering or leaving the cylinder. The piston is moving; the cylinder is getting smaller. The air is being squeezed. The heat is spontaneous; if the piston were to change direction, allowing the air to expand, the temperature would go down just as spontaneously, just as instantaneously.

So what happens to the work done to draw atmosphere into the compressor’s intake, and what happens to the work done to push the air into the tank at constant pressure?

INTAKE WORK is negative work. It can’t be lost because it is work not done, work canceled. The crankshaft is already moving and atmosphere rushes in behind the moving piston because of its positive pressure, canceling or making up for the work done to keep the crankshaft going around during intake.

DELIVERY WORK is positive work. It is done with the downstream valve open and air flowing out of the cylinder against constant tank pressure. This is the simplified version, assuming that the tank pressure isn’t going up since an equal amount of air is going out of the tank and down the pipe to be used in the air engine. So what is happening to the delivery work? First let’s picture this: imagine there is no air leaving the tank. So the delivery is not at constant pressure, it is at increasing pressure.

Wrong. The compression all takes place inside the cylinder with the valve closed. If tank pressure is ever higher than cylinder pressure, the valve closes. So that scenario is not valid: the delivery part of the power stroke cannot take place against an increasing resistance. Only when cylinder pressure overtakes tank pressure can the air leave the cylinder to enter the tank.

OK, so what happens to the delivery work? The textbook says that it is displacement air, it takes the place of air leaving the tank. At this point I don’t know. But I think it’s important, because depending on the pressure and other factors, delivery work can be more than compression work. The book states firmly that this amount is recovered by a chain of displacement through the system. In reference to air engines.

Just remember that the process of compression is the squeezing of air; the work of an air compressor is more complicated than that, so the two must be dealt with distinctly by theorists.

2. After cooling, compressed air still has pressure to expand and do work.

Nobody argues against this. The fact that the sciolist and the engineer who is uneducated on these points will agree readily with point 2 and aggressively deny points 1 & 3 just means that these folks feel that the letters after their names make them omniscient. My viewpoint is that because point 2 is true, points 1 & 3 must be true. But the untapped potential of air cannot speak for itself. Other than weather patterns which are like the forest we can’t see for the trees, it is not obvious to anyone that air carries solar energy; that compressed air in a tank contains none of the compressor’s invested energy. To assume the opposite is natural and therefore commonplace. In our society, the majority rules, and to hell with the math; John Doe, BS, didn’t get his BS for free and he is not going to concede on any point as long as he still has a student loan to pay off. That’s the math he really cares about. It’s personal.

By the time the motivating factors for his early arrogance—the costs of education—become a non-issue, he is a grizzled veteran and nobody questions the craggy mystique of the career’d.

Of course the real winners of that game are the banks, and John Doe, BS and all, is just another puppet, full of himself and thriving in the suburbs, unheralded champion of a fourth mortgage.

3. This availability of usable energy is accounted for by the fact that the air contained thermal energy before it was compressed.

Try getting a skeptic to address, with compressed air math, the fact that the air already contained thermal energy before it was compressed. They won’t do it because they don’t know how. Where is that energy now that the air has been compressed into a tank and cooled? I don’t know what answer they will give because no skeptic has yet faced up to that question or honestly tried to answer it. They will always change the subject, bring up laws and principles and generalizations and accusations that don’t apply, in order to avoid the specific question.

As Simons states in his textbook, the compressor no more put the energy into the air stuffed into a cooled-off air tank than Hoover Dam built itself and put water behind itself. The dam, like the compressor and tank, was built and arranged to be filled by people, and the water, like the air in the tank, was instilled with usable energy by the heat of the sun.

THE MATHEMATICAL PROOF THAT ALL COMPRESSION WORK IS LOST AS HEAT

I can’t stress enough that there are three parts to a compressor’s work, and the part we’re talking about here is the part where the air is trapped in a closed cylinder with a moving piston making its pressure go up while its volume goes down.

That is the work that becomes heat and is all lost by the time the final product is cooled and sitting in a tank.

If we know the initial pressure and volume of air that is going to be compressed, and we know the pressure it will be compressed to, the final volume can be found using the adiabatic equation. Adiabatic compression is when the heat of compression stays in the air, and it is appropriate here because it keeps the system’s energy isolated from outside influences and it produces the maximum possible heat that an air compressor will put into air without having a fire built under it.

Follow along in the Simons textbook and/or the spreadsheet if you want, as the example used is the same. If you know nothing about compressed air math, study Part One of my book Compressed Air Power Secrets, 3rd Edition.

V2/V1 = (P1/P2)1/n

Here the adiabatic equation tells us that as the volume of air is decreased by any method, its pressure increases. The equation also tells us that the process is inverse in general—pressure goes up while volume goes down—but not exactly inversely proportional. If you push air into half its original space, its pressure goes up less than double. The exponent “1/n” defines to what extent the relationship is not exactly inversely proportional.

The index n is the fingerprint of air. Its use in the adiabatic equation is what pinpoints the amount of heat that is generated, and it has been known for maybe 150 years that for air, this index is equal to about 1.406 for adiabatic conditions. Adiabatic condition means no heat exchange with the surroundings.

This is only one way to arrange the adiabatic equation. By simple algebra we can solve it for final volume:

V2 = V1(P1/P2)1/n

We are going to consider the case of compressing one pound of sea level atmosphere from 0 gauge pressure to 75 psig. That’s 14.7 absolute pressure (psia) and 89.7 psia. Ambient conditions will be set at 60° F which is 521° absolute temperature. At this temperature at sea level, one pound of air occupies 13.09 cubic feet. To find the final volume after compressing to 89.7 psia, substitute values into the formula:

V2 = 13.09(14.7/89.7)0.71
V2 = 3.62 cubic feet

Now that we know both initial and final values for both pressure and volume, the adiabatic work equation tells us theoretically how much work is required in the compression of the pound of air. Remember this is not all that a compressor does, but the work of compression during PV change only, while P is getting bigger and V is getting smaller. The adiabatic work equation for the compression phase of a compressor’s work:

W1 = 144(P2V2 - P1V1)/(n -1)

P2V2 is the final energy condition of the air, after compression. P1V1 is the initial energy condition before compression. P2V2 - P1V1 is the difference between the two, which is the basis for the work input by the compressor, the energy added to the intake air by pushing it into a smaller space. But not the whole story. “n - 1” corrects that value to take into account the effect of adiabatic heat buildup. The conversion factor 144 changes the result to ft-lbs since pressure is being stated in psi or pounds per square inch. To get the result to read out correctly in ft-lbs of work, the conversion factor 144 is needed to change the pressure to psf or pounds per square foot.

Substitute values into the formula:

W1 = 144(89.7*3.62 - 14.7*13.09)/0.406
W1 = 46806 ft lbs

Depending on how much rounding off takes place, the result varies by one or two hundred ft-lbs, which is no more than six thousandths of a horsepower if the work is done in one minute. Also the natural constants such as n = 1.406, the absolute zero, and the specific heat capacities of air, are not known exactly. That’s why a slightly different result is to be expected depending on who does the calculations and where they round off their results.

Using another version of the adiabatic equation, we can find out how hot the air got during the compression work:

T2 = T1(P2/P1)(n-1/n)

Initial temperature was 521° F abs, so substitute values to find the final temperature:

T2 = 521(89.7/14.7)0.29
T2 = 878.45° F abs

The added temperature due to compression:

T2 - T1 = 878 - 521
T2 - T1 = 357° F.

This adds up to saying that it takes about 47,000 ft-lbs of work to raise the temperature of 1 pound of air 357 degrees by mechanically squeezing the molecules closer together.

But what if we were to heat the same air directly instead of heating it by compression? Use the same temperature differential for 1 pound of air:

BTUs req'd = Cv(T2 - T1)
ft-lbs req'd BTUs * 778

The thermal unit or British Thermal Unit (BTU) is a measurement of thermal energy. One BTU equals 778 ft-lbs of energy or work. Cv is the work required to raise the temperature of one pound of air one degree Fahrenheit. Its value is 0.1689 and it is part of air’s index n:

n = Cp/Cv = 0.2375/0.1689
n = 1.406

Air’s index “n” is thus the ratio of maximum work needed to compress air (adiabatic compression) to the minimum work needed to compress air (isothermal).

Substituting values to find the BTUs and ft-lbs required to do the same heating job with heat instead of compression:

BTUs req'd = 0.1689 * 357 = 60.3 BTUs
ft-lbs req'd = 60.3 * 778 = about 47,000 ft-lbs when rounded off

Without any rounding off and using the most accurate values I have for the natural constants, the work done by compression takes 46,805.84 ft-lbs, and by direct heating the work done on the same pound of air is 46,970.15 ft-lbs. The difference in the results is five thousandths of a horsepower if the work is done in one minute. That is not considered a difference (the difference is negligible) for reasons already mentioned.

So it’s true: the work of compression (PV change) is all turned into heat.

The compressor’s work is NOT stored in the tank. So why is there still usable pressure in the tank when the heat has all dissipated? First of all, how much pressure will there be?

Charles’ Law states that a mass of air at a constant pressure changes volume at a constant increment per change of its increment of temperature. That translates to some very useful generalizations about air, once you transform its mathematical version into relevant forms with simple algebra. One form of Charles’ Law shows that if the volume of the air mass stays constant, pressure and temperature will change proportionately to each other. We’ll use this to see how much pressure is left in the tank after the heat of compression is all gone. Since the tank volume stays constant, V is the same on both sides of the equation and cancels itself out, so is not mentioned in the equation:

P3/P2 = T3/T2

Solving for the unknown new final pressure:

P3 = P2(T3/T2)

T2 is the same as before, the final pressure after compression. T3 is the new final temperature, once again ambient or 521° F abs.

Substituting values in the equation:

P3 = 89.7(521/880)
P3 = 53.2 psia
gauge pressure = 53.2 - 14.7 = 38.5 psig

This shows…

• …that it takes 47,000 ft-lbs of compression work to compress 1 pound of air into a tank that has a volume 3.62 cu ft, from atmospheric pressure (sea level at 60° F) to a pressure of 75 psig.
• …that 47,000 ft-lbs of compression work will be lost to heat dissipation when you change the condition of air between these starting and ending conditions.
• …that after the heat has all been lost, the tank will still hold air that is at 38.5 psig.

That is a very typical 38.5 psig, not some trick. It’s business as usual. It can expand down to atmospheric pressure, doing work. To find the new volume it will occupy once it is again part of the atmosphere:

V1 = V2(P3/P1)1/n

V1 is not the same as the V1 we started with, which was the volume occupied by 1 pound of air at sea level and 60° F. This is the final volume after expansion of the same pound of air from the same tank (3.62 cu ft) but starting at ambient temperature. Expanding from 53.2 psia down to 14.7 psia, and with the exponent 1/n taking care of the temperature changes in adiabatic expansion, substitute known values to find how much the same pound of air will occupy when its temperature goes down below ambient during expansion:

V1 = 3.62(53.2/14.7)0.71
V1 = 9.02 cu ft

Now we have all the factors to calculate how much work can theoretically be done by that much air expanding completely under those conditions:

W = 144(P3V2 - P1V1)/(n -1)

Substituting values:

W = 144(53.2*3.62 - 14.7*9.02)/0.406
W = 21,170 ft-lbs

Knowing that the work of compression was 47,000 ft-lbs, we can find out how much work can be done by this air in comparison, once all the work of compression has been lost forever:

W/W1 ratio of expansion work to compression work, adiabatic cond

W/W1 = 21170/47000
W/W1 = 45%

So 45% of the theoretical work of compression—and 100% of that is lost as dissipated heat—is then regained by using the heat of the atmosphere from where it is trapped in an air tank to expand into the atmosphere and do work.

This is not magic, it is not perpetual motion, it is not hard to believe, and it is not taught to engineers anymore. Because it’s changed? Because it’s wrong? Because it’s a conspiracy? None of the above. It’s just not taught. It’s forgotten because it’s not mentioned in textbooks anymore. I don’t believe that there is currently any conspiracy to cover this fact up. Conspiracy isn’t needed when it is assumptions that steer concensus opinion.

It could be a coincidence that the information disappeared from compressed air textbooks at the same time that petroleum fuels were unquestionably on top for the first time in history. I doubt it. But if there was once a conspiracy to change the textbooks, once calculus took over where algebra had always been adequate, textbooks were not used anymore to teach compressed air. Either engineers learn their air routines on the job or they don’t need to, and most engineers don’t make it their hobby to go home after work and study things their professors forgot to tell them about in college. It’s just forgotten. It’s too easy; it’s not cutting edge; it’s low tech.

Compressed air is taught from a practical standpoint in an industry where it is a workhorse taken for granted, and the details of its inner life are not considered worth spending any time on. Too bad.

There’s more:

THE MATHEMATICAL PROOF THAT AIR’S ENERGY IS NOT BASED ON ITS PRESSURE

proof 1:
pressure * area = force
pressure = force/area
force * distance = pressure * volume = energy
pressure = energy/volume
conclusion: pressure ≠ energy

proof 2: Pressure is so often mistaken for energy in the diatribes of those who propound against the fact that energy contains intrinsic energy of its own, that they might as well burn the physics book when it comes time to study the production and use of compressed air.

The internal energy of air is entirely dependent on its thermal energy, the heat it contains. And the internal energy of air is entirely INdependent of its pressure. Pressure is a component of force, and force is a component of work, and work is what energy can do. Pressure is not energy. Here is the proof.

The maximum specific heat capacity of air is not 0.1689 BTU per lb per °F as pertains to heating air at constant volume. The higher quantity 0.2375 BTU refers to heating air at constant pressure, which is a condition in which the heated air is allowed to expand instead of being confined in a constant volume. The work available from air in expansion and the work needed to compress air are therefore going to be related to the proportions between the two specific heat capacities of air, as well as the arithmetical difference between them. I have gone into this in detail in my book Compressed Air Power Secrets.

One pound of air at atmospheric pressure and 60° F or 521° F abs contains an amount of energy proportional to the specific heat capacity of air, or Cp:

Internal Energy = 521 * 0.2375
Internal Energy = 123.7375 BTUs
123.7375 BTUs * 778 = 96,268 ft-lbs of work

Work is what energy can do. Work and energy are measured in the same units, in my case foot-pounds (or ft-lbs) since I’m too old to switch over to SI units and the older textbooks I read are not going to changeover with me if I do.

A pound of atmosphere at the stated conditions contains energy that could do 96,268 ft-lbs of work if it could expand down to a vacuum. But atmospheric pressure is generally unavailable for doing work because the back pressure of the atmosphere resists it and it can do no work without added energy.

If the circumstances were right, then some of that energy could be used. The same air, containing the same energy, could do some work with part of that energy if the air were at a higher pressure than ambient, so it could expand and give up some of its heat or internal energy.

Int. energy = Cp * T1 in BTUs
internal energy of 1 pound of air in ft-lbs

Substituting values for air at sea level and 60° F:

internal energy of 1 pound of air = 0.2375 * 521
internal energy of 1 pound of air = 123.7 BTUs
intern al energy of 1 lb air * 778 = 96,268 ft-lbs, but none is available

If the same pound of air is in a tank compressed to 100 psig, the adiabatic equation can be used to find the air’s final temperature T1 after expanding to 0 psig.

T1 = T(P1/P)n-1/n

Substituting values:

T1 = 521(14.7/287.18)0.29
T1 = 287.8 °F abs
287.8 - 461 = -173.18°

The difference in temperature T - T1 = 521 - 287.8 = 233.18° F

The difference in temp 233.18 * 0.2375, the specific heat capacity of air at constant pressure, gives the work of expansion:

233.18 * 0.2375 = 55.38 BTUs

Converting to ft-lbs by the multiplier 778:

55.38 * 778 = 43,086 ft-lbs.

So the theoretical usable work available from a pound of 100 psi air is 43,086 ft-lbs.

Now to find out the total energy of a pound of air, usable or not. The absolute temperature remaining in the air * Cp:

287.8 * 0.2375 = 68.36 BTU

Convert to ft-lbs:

68.36 * 778 = 53,182 ft-lbs still in the air but unavailable since ambient pressure has already been reached.

Unavailable energy still in air after expansion to ambient pressure: 53,182 ft-lbs
Available energy already used expanding to ambient pressure: 43,086 ft-lbs
Total energy of 1 pound of air starting at 100 psig: 96,268 ft-lbs

From above: total energy of 1 pound of atmosphere: 96,268 ft-lbs

Let the doubters doubt, but better yet, let them break their pattern and present some evidence:

COMPRESSED AIR IS SOLAR ENERGY!

We are living in a gigantic tank of compressed air heated by the sun…now what are we going to do about it?

THE LAST WORD FOR TODAY: IS THERE A GLITCH IN MY THEORY?

Because of this chapter from Simons and the less detailed sections from similar textbooks, I believe that some of the people who claim they can make an air car operate its own compressors are telling the truth. But I have to be skeptical and question everything.

Simons seems to contradict himself on one point. In two different parts of his chapter he refers to the energy stored in atmosphere as it relates to compressed air made by compressors and used by air engines.

In the first quote below he seems to be saying that the contribution of energy by the atmosphere to the operation of the compressor is canceled out by back pressure of the atmosphere against the exhaust of an air engine later. (?I thought that the “contributed” or “negative” intake work in the compressor was already canceled out by the fact that the compressor had already used an equivalent amount of energy to resist atmospheric pressure which would otherwise pull back on the progress of the crankshaft in its rotation?)

In the second quote he seems to contradict the earlier statement by saying that the air in the tank is going to be used, it can do work, and it wouldn’t be there if not for the energy of the atmosphere.

Here is the background I see for this apparent contradiction. A closer look is all that’s needed, but so far I don’t understand how both his statements can be true.

In the first quote (see below) he is referring to a specific amount of energy at a specific time: atmospheric pressure entering and leaving a compressor. He states that the atmospheric pressure, or the energy it represents, is stored up in the compressor’s discharge air. Then, we can infer, the air is pushed into the tank through the delivery part of the compressor’s power stroke. According to the later quote from the same chapter (see below), the air cools and when the air is to be used, it contains useful energy that was in it before it was compressed. But according to the first quote, even later than that the air will be used in an engine, and when the engine’s exhaust valve opens, the same atmospheric pressure is now OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM resisting its exhaust. So the atmospheric pressure in the engine that is part of its exhaust must now cancel out or resist the outside air in order for the air to move. All air engines that have an exhaust must operate against a back pressure of outside atmospheric air, minimum.

It needs to be figured out, because both his statements are true but he was just unclear enough about the context of each that we have to figure out how and when the two seemingly contradictory statements could both be true. I will save that for next time: here are the quotes:

First quote:

It may be asked: What becomes of the energy contributed by the atmospheric air toward compression and delivery…? This energy is actually stored up in the compressed air when the latter leaves the compressor. It could do useful work if it were practicable to exhaust the air from the engine into a vacuum. But since we must exhaust against atmospheric pressure, the energy is consumed in the process of exhaustion and is therefore not available for useful work. It is not included in the formulas expressing power to be furnished by the compressor because it is furnished gratis by the atmosphere; and it is not included in the formulas expressing the useful work which a volume of compressed air can perform, because it is not available for such work.

Second quote:

The answer to the question, why energy still remains in the compressed air after all the heat of compression has been dissipated, is that a certain capacity for work resides in the air which is due to the latter’s ability to expand when the proper conditions prevail.

Such conditions could be brought about by confining a volume of atmospheric air in a cylinder under a piston and then create a partial vacuum on the other side of the piston; the atmospheric air in the cylinder would expand and push out the piston, that is, perform work. But creating a vacuum requires extra work, and is therefore not of practical application in air engines.

As a matter of fact, after all the heat generated during compression of a volume of air has been dissipated, the compressed air possesses no more energy than it did before compression, but part of the energy which it did possess has, by mechanical compression, been made available for doing useful work.

To do work, however, the air requires energy in the form of heat and while expanding, it consumes heat that was contained in its mass before compression. As a consequence the temperature of the expanded air falls below that of the surrounding atmosphere. The amount of heat consumed is equivalent to the amount of work performed and equal to the amount of heat that would be generated in compressing this air from the pressure at which it exhausts from the air engine to the pressure at which it enters the same.

The consumption of heat from the mass of the expanding air is manifested by the cold created in and around the cylinders of an engine using air expansively. Theoretically this is exactly the reverse of the generation of heat in the air cylinders of a compressor.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INFO ON SOURCE “SIMONS” AND WHERE IT CAN BE DOWNLOADED

This math is not mine, it is from a compressed air textbook:
Compressed Air by Theodore Simons, 1921, p. 113-123, articles 117-120
"Effect of Loss of Heat, Generated During Compression, on the Ultimate Useful Energy Residing in a Given Quantity of Compressed Air"
The book can be downloaded from my site:
http://www.aircaraccess.com

and is also reproduced in my book Compressed Air Power Secrets, 3rd Edition.

Luther
April 18, 2010

Next: The Roar Compressor

2010-04-15T00:11:00.000-07:00

I didn’t really want to stop with pressure equalization but it seems to have an inherent problem. Which is that if you use a lot of air to compress a little air then you have to be satisfied with the pressure you end up with. If you want to recompress back up to tank pressure, it’s a loser, but if you can just use it from the equalized pressure, I think it will work. That’s one of the ideas that ended up inspiring me to use the term “downhill equalizer”. I hope to get back to it since it’s my baby. But the Equalization Engine in the form presented in my last book is dead, proved wrong by the right math.

Well whatever. I think I’ve found something better.

I am here to tell you that I don’t have time for this blog because I feel I have to keep it current and update it when I learn something, and because of that, I am not getting my new book put together. I can’t stop learning new stuff, it seems to never stop. So hopefully this new idea will hold steady for awhile and I can stay off the blog task long enough to compile Air Car Hall of Fame. It is going to be a most amazing book, definitely not a rehash of Self-Fueling Air Cars or any other of my books. In fact it is going to blow your mind.

As a preview I am going to write part of one of the chapters here on the blog. The new idea I’m about to share is not mine, and it’s not new. It’s from the late 19th century, that’s the 1890s. The inventor is pictured at the top of the blog. His name and other details will be included in the book. A sketch of the machine will also be near the top of this blog page. The URL for the associated spreadsheet is here. At this point I have not finished the math but the start I’ve made seems to promise overunity. I have to do a little study on flywheels and how to predict mathematically the part they will play.

spreadsheet:

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-DQiVAbbA7WNDYyYmNmMjUtYjkzMS00NzEwLTg4ZmUtMmQ2ODgwYzIzMmVk&hl=en

This is for now going to be called the Roar Compressor, for reasons that will be obvious when you read my book.

It is very simple.

An air tank has a compression cylinder attached to it so the two vessels communicate freely with no valve between them. Other than that, the head end of the compression cylinder—the end away from the tank—is typical, with check valves in the usual places. The intake check valves are in the head, and the piston rod is reciprocated by a crankshaft. The other end of the piston is in direct communication with tank pressure at all times. The head end of the compression cylinder pumps air through a pipe and check valve into the tank.

The crankshaft also carries two large flywheels, one on each end. Since there are opposing forces in this cycle, and forces that are not continuous, the flywheel is essential to store the extra work that is being done when it is not needed, so it will be there for the next part of the cycle when it is needed. The part of the cycle where the compression cylinder is pumping atmosphere into the tank through a pipe is the easy part, because full tank pressure is pushing against the back of the piston in order to do this work, and a lot of extra worked is stored for a short time by flywheel momentum. This is the out stroke, where the compression piston is moving away from the tank.

The other half of the cycle is the in stroke of the compression cylinder, which is the atmosphere intake stroke. The intake air pushes its own way into the cylinder, canceling the part of the shaft work that would have to be done to turn the shaft if the atmosphere didn’t have its own pressure to contribute. That’s the easy part. The hard part is that the other side of the piston is in contact with the tank, and the tank air now has to be pushed back into the tank so the piston can move.

So the tank air is acting as a spring. On the compression cylinder’s compression stroke—the out stroke—the tank air expands and does all the work of compression and then some. The extra work is stored in the flywheels. Then on the intake stroke of the compression cylinder, the flywheels carry the piston part of the way back in toward the tank, but the compression stroke on the tank end of the piston is the same amount of work as the expansion stroke had been, and the flywheels alone won’t do that much work. So the piston compresses atmosphere on the out stroke when it’s moving away from the tank, and compresses the tank air about ¾ of the way back into the tank (“loads the spring”) going back toward the tank on the in stroke.

Before the flywheel slows down too much, an air engine mounted on or near the tank takes over the task of getting the tank air back in the tank by turning the crankshaft the rest of the way to dead center. Once past dead center, the tank air—like a wound spring—is again allowed to unwind against the back of the piston and the cycle starts again. So the air engine is not working through the whole stroke, just about 1/8 of the time. The last ¼ of the in stroke is done by the air engine alone. Assuming it is an efficient air engine, the work could be done at constant pressure, during the first 25% of its stroke before cutoff, before the expansion portion of the stroke. Once past the dead center, expansion of the air already in the cylinder will continue to contribute to shaft work and is unneeded so will be stored in the flywheel of maybe it can be used to run the compressor faster.

The nice thing about the arrangement with the air engine is that it puts the strongest part of the air engine’s cycle—the first fourth of the power stroke when it is working at full pressure—to work when it is needed most. If you’ve ever thought about pushing a compressor cylinder directly with an expansion cylinder, the problem crops up that the pushing cylinder decreases in force while the compression cylinder increases in resistance, which is exactly the sort of thing that encourages most inventors to join the discouragement fraternity and claim that the whole idea is impossible. Makes ‘em look smarter if the whole engineering profession is sagely wobbling their noodles in unison with them, eh? But this design eliminates the problem by letting us use an efficient air engine without getting in trouble for it.

That’s all there is to it!

To summarize from the beginning:

The machine can be started externally, by any means including spinning the flywheel by hand through several revolutions. The way I see it, the machine will then run by itself and compress extra air that can be used to do external work. Because it takes in ambient air, it does have an external energy source. Here’s the way I see it: if it works, it’s solar power. If it doesn’t work, it’s perpetual motion delusion.

The cylinder’s compression stroke and the tank’s expansion stroke take place at the same time—the out stroke. The first part of the out stroke has pressure going up in the cylinder as the air is squeezed into a smaller volume. Then once the pressure is the same as tank pressure, the rest of the so-called compression stroke is really delivery at constant pressure into the tank.

Everything on the head end of the cylinder can be calculated with the normal air compressor formula since nothing unusual happens on that end. There is no mixing of tank air with anything, just intake of atmosphere, compression, and delivery into a tank.

But unlike the typical compressor, when the hot compressed air is delivered into the tank, it is going to mix with actively expanding COLD air and will instantly be cooled. The heat of compression should be automatically conserved. (I wonder if Lee Rogers heard about this design.) Then this cold tank air will be forced part of the way back into the tank where it came from by the energized flywheel. Very energized flywheel, as the expansion of tank air far exceeds what the cylinder needs to get its air compressed. The air motor turns the shaft the rest of the way home at full pressure and then works expansively through the rest of its stroke. Note the good use of the separation of components principle, with the air motor able to do its job where it is needed most. The gear ratio between the air motor shaft and the big crankshaft can be designed wherever it needs to be.

The reason this should work, vs. the equalization engine, is that the entry of large amounts of tank air into the equation is helping to turn the shaft! Compare the two, go ahead and do the math, it won’t make your brain bleed, it might make you a real superhero! I really like this new idea, it’s only 120 years old and the laws of physics were well established by the 1890s. I’m implying that the inventor, a professional machinist who always listed his occupation as “inventor”—and how many “inventors” can do that—knew the difference between wishful thinking in the realm of perpetual motion and a simple way of getting fresh energy tricked into an air tank.

This was patented. The patent office asked for and received a working model and then granted the patent!

The same inventor also built and patented an in-tank air compressor, which is the most obvious way to conserve compression heat, and he said the machine produced three times more power than it needed to operate. There were hundreds of witnesses, and he used to leave the machine running for days when he left home, with only big dogs guarding it. Whether he combined the two inventions I don’t know.

This same inventor later had the pleasure of carrying out a very lucrative land deal with an extremely wealthy businessmen’s organization from New York City that wanted to build an athletic club on the resort island where he lived. I wonder if that has anything to do with why his remarkable air compressors disappeared from the face of the earth?

Since the math is the bottom line, here is the bottom line. The head end of the cylinder works the same as any air compressor. The other end—the end that does most of the work—runs almost for free! Because when the spring unwinds it energizes a flywheel, so all but friction can be put back into the system by taking it back from the flywheel. By “free” I mean that the expansion of the tank air into the back end of the cylinder, and the recompression of the same air back into the tank, cancel each other out exactly. Not counting losses. Losses are few because the air doesn’t ever leave the system. The recompression constitutes very cold air being pushed back into a very cold tank, and all this cold absorbs the heat of compression so thermal losses should be small or even negligible.

Luther

PS. I don’t mean to be pushy about learning compressed air math, but I have discovered by experience that Santa Claus is not going to bring me an air car for Christmas, so if I want it to happen I have to make a place for it in my world by my own efforts. One of the best feelings I ever got was getting to the bottom of compressed air math. Not that I’ve mastered it, but I’ve seen it and know it’s real. The reason people won’t try it is that they think it’s not real; that they can’t possibly do it. The reason for this is that the textbooks are so poorly written. Start on page one of Compressed Air Power Secrets and don’t move on to the next word or next page until you get it. Then it’s easy-

-er.

Equalization Engine...what went wrong?

2010-04-12T00:39:00.000-07:00

The Equalization Engine had a following so sorry about that but in case anyone doesn’t want to let go of it, here’s the proof that it won’t work. The formatted doc can be downloaded from this URL:

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-DQiVAbbA7WZGY0YmY5YzktNzJhNC00ZWZhLWFlMjUtM2NlYzExNWRiYzRl&hl=en

The new spreadsheet can be downloaded from this URL:

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-DQiVAbbA7WZGY0YmY5YzktNzJhNC00ZWZhLWFlMjUtM2NlYzExNWRiYzRl&hl=en

First the idea that it could bring in ambient heat if it does work…that’s still in effect but the whole premise of the equalization engine involves losing pressure of a large air mass to bring up the pressure of a very small air mass. That is not a happy situation as it turns out. But ambient heat is still free energy, and something analogous to putting low pressure air into a high pressure tank has been done with steam boilers since 1858. We just have to hit the gizmo on the head.

The three parts of the work equation, if not done separately, combine into a single equation. That was my downfall. You have to do the three parts of the equation separately because there are two different pressure inputs, and so depending on what you’re doing you need to use the correct initial pressure for the formula.

• The negative work of the intake stroke is -P1V1.
o P1 is atmospheric pressure, between 10-15 psi most places on earth, and 14.7 at standard condition (sea level and 32° F).
o V1 is the volume or displacement of the equalizer/booster cylinder.
• The work of compression is (P2V2 - P1V1)/(n -1).
o P2 is final pressure, such as tank pressure.
o V2 is final volume. It’s not usually known so I use this to find it:
 V2n = P1V1n/P2
 if V2n = X, then V2 = X1/n
 n takes temperature changes into effect as they affect air; just use 1.406 for adiabatic compression.
o Same as in the previous step, V1 is the volume or displacement of the equalizer/booster cylinder.
o Not the same as before, P1 is (in the equalization engine) the equalized pressure with tank air added to the air in the equalizer. This is the missing part of the equation that took me 22 years to find. That was too long to wait.
• Work of delivery = P2V2
o Same as before, P2 is final pressure, such as tank pressure.
o Not the same as before, V2 is found the same way but using the higher value of P1 as the basis:
 V2n = P1V1n/P2
 if V2n = X, then V2 = X1/n

To do the math, the three values are added together and the result is multiplied by 144 to get ft-lbs of work to get one cylinder full of atmosphere into the tank with the equalizer engine or the downhill equalizer. The example I have in the spreadsheet shows that if you want to compress the equalizer contents into the tank once per second, you’ll need a 98 hp engine to do it because of the extra tank air joining the equalizer air and then needing to be recompressed to get back into the tank.

The reason I missed the two different values of P1 that have to be used is that I used the simpler derived formula instead of working the three steps of compression separately so I could think carefully about each value.

I am ready to concede that the equalization engine should not be a source of overunity function. But remember that earth’s atmosphere carries solar energy, we just need to get some of it into a pressurized tank cheaply, then we can go to town and spend the money saved by not putting petroleum and plutonium in our gas tanks.

Scott Robertson
Researcher and Wanna-Be Inventor
Pneumatic Options Research Library
http://www.aircaraccess.com

Work, Force, and Power Calculations for the Equalization Engine

2010-04-12T00:36:00.000-07:00

TO SEE THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENT WITH SKETCHES AND FORMATTING INTACT, HERE IS THE URL:

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-DQiVAbbA7WOGE4N2JjNGYtYWEwNC00YWU4LWE0YjEtOWMwMTgxZjgyOWE3&hl=en

(above: crude sketch of a PV diagram)

INSPIRATIONAL YIK-YAK

The seemingly simple process of squeezing air to put it into a smaller space is not simple at all. There are at least three things changing together, not always at the same time but often they are all three changing together: pressure, volume, and temperature. Also there is more than one pool of energy to take into account. The ambient heat carried by atmosphere, the heat of compression as well as the absence of heat—or “cold”—resulting from expansion. A pre-filled tank of air that acts like a spring…what is its contribution? Realistically?

If not for the claims of dozens of inventors and hundreds more wanna-be inventors, especially the two real air car builders who spoke to me personally and thus changed the course of my life, the world as a unit would be completely against the idea of the self-filling air tank, because status quo engineering thought is automatically opposed without seeing the evidence, or what engineers would call the “so-called evidence” as they turn their back on it. As it turns out, there is a minority of voices in the wilderness muttering about possibilities, generally completely obsessed with these “so-called” possibilities. As it also turns out, most of these lonely people have no money to pay educated engineers to evaluate their ideas.

Since 1988 I have been quietly on the lookout for engineering assistance to prove whether my equalization engine would work. It is a new way of compressing air using pressure equalization of fresh air with a pre-filled air tank. Compressing air with pressure equalization does no extra work, so it is a tempting theory. The problem is that like all spontaneous energy transformations, it goes downhill. Pressure is lost in the process and if you try to make up for it by recompressing, you have to compress both masses of air that have mixed: the fresh air that was raised in pressure, as well as the tank air that lost a little pressure to get the job done.

I have presented the equalization engine theory, in configuration after configuration, to anyone who wants to comment. Usually it is I who topples my own theories, and then I set up a new theory and let people take pot shots at it. There is always the hope that one of my ideas will make it through to the final analysis in one piece. But the benefit I can most realistically hope for is that someone out there who has the talent, experience, and motivation to design and build a real self-filling air tank will read my stuff and then go ahead and learn the math. Better than I can. When this happens, there is the added hope that such a person will share his work with the world instead of taking his secrets to the grave and/or selling them to a secret warehouse of ideas that you and I will never see.

That is a lot of hope! Hope stacked on hope in a house of cards. But I don’t mind. We dreamers exist to test the limits of what others mistake for reality. Those who attempt to limit reality to what is already known are just as compulsive about their way of doing things as we dreamers who feel that if we don’t push the envelope, we have failed to try. Don’t let me die without trying, because unlike the status quo I don’t believe I will go to them pearly gates with pockets stuffed full of earthly trinkets. Only by making the most of my fleeting experience in this life can I hope to have something worthwhile to carry with me to the next place.

Unfortunately by taking my own advice and learning the math, I have finally after 21+ years learned that pressure equalization in itself probably can’t generate overunity conditions.

PART ONE: WHAT WENT WRONG AND WHY

With that in mind, I am going to try to take the mathematical approach to the equalization engine deeper. Maybe it will help someone in their struggle. Let the hyenas laugh.

The work required to push 90 psi air into a 90 psi tank is zero! But there is real work that really has to be done in spite of zero NET work. That means real force to be overcome. Unfortunately the equalization engine and its latest reincarnation, the downhill equalizer, are not arranged properly because there is no intake stroke, so the elevated pressure doesn’t provide a negative work, just an extra load.

That was one loaded paragraph. I’ll try to take it one step at a time.

The work equation results in what looks like, and is, zero work done to put X pressure into a tank that is the same pressure. This sounds unlikely, even neglecting friction. You can’t move anything, including air, from point A to point B without doing work, obviously. So I was motivated by this apparent anomaly to crack open the book and check the formula again. I learned that the equation I had was correct: no work done, for example if the compressor takes in 90 psi and puts the same air into a 90 psi tank. No NET work. Big difference. You have to look at the process of compressing air in a time frame, not just the bottom line. Everything from start to finish of the process has to actually be possible, or the math can lie. Here’s the short version on the work equation for compressing air.

The PV diagram is a graph with the vertical axis showing pressure and the horizontal axis showing volume, which is proportionate to stroke. The PV diagram at the top of this page is not a real PV diagram but a rough sketch of one. A real PV diagram of a real machine is called an indicator card, and a real PV diagram of a theoretical machine is the same thing but with prettier lines. The areas that can be calculated from the diagram are proportionate to the work of the air compressor.

The typical air compressor has three jobs to do, each one involving work.

FIRST, the intake stroke. On the PV diagram this is the horizontal length of the bottom rectangle all the way from right to left (see sketch at top). The pressure of the atmosphere is the height of the rectangle. So starting at the right on the atmosphere line, the intake stroke takes place at constant pressure till it reaches the left end where the curve starts up from the point where the intake stroke ends. The work of intake is proportionate to the area P x V described by the rectangle.

In the intake stroke, the piston is moved away from the atmosphere. The pressure of the atmosphere, which abhors a vacuum, moves spontaneously into the attempted suction. The compressor is already moving, and atmospheric pressure overcomes valve friction to enter the compressor cylinder under its own power. The compressor is already in motion, which requires ongoing work, and the already existing pressure of the atmosphere cancels the work of resisting the inertia of atmosphere by helping push the piston. So the intake stroke constitutes negative work: an amount of work that will be subtracted from the compressor’s total work load. Work is force x distance or in compressed air calculations it is more conveniently stated as pressure x volume which is the same thing. So the negative work in ft-lbs that is done by the atmospheric air on the intake stroke amounts to atmospheric pressure in psia x the volume of the compressor cylinder in cubic feet. INTAKE WORK IS NEGATIVE WORK BECAUSE THE ATMOSPHERE IS ALREADY COMPRESSED AIR AND THE COMPRESSOR IS ALREADY MOVING. Maybe the eternal search for a cold spot or low pressure zone or energy sponge in a self-sustaining air engine is over: it is the suction stroke of the compressor!

The negative work of the intake stroke is -P1V1. P1 is the initial pressure of compression, or the compressor’s intake pressure. V1 is the initial volume of the air to be compressed, which is the displacement of the compressor cylinder.

SECOND, the work of compression. That is when the air is literally getting squeezed, with pressure going up and volume going down. On the PV diagram, there is a curve starting from the end of the atmosphere line on the left and traveling up to a second rectangle, a vertical one. The area under the curve all the way to the bottom line of the chart is the work of compression. The bottom rectangle, part of which is included in compression work, is intake air. Atmosphere. This points to the fact that part of the work of compression is due to the pressure that was already in the air before compression starts. Calculating the area under the curve is done by the work equation, and the work equation is derived from a bit of calculus that you don’t need because the work equation has already been created by the mathematicians who did the calculus for you. The calculus can be approximated by measuring the vertical distance from the bottom line to the curve in many places and averaging the lengths. That’s simple arithmetic doing the work of calculus, in order to arrive at the mean effective pressure during compression work. Knowing the average pressure during PV change, you can multiply that by V which is the horizontal length of the diagram to get the area or work. But this isn’t necessary, nor is calculus, nor is measuring the little lines and averaging them; the work equation has already been constructed by mathematicians and you can study its complete derivation in my book Compressed Air Power Secrets.

The equation for the work of compression is simple P2V2 - P1V1/(n -1) which is multiplied by the conversion factor 144 if pressure is stated in psi since work is stated in ft-lbs and there are 144 square inches in one square foot. The generality expressed by this mathematical statement is easy to understand. Final energy condition of the air in ft-lbs is P2V2. Initial energy condition before being compressed was P1V1. The difference is going to account for pressure and volume changes that happen during compression, and dividing the difference by (n -1) alters that value to account for the temperature changes that take place. The index n is always greater than 1 and no greater than 1.406. For adiabatic compression in which all compression heat stays in the air, just use 1.406.

Work of adiabatic compression = 144*((P2V2) - (P1V1))/0.406.

THIRD, the work of delivery. Somewhere during the stroke the pressure in the cylinder will equal the pressure of the tank that the air will be pumped into. At this point the PV change work of compression ends and the work of delivery at constant pressure begins. This value is represented on the PV diagram by the vertical rectangle at the right side of the diagram. The whole rectangle, all the way from the top to the bottom of the diagram, is proportionate to delivery work. You can see that part of this work is canceled by the negative work of intake.

Work of delivery = P2V2 or final pressure x final volume after the squeezing is finished.

Those are the three parts of the air compressor’s work.

This inquiry is going to address some apparent anomalies of compressed air production, starting with the loaded paragraph from above which was:

The work required to push 90 psi air into a 90 psi tank is zero! But there is real work that really has to be done in spite of zero NET work. That means real force to be overcome. Unfortunately the equalization engine and its latest reincarnation, the downhill equalizer, are not arranged properly because there is no intake stroke, so the elevated pressure doesn’t provide a negative work, just an extra load.

First, the generalization that forcing 90 psi into a tank at the same pressure requires no net work. I’m talking about a cylinder that STARTS AT 90 psi, not at atmospheric. P1 = P2. The key to understanding this seeming anomaly is that this is NET work. Yes, work has to be done to get the air into the tank, not counting valve and pipe friction which tend to rob the air of pressure and cause unwanted expansion. We’ll ignore friction for now and deal with the essential work.

Pushing X pressure into X pressure involves no compression work. That part is obviously zero. The work of delivery is P2V2. But the work of intake is negative P1V1. And with no PV change, there can be no temperature change either. So mathematically speaking, with no change in pressure during the delivery of X psi into X psi, P1V1 = P2V2 so the negative work of intake exactly cancels out the positive work of delivery, and with no compression work, there is no work done! Right?

Wrong! There is no NET work, but to get the air into the tank you have to move it, you have to do the delivery work. It’s just that the little accountant sitting in the tank is going to arrive at a net cost of zero for getting the job done. This is important; not only does it involve friction, since air has to move, but the work that gets cancelled by negative intake work has to get done somehow or the intake’s negative work will have nothing to cancel and the machine will just sit there making its inventor look stupid. The point is that you have to look at every step of the process and not just use the equation but also understand it. Because if there is any impossible step in the process you’re postulating, then the possible parts can’t get done no matter how well the math works out.

That was just an example but we’ll come back to it. Understanding it is important. As my parents used to say, “Yeah there’s ice cream in the freezer, but if you don’t eat your peas and carrots first, that ice cream is not going to get used tonight.” I had to accomplish the difficult task of eating my vegetables in order to reap the benefit of dessert.

Here’s the next part of the loaded paragraph that has to be delved into:

Unfortunately the equalization engine and its latest reincarnation, the downhill equalizer, are not arranged properly because there is no intake stroke, so the elevated pressure doesn’t provide a negative work, just an extra load.

This involves reeling back through the years to 1988 when I discovered the principle of the equalization engine. And then quickly moving back to today because I never built it and didn’t know how to do the math till a year ago. Er—until today. OK the time machine has returned, it’s today, and I’m still trying to figure out the right way to represent this device mathematically.

It involves a PV diagram that looks something like this:

This time the long horizontal rectangle at the bottom is very tall, because the equalization engine (really a compressor) has an intake of tank air after the compressor has done its intake stroke. Then the compression curve is very short because little pressure is lost from the tank pressure to equalized pressure, and most of the stroke is delivery. That’s very little compression work, a lot of delivery work, and a lot of negative intake work to cancel out the delivery work. The result seemed to be “home free, we’re in business,” a year ago when I finally learned what a PV diagram is and came up with this way of picturing the work requirements of the equalization engine.

But it has a glitch, which is shared with the downhill equalizer I’ve been working on lately.

There is already an intake stroke, an atmospheric intake stroke like any compressor, with the piston moving and atmosphere entering on its own to cancel the work of moving the piston away from the atmosphere.

That means that the PV diagram above is wrong. The large amount of delivery work is not cancelled by the intake stroke because in order to call the equalization stroke a “stroke” it has to be a STROKE. The act of cancelling delivery work with negative intake work has to take place according to the rules. The rules state that the reason intake work is negative is that the machine is already moving, under power, and the existing pressure of the intake air motivates itself into the cylinder behind the moving piston, contributes to the moving of the piston by virtue of its positive pressure, and as a result cancels the effort being expended by the machine to move the piston away. The attempted suction is defeated, and intake work is done for free.

Now look at the equalization engine and its current configuration, the downhill equalizer. Oops, the tank air enters the equalizer after the piston has already stopped moving, with the cylinder already full of intake air. There is nothing being done by the piston, and the pressure of the intake air is now just going to be in the way. It is all going to have to be delivered into the tank with no negative intake work except the negative intake work of the normal intake.

Because of this the compression equation has to be reworked somewhat, but the result is easy to predict. It won’t work. You are delivering a whole cylinderful of compressed air, plus the atmosphere it mixed with, into a tank with very little pressure rise but a lot of extra air due to the fact that the tank air had to leave the tank and lose pressure to equalize with the atmosphere. I’ll still redo the work equation to reflect the reality of the situation, then I imagine I will be redoing the equalizer again to try and find a winning combination.

First we’ll have to deal briefly with the other part of the loaded paragraph:

There is real work that really has to be done in spite of zero NET work. That means real force to be overcome.

It’s the old bugaboo, piston balancing forces. I thought I had gotten rid of that by putting the piston in the equalizer instead of in the tank. Since there was so little compression work to do, and I had wrongly thought that the high pressure intake air was going to cancel out the massive delivery work to be done, I assumed that the good results I was getting would keep the force problem at bay for me so I wouldn’t have to think about it. That is the kind of thinking that keeps inventors in the wanna-be department.

Here’s a simple example: a piston with a cross-sectional area of 3 square inches. The piston is driven forward by a crankshaft that is driven by an electric motor. The job of the piston is to push 88 psi into a 90 psi tank. From the equalizer into the tank. The equalizer contains maximum 90 psi. The maximum force that the electric motor has to overcome is 90 pounds per square inch x 3 square inches = 270 pounds of force.

Contrary to the objection that has been raised, it is not the other side of the piston that has to do this pushing, but the piston rod and its energy source. So we have to look at what the delivery work is, because force is part of this equation. PV = work = force x distance. If the final tank pressure is 90 psia and the cylinder volume is 0.01 cu ft, the work of delivery is 144 x 90 x 0.01 = 129.6 ft-lbs of work. Work divided by force = distance: 129.6/270 lbs force gives almost half a foot distance with a 3 sq in piston area.

Summary:
work of delivery is 129.6 ft-lbs
piston of 3 sq in area resisting pressure of 90 psi needs a force from the piston rod = 270 lbs-f
the work divided by the force tells us that the torque available from the electric motor must deliver a force of 270 lbs to move the piston and put the equalizer air into the tank.

The piston moves 6” or ½ ft so the crank pushing it, which is the radius of the torque, is 0.5 ft.
Torque = force x radius, so the torque needed from the electric motor is 270 x 0.5 = 135 lb-ft torque.

Horsepower = torque x rpm/5252
With a motor running at 50 rpm, hp = 135 * 50/5252 = 1.29 hp
With a motor running at 100 rpm, hp = 135 * 100/5252 = 2.57 hp
With a motor running at 1000 rpm, hp = 135 * 1000/5252 = 25.7 hp

Don’t be fooled: 1.29 hp is not a small amount of power. We’re talking about putting one dinky little cylinderful of 88 psi air into a 90 psi tank, or something like that. The work needed to compress 0.01 cu ft of air from atmospheric pressure into a 90 psia tank with a conventional compressor is 50.4 ft-lbs, which if done in one leisurely second requires only 50.4/550 = 0.09 hp. Less than a tenth of a hp.

Knowing we’re on shaky ground with the work equation up in the air, this discussion can be put off for later. Power is not the point to attack; this has to be solved from the viewpoint of PV, which is work, and work is done by energy. And energy is the whole point. So the key question is, what is the correct work equation for the downhill equalizer?

And what will I do with the bad news when I get it? Keep trying. The new configuration is forming as I write this.

PART TWO: THE RIGHT WORK EQUATION FOR THE RIGHT JOB

There isn’t any hope for the current configuration, as explained above, because the extra air entering the equalizer from the tank doesn’t offer a negative work value as I had thought it would based on a flawed analysis. I won’t waste time developing an equation for something that won’t work. Instead I’ll dive right into the new configuration.

The key to the new design isn’t to throw the baby out with the bath water. It is to think of where the previous concept went wrong to see if a few changes can be made to resurrect the downhill equalizer.

The downhill equalizer actually started out to have no booster compressor, and that was part of the reason I named it “downhill”. The air was not going to go back into the tank. But it was too hard to give up on that idea; I’ve been hooked on trying to get low pressure air into a high pressure tank for 29 years. I’ve done numerous experiments but in the past year or so it’s all about math. Until I get the math right I won’t buy so much as a hose clamp. I actually gave all my engines and air equipment away to a 13-year-old boy whose mother had a little loose change to pay for it; it was his birthday present and he seemed to know more about it than I did.

I am going to take a look at keeping the booster compressor, but instead of having all the work done by the piston rod, what if it was helped along by adding air to the rod end of the piston? It would have to be throw-away air because otherwise it would get in the way as back pressure. I know better by now, hopefully, than to put a piston in the tank or anything like that. I predict that this won’t work either. But I’ll try it.

After that, assuming it won’t work, the next step will be to omit the final step of putting the air back into the tank. That will break my heart but I’ll still try it. 88 psi is perfectly usable. If nothing else, overunity should be helped along nicely if the extra work that has to be done to produce high pressure in the air car’s storage tanks can be regained by mixing this air with atmosphere instead of compressing the atmosphere conventionally.

THE REFRIGERATION CONCEPT

If nothing works I might stop for now with equalization concepts and go with absorption of ambient heat and conservation of compression heat. The idea is that keeping the temperature in a compressor from ever going above ambient temperature should prevent the loss of compression heat. That might have been Lee Rogers’ secret.

Luther

The Separation of Components Principle

2010-04-07T21:33:00.000-07:00

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The concepts discussed in this document are dealt with tentatively in the latest spreadsheet on a tab called Torque and a tab called Torque and Power. The URL for the new spreadsheet is:

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-DQiVAbbA7WYmE3MTlhZTktZmJhZC00ZTE1LWI3YzYtOWJmZThjNTc3ODg1&hl=en

This is not a revolutionary scientific principle, it is a design trick that air car inventor Bill Truitt tried to teach me in 1986 when I asked him how he got around the laws of physics. It isn’t really a way around the law, there isn’t one. It is a way over the hurdles presented by being constrained by the various laws of nature. For example, a perfectly capable air powered piston can have many times more power than it needs to do the job, but it might not have enough force to move one millimeter. The sort of constraint that is a real stumbling block when the math works fine on the generalities, but the nuts and bolts is still impossible without a complete re-thinking. The math doesn’t lie, but it takes a lot of experience to know when it is wrong, incomplete, or suggesting something misleading.

The math for the downhill equalizer seems to work fine but I still have to look at the details. The operation of two compressors has been isolated from the characteristics specific to the tank so that the tank’s pressure and other characteristics will not impose unnecessary limitations on what the two compressors are capable of actually doing. The math isn’t the problem, I mean the amount of work they have to do is puny compared to the work done by the compressor you can buy at Home Depot, the one that’s deeply appreciated by your local Power Company. But so many of my hot ideas have failed to get past the hard look dept. that I have finally caved in and said OK to electricity. I didn’t want to mix media, I wanted purely pneumatic, but just for the sake of learning a new trick, let’s try to look at what could be gained by using electricity to operate the two compressors instead of beating my head against Rube Goldberg’s sacred wall of configurationalism.

The piston in the tank idea keeps popping up and keeps getting rejected for the same reason. The booster piston in the current Downhill Equalizer configuration looks like it’s in the tank, but it is only in the equalizer. That is why the intake pipe goes all the way through the tank to the other end. So there is no back pressure except atmospheric air on the back side of the booster piston. The equalizer is smooth and polished to a close tolerance like any compressor cylinder, and the booster piston reciprocates in it. It is a one-way actuator, with only the compression stroke doing anything of importance. On the return stroke it might look like it’s drawing in atmosphere, but it’s just getting out of the way; the atmosphere is pumped in positively by a separate compressor. Since these two compressors don’t limit each other, it helps insure that the dang thing should work. An exotic variation would be to try to use the booster compressor as the intake compressor on its return stroke. It might work, but the entanglement might get one device over-involved in the business of the other if you try to combine them. I haven’t thought it out yet.

Knowing that the pre-filled tank has plenty of energy to compress a little atmosphere to 4 psi higher in pressure than it started out, and being able to prove it with standard compressed air calculations, it is not a question of the work. Work and energy are two sides of the same coin and measured by the same units—I use foot-pounds since I’m over 50 and undereducated. Feet and meters, it’s all the same. But once you get TIME into the equation, you have a potentially real machine to deal with, preferably on paper, before you go out and buy the parts to prove that your real machine only works as an oversized paper weight.

Power is work done per unit time. It can be broken down in different ways, including those in the table (DOWNLOAD MS DOC FOR CORRECT FORMAT, SEE URL ABOVE):

power = work / time
power = force x distance / time
power = pressure x area x distance / time
power = pressure x volume / time
power = force x speed
power = mass x acceleration x speed
power = linear force x linear speed
power = force x radius x angular speed
power = torque x angular speed
power in ft-lbs/min = torque in lb-ft x 2π * rpm

Regarding the bottom rows of the table, the term “speed = distance per time”, when applied to circular efforts of devices such as engine shafts and wheels, is technically rendered “angular speed”, and examination of the table should lead us to expect that torque is a circular force that can be measured in pounds. This is approximately correct so in order to understand why a rotating motor outside the air tank can do things that a piston inside the air tank can’t do with the same amount of energy, a review of TORQUE and ANGULAR SPEED is needed. I will keep it short and you can refer to the spreadsheet for the math and to my book Compressed Air Power Secrets for a detailed discussion of torque. Here’s the crux of it:

Power = force * distance / time = force * speed
Power = linear force * linear speed
Torque = force * wheel radius, crank radius, gear radius, etc.
Linear speed / radius = angular speed
Power = torque * angular speed

The point is to see what these values are, so they don’t have to be accepted as abstractions that only geniuses can apprehend. And to show that trying to use linear piston-on-piston concepts is rigid and constrained compared to using a rotating shaft. The motor adds abilities to the system and flexibility to the design by adding factors within the power available that are easily juggled till force, torque, work, and power are all adequate to perform the task.

My problem with separate systems is that like other wanna-be inventors I have never worked with them; I’m too impractical, always wanting to kill a herd of flying pink elephants with a single pebble. But face it: an air tank can’t dictate or constrain what speed to run your electric motor at. But if you put a piston in the tank to do the same job, the tank pressure and the size of the piston will dictate to you a relatively inflexible set of options.

Ultimately I want to answer the question, Can an air motor do it instead of an electric one? Separate still, depending on gear ratios like the electric motor to get desired characteristics, but without the annoyance and loss of transforming to electricity and trying to store that stuff in a “battery”, whatever that is. It’s bad enough that air and heat are invisible, do I have to get into electricity too? At an extra cost in losses?

The reason a piston producing force directly off an air tank—as simple as it sounds—is inflexible to the point of being doomed in certain applications is known to us: piston balancing forces. When the force is equal pushing both ways on the piston, the piston won’t move. And this is what happens since the piston is the same size on both sides. But what about the other side of the coin: why is it that a rotating shaft introduces flexibility?

It’s because torque is leverage is mechanical advantage. Force is a straight push, and torque is a straight push around a fulcrum. Torque is a straight push: straight around a circle. Like the force used to push a lever, the force applied to produce torque is going to be differently capable depending on the lever length. Torque = force x radius.

So the answer: what is the advantage of running part of an air system off a shaft, a torquer, instead of running everything directly off the same air tank?—is leverage or analogical to leverage. Mechanical advantage and torque are easy to manipulate in design work. In the example of the piston in a tank that won’t move because the tank air feeding it is the same pressure as the tank air resisting it, and the pushing side of the piston is the same area as the resisting side of the piston: making the piston bigger means using more air but it doesn’t solve the problem; pressure is still the same on both sides of the piston. But changing the pushing hardware—from a straight force to a rotating effort—introduces leverage and the flexibility offered by unlimited varieties of lever lengths, gear ratios, etc. Running the motor slower tends to increase its torque. The numbers in my spreadsheet need to be supplemented by real torque vs power data which can be obtained from websites of motor manufacturers.

So that’s my best guess on why Bill Truitt said he had to keep his systems separate. But why bother with electric motors when the air is already available? Air motors have more torque than electric motors, don’t they?

For one thing, an efficient air engine is very large. And once you put valves on something, then you have to find a way to operate the valves. I could carve an engine block with a chisel and pocketknife, but I would need brains to make a valve open and close at the same time. In an overunity air power system, once you have your extra air to use, you can waste it any way you want, but if you don’t first use your stored air frugally or at least carefully and consciously to get the extra air made, then the overunity condition won’t be reachable. So running compressors with electric motors is partly more practical and partly just more convenient. You can go buy an electric motor of any size and speed without worrying about the mode of using the electricity in the motor, but an efficient air engine is not going to be found on the shelf anywhere in the world. Except at your local “piston expander” dept. at Steam Engines R Us. Let me know if you find that place.

The question now seems settled, Why not an air motor to develop the needed torque on a turning shaft? The answer: convenient, efficient, small air motors don’t exist. If they did, we would have been driving air cars a long time ago. Efficient air engines need a big flywheel. Spacewise and convenience-wise and availability-wise, electric motors beat air motors easily, and let me know if I’m wrong. Me and electricity don’t get along but I have to concede. So far I haven’t studied the losses involved in transforming part of the air tank’s pressure to electricity and storing it in a battery. So I’m assuming they are considerable, but worth it, if it works. If the cost in wasted energy is not too much. Then you have your overunity air production unit, and you can make extra air that you can waste any way you want.

Luther

Potential point of confusion

2010-04-06T00:44:00.000-07:00

I got a nice letter today from a man trying to help me avoid wasting my time. He had a good point, although it was based on a false assumption. This can be checked by looking at the math for the work of compression and how it is derived. Here is his letter followed by my response:

Dear Scott

I have read your blog and am afraid that I think I have found a flaw in your reasoning. In the description of your invention you say that when the booster piston moves all the way to the right the valve is opened equalising the pressure. The at least in maths it looks like the piston only has to do a small amount of work. But this is not so. The piston now has a large pressure on one side and a small one on the other. It will have to push against this pressure differential all the way as it moves right. So the mechanical work required to drive it will be great. It does not work if it has pressure on the other side either. It is easy on the compression stroke but in order to draw back to let more air in it has to do so against the full pressure difference again. However one configures it, one half of the crank rotation will have to be against the full pressure differential.

Unless I misunderstand the cycle it seems impossible for this to compress air with less work than can be extracted from it.

I write to you as I would not wish you to use up valuable time on an idea
which did not work.

N

N,

Thanks for writing. I have thought of what you're saying and here's my answer. Let me know what you think. I am happy to hear from you whether you agree or not.

The work of compressing air with a piston has 3 components.
1. intake, which is negative work; atmospheric pressure enters on its own
2. PV change work, pressure going up as volume goes down, this is the actual compression
3. delivery, after a portion of the stroke the air in the cylinder will equal tank pressure; from there till the end of the power stroke the work is done against a constant pressure so is a lot less

The way I see it is that the work done is not the difference between the two sides of the piston. If it was, then double-acting compressors would be the only possible way to compress air, especially if multi-stage.

Look at the math for compression work. There is no term in the equation for what is on the back side of the piston. It is a neutral zone, unrelated. The pressure differential against which any compressor works is the difference between initial pressure of intake and final pressure of delivery.

In the equalization engine, the piston is fighting about 2 psi. The PV curve is very short, and most of the PV diagram shows a straight line. That is the delivery portion of the stroke, which is most of the power stroke.

I went into all this in my book Compressed Air Power Secrets, 3rd edition. Believe me, I spent many agonizing weeks trying to analyze the exact question you raise. Here is something else you can think about.

A single-acting, two-stage compressor has atmospheric pressure on one side of the piston and an elevated intake pressure in the 2nd stage. The pressure differential is not related to the two sides of the piston; if it were, then there would be no advantage to multi-staging. The elevated intake pressure is negative work; it actually helps the compression stroke. There is no mention in the math of atmospheric pressure on the 2nd stage, it's like a booster.

I hope I have made my opinion clear, and if not then write again. I will post this information on the blog also.

Don't hesitate to let me know if I have made a mistake!

Scott

The Downhill Equalizer

2010-04-01T19:48:00.000-07:00

The Downhill Equalizer

invented by Scott Robertson March 31, 2010

a configuration of the Equalization Engine Cycle
discovered by Scott Robertson in 1988

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I’m naming my new invention the Downhill Equalizer in appreciation and honor of the engineers and other skeptics who are always accusing me of trying to push energy uphill, a direction in which energy isn’t supposed to want to flow on its own dime. I have no argument with that.

When I say “appreciation and honor” I am not being ironic. I did have some mistakes in my thinking and the skeptics, right or wrong, and superficial always in their examination of new ideas, forced me to think up the simplest possible configuration in order to describe something they couldn’t automatically reject. At no time does this new design rely on any trick against nature’s ways nor any scientific “effect”: no Bernoulli’s law, no Kadenacy effect, no acoustic wave pumping, no compressor in the tank, not even conservation of compression heat. That makes my design “robust”: if it’s off a little on some detail, it doesn’t send the whole thing to Toonville. Because with high overunity COPs easily shown, we haven’t even reached deeply into a bag of tricks that is still available to us. Everything I am claiming now is simple, obvious, and easy to build so many people will want to build it to prove to themselves that it’s true that compressed air is solar energy. That is the purpose of this exercise: to design something that makes it easy for any mechanically-inclined person to prove to his own satisfaction that an engine-compressor unit can run on ambient heat.

The downhill equalizer is very simple. A pre-filled tank has a pipe running down the middle of it from end to end. This pipe carries two valves and a piston comprising the equalizer. There is a charging compressor that keeps low pressure air moving into the downstream end of the pipe, or the equalizer, which is everything past the check valve. At the opposite end of the pipe is a booster piston, running in that end of the pipe, up to the check valve which serves as the intake to the equalizer. A two-way valve connecting tank air to the equalizer is always open except when the booster piston is moving away from the check valve. The two-way valve is closed only during the equalizer’s low pressure intake cycle. Both compressors are driven by a motor that is outside the tank. This needs to be easy to build and test so we can see low pressure going into the tank and high pressure coming out.

The two-way valve has two functions. As soon as the booster piston reaches the far end of its stroke away from the check valve, the two-way valve opens and tank air mixes into the equalizer. Tank pressure goes down a little, equalizer pressure goes up a lot, and the two pressures equalize. Then the piston starts back toward the check valve, with the two-way valve still open. The piston pushes the air out of the equalizer into the tank until it nearly touches the check valve. Then the two-way valve closes and the piston withdraws. The external compressor charges the equalizer with fresh air again and the cycle repeats many times per minute.

The booster compressor is mounted at the downstream end of the tank, just outside the tank. The booster compressor cannot be driven directly by the air in this tank; that would be uphill energy flow which leads to round robin Rube Goldberg complexity. I’m trying to take advantage of Bill Truitt’s “keep ‘em separate” principle. For an example of ignoring that worthy principle, if you try putting a piston inside the tank, running on the tank’s pressure, it might work on one stroke but then the same tank pressure surrounding it will be in the way on the return stroke. Another example is piston balancing forces, where a piston has enough power to do a task, but not enough force. By keeping components separate, not dependent on each others’ characteristics, you avoid imposing unnecessary limitations on them.

The equalizer intake check valve keeps the air from going back out of the tank the way it came. The downstream end of the tank where the air would otherwise exit is blocked by the booster piston.

The intake pipe and equalizer at this pipe’s far end are filled to a low pressure with air. The lower the pressure the better, but it isn’t absolutely critical whether it’s 2 psi or 20 psi or 0.02 psi. What’s important is that no leakage occurs in or out of the pipe from the tank air which is at a much higher pressure, or out through the booster or backwards through the check valve. Complete separation of separately-pressured components is essential to good results.

Now the big pipe is full of air only to let’s say 2 psi. The valve opens to let tank air into the equalizer to mix with the slightly-compressed atmosphere that’s already in it. The compressor can keep running, this won’t take long. If the tank has 90 psi in it, then by filling the equalizer, it has gone down to maybe 88 psi and the air in the equalizer has been raised to 88 psi. The valve into the tank just stays open and the booster pumps most of the air out of the equalizer from 88 to 90 psi to get it into the tank.

By now the big pipe and equalizer is already full again with slightly-compressed atmosphere, so the valve opens again to let tank air in, the booster pumps most of the air from the equalizer into the tank, and on and on till something breaks and the air leaks out.

Let’s say both compressors are run on electricity. The electricity is provided by generators and stored in batteries. The generators are run by an air motor which takes its air from the tank. This is possible because the original pressure is never depleted—the work is all done within the system—and a constant supply of fresh air is entering the tank with its internal energy provided by the sun. It is not perpetual motion, it is a new kind of compressor supplied by a new kind of heat pump cycle.

The analogy of the heat pump is sometimes questioned by people who say a heat pump is (only) a machine you can buy down at Home Depot. From my point-of-view as someone who wants to expand the way that science is taught, a heat pump is any process that upgrades existing thermal energy to make it available to do work. The equalization engine is a heat pump, so naturally it puts out more energy than it uses, like the one down at Home Depot. It is not a perpetual motion concept and I have no interest in perpetual motion and I don’t believe it is possible. The heat pump analogy stands intact, if you take it point-by-point:

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The downhill equalizer is easy to summarize, even for me, Mr. Wordy, because it is such a simple system:

1. Start with a pre-filled tank, filled from any source, to 90 psi for example.
2. After that, the two compressors internal to the system are run indirectly by the air in the tank. An air motor turns a generator which charges the batteries that run the compressors.
3. The charging compressor fills the equalizer with air but not very much pressure, like 2 psi.
4. A two-way valve in the tank addsn tank air to the equalizer so that pressure is the same in tank and equalizer, about 88 psi.
5. The booster piston adds 2 psi to the air to push it back into the tank through the two-way valve.
6. Result: the main compressor is pushing against 2 psi. The booster is pushing from 88 to 90 psi, that’s only 2 psi. So the total compressor work is to resist 4 psi. The tank air is responsible for generating 86 of the total 90 psi. There is no external work involved in the equalization since no energy leaves the tank. This is Joule’s first law; the knowledge that pressure equalization does no external work is old as the hills.
7. The atmosphere that has been added to the tank was compressed by the sun before it was put into the equalizer. This original heat, or ambient heat, or internal energy, adds to the pool of heat available in the tank. It has the power of 90 psi air but the work done to get it into the tank was only a fraction of the work that the same air can do. The source of this extra energy is the sun’s heat.
8. Because of the overunity Coefficient of Performance or COP, an amount of air equal to the atmosphere added can be taken out and used to run an air engine. This engine can run a car or flywheel. The car or flywheel can run a generator. The generator charges the batteries.
9. It sounds like something for nothing but it isn’t. Two underworked compressors and some simple valves manipulate existing energy—the energy already in the tank, and the energy already in the solar-heated atmosphere—so that the cost of keeping the cycle in operation draws free ambient heat into a system that uses ambient heat to run an air engine. Extra air becomes available to run the car or flywheel and other equipment.

CHAIN OF EVENTS LEADING TO THIS INVENTION

I tell people to keep it simple and not try to make a clever invention, but rather a working one. So the principle can be tested quickly before a lot of money gets spent on exotic configurations. My own advice is hard for me to follow; every thinker enjoys devising an ingenious way to kill four or five birds with one stone. It is nearly a compulsion because it’s what makes inventing fun. It took me over 20 years to get this system nailed down to its essential, non-experimental elements so it can be tested by any mechanically inclined person.

First configuration: The 1-cylinder Equalization Engine
Just a compressor, tank and air engine. The compressor takes in atmosphere, then tank air into the same cylinder, then there is a compression stroke back into the tank. Problem: two intake strokes at the same time. The crankshaft doesn’t want to stop for a double intake stroke.

Second configuration: The 4-cycle Air Engine
In a single engine block, each cylinder undergoes first an atmosphere intake stroke, then a compression stroke, then an expansion stroke, then an exhaust stroke. The expansion stroke includes equalization with air from the tank. Problem: maybe none; ask Leroy Rogers. Probably runs well at only a limited range of speeds.

Third configuration: The Surge-Driven Equalizer
In an in-tank equalizer full of atmosphere, tank air suddenly slams into the equalizer and compression heat supposedly drives equalizer higher than tank pressure. Problem: equalization with tank air stops any more air from entering. Because of increasing resistance as pressure increases in the equalizer, motion of air into the equalizer doesn’t overshoot equilibrium and compression heat doesn’t have the desired effect.

Fourth configuration: The Piston-Driven Equalizer
In an in-tank equalizer full of atmosphere, tank air enters the equalizer to raise its pressure. A piston—the movable intake check valve of the equalizer which is really a piston fitted with check valves—pushes the air into the tank and then returns to its original position, taking in fresh atmosphere through its check valves. Problem: piston-balancing forces. Unless the piston pushing the equalizer piston is larger in area or driven by a higher pressure than what’s in the tank, the piston won’t move. It has plenty of power but not enough force.

Fifth configuration: The Heat-Driven Equalizer
In an in-tank equalizer full of atmosphere, an electric heating element drives equalizer pressure well above tank pressure so that the air in the equalizer suddenly blasts en masse into the tank, leaving a low pressure in the equalizer that can now be filled easily by the compressor. Problem: driving equalizer temperature high enough to raise equalizer pressure substantially higher than tank pressure cancels out the whole purpose of the equalization engine concept, which is to eliminate the cost of raising the atmosphere only to tank pressure to get it into the tank. Needing a blast out to empty the equalizer is extra expense.

Sixth configuration: The Downhill Equalizer
In an in-tank equalizer full of atmosphere, mixing tank air into the air in the equalizer raises its pressure to that of the tank. The equalizer air is removed from the equalizer by the suction stroke of a booster compressor and pushed into the tank. Problem: none, the math works. Hasn’t been built yet.

In summary, the downhill equalizer will work and it is easily proven by common sense: pressure equalization compresses incoming atmosphere without any external work and without losses, the atmosphere is just pushed into the system at slight cost and the equalized air in the equalizer is then pumped into the tank at another slight cost. The result is a new kind of air compressor that keeps a tank full using the tank’s own stored energy to accomplish the task, while providing fresh energy to the system in the form of ambient air. This is a self-filling air tank.

P.S.: it’s my fault for inventing the terms, but I’d like to see people get away from using the terminology “Neal Tank” and “self-fueling air engine”. We don’t know how Bob Neal’s self-filling air tank worked, and his ghost wouldn’t tell me. Call my invention a Luther tank if you want; my friends call me Luther and I’d like to start getting credit for my work, at least from my friends. Self-filling air tank is better. “Self-fueling air engine” is wrong because air is not fuel, fuel is something that burns to make heat. So the sun is ultimately its fuel, but indirectly, after rays have heated the earth which heats the air. The air is not fuel or energy but only a medium for thermal energy. I like the term “self-filling air tank” which is not precise but it is descriptive: the air in the tank does the work of putting more air into the tank. Nothing that mysterious about it, they’ve been doing it with steam boilers since 1858.

In closing I’d like to offer absolution to the dozens of website owners who have stolen my writing, my work, and my ideas because my website inspired them to make their own website on compressed air. I’ll take it as a compliment, thank you very much. More power to us all.

Luther

Moving On

2010-04-01T19:45:00.000-07:00

The heat-driven equalizer has a bug in it too. That is the means of emptying it, which is the Kadenacy Effect. In order for this to work, the air in the equalizer has to be heated well above tank pressure so that it will blast en masse into the tank. That leaves a low pressure behind in the equalizer. The problem is that the whole purpose of the equalization engine is cancelled out by having to raise the pressure above tank pressure.

I have found a better way, see the next post.

Luther

Back to Bill Truitt’s “keep ‘em separate” Principle

2010-03-28T18:27:00.000-07:00

The first time I asked Bill Truitt how his air car could keep its own tanks full, he said, “Because there are three separate systems.” The air compressor, the electric generating system, and I think the other one was the plurality of hydraulic air pumps, or the tanks. I didn’t get the point at the time; he wasn’t giving me an answer in terms of the laws of physics that I was referring to. He was giving me practical advice, based on his own experience.

Now that I have experience in trying to devise methods of designing with and around the laws of thermodynamics in order to do something that most people think is impossible, I can tell you that it isn’t easy. What’s easy is to become temporarily deluded, not because of senility (yet) nor insanity (I hope), but because there is always an element of wanting to believe in a good thing, and this causes selective blindness. That’s like wishful thinking but more sophisticated. I hope.

I thought up the equalization engine in 1988 and have been fighting with it, off and on ever since, to try and get it to yield a simple practical manifestation. Some arrangement of hardware that can be expected to actually work. It has always been my ideal to try and work with strictly pneumatic processes, for a variety of reasons. Mainly because transforming to electric or anything but air has losses, so if it can all be done with air, it should be. But Bill Truitt wasn’t afraid of working with electricity; he seemed to think it was necessary.

Many times I have sat down to put the equalization engine in hardware, on paper, and ended up with extravagant processes, pistons in tanks, compressors in tanks, etc. It’s all OK, I don’t mind. But my job isn’t to design something that neither I nor anyone else is going to understand without an hour or two of studying drawings and spreadsheets. As an advocate of compressed air it’s my job to get the point across in a few moments, because that’s all the time you’re going to get from qualified technical people who have all, without very many exceptions, been trained to consider compressed air a finished science and a loser of energy.

So here’s the problem with the piston that operates the delivery stroke of the equalized air into the tank. This problem keeps cropping up and I keep forgetting it, then as happened today it suddenly re-enters the atmosphere of my imagination, a place that is crowded with enthusiasm generated by work equations that work. With an overunity COP from a seemingly robust spreadsheet, I had once again forgotten about PISTON BALANCING FORCES.

The work needed to get the equalized air back into the tank is tiny. The piston needed to do it is big! Why the seeming paradox? The problem is caused by assumptions, naturally. The assumption that pressure is energy. It isn’t; a little energy is used, but that doesn’t mean a little piston will do it. The assumption that the piston idea has to work because it should work because I want it to work. Not. The assumption that whatever size the piston is, then the energy it handles is all supposed to be useful. Not that either.

What really happens in the design as previously depicted, with the piston outside the tank pushing the equalized air mass out of the equalizer into the tank, is nothing. Unless the piston is bigger than the equalizer in area, or uses a higher pressure from some other source, it won’t move. The tank air pushing the piston will cause it to shift slightly, until the pressure is the same in tank and piston, and then it will stop, and not budge. There are many times more energy available in the piston, or would be if we could get air into it, than what is needed to push 197 psi air from the equalizer into the 200 psi tank. That’s actually part of the problem. Since the piston has to be bigger than the equalizer in area in order for it to move, and a lot bigger if you want it to move fast, the amount of air being “used” (but not expended) has to be put back into the tank. It can be done, but not simply. A genius could figure out how to do it simply, but then there’s me standing between the genius and the result.

Using a high pressure air source is another bugaboo I want to avoid. It also could be made to work, and Bill Truitt was doing it too. But here’s my goal: make it seeable in three seconds of some engineer’s precious time, or some fundraiser’s precious time. That’s how much time they are going to give to it. The experimental stuff comes later, when someone has funded the Subgenius Compressed Air Research Facility (SCARF). That someone won’t stop to study the plans, with my limited or nonexistent powers of persuasion, unless I give it to them simply.

The complication of the piston that needs to be big to do a job that is small and then makes us design around not wanting to throw away a big piston-full of air. It’s probably the sort of design problem that got Bill Truitt to name his car an Electro-Pneumatic Air Car. Because that’s what the electric component can do. Forget the piston with its moving parts, its air eating ways, and worst of all, its tendency to balance against the tank pressure. Ideals like “all air” are for that research institute I just mentioned. As I lecture to my eager audience all the time, trying to combine all your best ideas into one actual machine spells doom for your first several tests, and most tests don’t make it past the first several tests because of financial constraints, time constraints, family obligations, lack of patience, lack of knowledge or skill, etc. Brilliance is for people who already have money, time, a supportive family, lots of patience, and a solid technical background. For the rest of us, we wanna-be inventors, the place to start is with the simplest possible way that your most important concept can be proven, and never mind the bells, whistles, and movie rights.

In the case of the last two steps, the part the piston was supposed to do, once you get rid of the moving parts which won’t get out of the way, you eliminate the problem. The energy that air uses is heat. Compressing air isn’t the only way to heat it. Try heating it directly with electricity. No moving parts to get in the way. Proven technology. Electric resistance heating will solve both problems, the two final steps:

1. Getting the equalized air—the two joined air masses—out of the equalizer into the tank by adding a few psi to the equalized result.
2. Getting ALL the equalized air out of the equalizer so that the next filling of atmosphere to go into the equalizer will be a whole equalizer full of air. Volumetric efficiency should be close to 100% or it will have a trickle-down effect of negatively influencing everything else that is supposed to happen.

Electric resistance heating is a 100% efficient way of wasting electricity on purpose, thus 100% inefficient but perfectly effective at what it is supposed to do. All the electricity turns into heat; resistance is friction. Unlike the piston it replaces, enough is enough. There’s no piston balancing forces problem forcing you to use more than you want, and it all happens right in the equalizer where it should. No extra valves. No moving parts. After the equalization has taken place inside the equalizer, heat the air and away it goes into the tank.

In order to get ALL the air out of the equalizer, the discharge check valve would need a strong spring so that pressure has to build up way past tank pressure before the valve can open. Better yet, have the valve operated by a mechanical method instead of a spring, so its time of opening and closing can both be controlled and varied experimentally. If the valve just opens a little, air will remain in the equalizer and it will never empty. The air has to empty all at once, en masse, as a unit, a burst. Then the equalizer will be fairly empty and will accept a full charge of new air. This is the Kadenacy effect. The tailpipe on the equalizer can be sized and shaped to tune this effect, just like a two-stroke motorcycle engine.

A check valve on the equalizer discharge is probably not suitable. It presents a substantial blockage and because of the spring, it will want to close as soon as the equalizer is partially relieved of its air. It can’t make experimentation easy, when you have to take the tank apart to change the spring. The valve that opens the discharge part of the equalizer has to be adjustable from outside of the tank so that many experiments can be done in a few hours. Otherwise it won’t get done. Design it this way from the start. The port has to be big. The valve has to open fast and get out of the way, not present a constriction or blockage. Scavenging—complete emptying of the equalizer—is dependent on how fast the valve opens, the pressure differential between the inside of the equalizer and the tank, and the size and shape of the tailpipe. With the valve open, it should be open wide at the back, like a pulsejet.

I have actually seen this principle work with water, in a toy steam boat that used a coil of aluminum tubing heated by a candle to create a periodic outward bursting that drove the boat forward and left behind a suction in the tube that drew in a fresh water supply. Air is harder since it’s compressible, so the valve is needed to make the air build up enough pressure to give it a blasting outward effect when the valve suddenly opens. There is plenty of information on the Kadenacy effect in my book The Piston Made of Air.

The same thing works with water, even through a check valve in a pump that drives water uphill with heat only. Between two check valves heat is applied. It is an acoustic principle so tapping the pipe with a screwdriver might be necessary to get it started. Details are available from Roy Phillips of ABCO. A key word you can search is Fluidyne. The Metal Box Company in Calcutta, India had a large pump operating this way at one time. One of my books contains a chapter about the Fluidyne pump which was a little more complicated but worked on the same principle.

Before you start putting electricity into an air tank I hope you know what you’re doing or hire someone to do it for you. I am not going to say one word about how to assure you don’t electrocute yourself, because it is your responsibility to do it right so no one gets hurt. Conduits, sealing problems, controls, etc. Moisture may be a problem, or it might be helpful since steam is more expansive than air.

The spreadsheet will show how much electricity is required to drive the pressure in the equalizer up to tank pressure, then how to drive it up to a pressure that will be able to induce more air in through the Kadenacy effect. I don’t know the math for the Kadenacy effect, and I’m guessing on electricity since I have never done calculations with it.

Here’s the link for the new spreadsheet:

(not done yet)

Luther

Pressure Equalization Calculations

2010-03-22T01:16:00.000-07:00

(For a properly formatted version you can download, copy this URL to your browser:
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-DQiVAbbA7WZGU0ZjY4MmEtNzNiOS00NTI3LThlN2MtODk0MDNkMWMyMjBm&hl=en

Two initial conditions add up to a third condition, and each of these conditions is represented mathematically by a constant like PV/T.

The combined gas law is P1V1/T1 = P2V2/T2 = P3V3T3 etc.

The shortcut version, derived from a chain of steps, that pertains to pressure equalization, is:

P1V1/T1 + P2V2/T2 = PV/T for full equalization.

Unbalanced equalization has the same sum constant PV/T but the thermal effects don’t equalize as fast as the pressure effects:

PaVa/Ta + PbVb/Tb = PcVc/Tc + PdVd/Td = PV/T

Once the six values of the initial condition of the two air masses to be mixed are filled in on the equation, the next step is to find the equalized pressure. This is the same for both tank and equalizer. The advantage of the in-tank equalizer is that this pressure is reached quicker in thisway; compression heat becomes a savable quantity.

The next step is to use the adiabatic equation to find the final tank temperature, after unbalanced equalization—not waiting for thermal equalization. The form of the adiabatic equation to use is the one that solves for final temperature in terms of pressure change and the index n = 1.406. The pressure change is known since full pressure equalization is a stopping place.

With final tank temperature known and reflecting adiabatic compression, there is only one more unknown and it can be found using the combined gas laws or preferably the shortcut version derived for mixing problems. This gives final equalizer temperature.

With these instructions and examples shown in the worksheet, anyone can design a miracle machine that compresses air WITH the tank pressure instead of AGAINST IT.

The equalization engine relies on a large difference between the volume of the tank and the equalizer, so with all else being equal, using a smaller equalizer or a larger tank will increase the COP.

COP is the proportion of work made available compared to the work used to make it available. A Coefficient of Performance over 1 indicates success.

Let me know if you have any questions, criticism, suggestions, or improvements that you want to see added to the Pneumatic Options Research Library.

Luther

The Equalization Engine

2010-03-22T01:14:00.000-07:00

In 1988, shortly before a friend introduced me to someone who told me about Bob Neal’s “equalizer”, I was already trying to build a device which I was calling an “equalizer”. I now call this device the Equalization Engine. I just like the way it sounds; it’s really a compression unit including an air engine, an air compressor, and an equalizer in the tank.

I don’t know how Bob Neal’s equalizer worked. This is my idea and I haven’t seen anything like it anywhere. By putting it online I am aware that it goes into the public domain. Some people use the public domain status of an idea as an excuse to not credit the idea’s originator, and those people have their conscience as a companion. I don’t have time to pursue them, so I have to take it as a compliment that large sections of my website have been lifted wholesale and pasted into the websites of others. Some of these websites are prettier than mine, but my website is about compressed air, not about display.

The equalization engine process was at first supposed to be situated in the compressor, but as it turned out, there would have to be two intake strokes, so that makes it a 4-cycle engine. That’s been done by Leroy Rogers and maybe others, and there are problems with it; it works best at certain favored speeds and at other speeds it disappoints. The same will be true of my self-filling air tank but by not trying to kill too many birds with one stone, by keeping separate systems separate rather than dependent on each other for proper functioning, and by not trying to design the cleverest possible configuration as a first working model, I hope that a machine can be built cheaply that is easy to test and modify.

It’s so simple that for many years I didn’t bother to draw it. After a normal intake stroke, the compressor cylinder is full of atmosphere. Freeze action—that’s the problem; it really requires a separate intake stroke—while the cylinder is equalized with full tank pressure. The atmosphere jumps up in pressure and temperature while the tank barely loses a few psi, if that much, and drops maybe a few degrees in temperature. The compression stroke now proceeds, but after maybe 5% of the stroke, the air has already reached full tank pressure and the rest of the compression stroke is just constant pressure delivery, not PV change work. The compression is mostly done by tank air, while the compressor only moves atmosphere into the system.

To avoid the complication of a compressor with two intake strokes, the current design keeps the compressor and equalizing chamber separate. The equalizer is in the tank where it belongs, so that the compression taking place in it can’t dissipate heat anywhere but back into the tank. The intake check valve to the equalizer is really a piston with holes in it plugged with check valve members so air can go in through the piston when the piston is moving backward on the atmosphere intake stroke. But during the equalization with tank air, nothing can leave the equalizer. After equalization, the lateral supply valve that communicates tank air to equalizer closes and the intake check valve/piston is pushed toward the discharge check valve which is fixed in the pipe. Just before the two check valve members touch, the linear air motor that reciprocates the moving check valve/piston member stops and a spring returns the piston. With the piston moving backward its check valve opens and atmosphere fills the equalizer as its volume grows back to maximum.

These events have to be controlled by the usual means such as cam-operated valves. That part isn’t designed yet, and I encourage designers to prove the concept first before trying anything fancy. Mechanical operators are foolproof once you get them working right, till they wear out. Proving the concept, for anyone that works on this, is a high priority prerequisite compared to proving how clever a designer you are. There isn’t much to operating valves mechanically, it’s just common sense, but if you start trying to design logic circuits either pneumatical or electronic, then you are building bugs into the device that will distract you from getting to the finish line quick. The quicker you get something built that you can show to potential resource people, the less is the likelihood that you will end up with a “promising but unfinished” bucket of excuses begging for financial assistance. On the other hand, a simple machine can be built with your own money and can be gotten to work correctly. Any smart capitalist will be much more impressed with a simple equalization engine that works, than with a fancy one that “should” work. Unless you have a glib and charming personality, forget about getting someone else to pay for your working model. Only sharks normally take that bait, and they end up owning you.

I’ll be happy to work with anyone who wants to do this, as I can find the time. I don’t do exclusive partnerships, just keep it fun and make it work. I don’t sign on to anyone else’s agenda and I don’t expect anyone to sign on to mine. I can only hope that successful exploitation of my ideas will result in the proceeds being shared with me. I have put it in the public domain in hopes that more people will attempt it. It’s a numbers game: the more trying there is, the greater the likelihood of success. Inventors don’t expect success on the first or second try; quitters do, they set it up that way. Inventors make it work.

Canned Thunder: Yes. Surge-Driven Equalizer: No.

2010-03-22T01:11:00.000-07:00

I have to make a retraction of what has gone before so I can clear the way for better idealizations of the in-tank equalizer.

The idea that a surge of tank energy will drive the equalizer pressure above tank pressure seems wrong once viewed in the context of this simple law of nature: a lower pressure gas doesn’t spontaneously flow into a higher pressure. I got hooked on the idea that equalization with tank air would cause the equalizer and tank air to arrive at equilibrium, which would then be bypassed in the equalizer because of the heat of compression. It is a superficial idea based on not thinking critically enough.

What really happens is that compression heating in the equalizer does take place when tank air slams into the equalizer, but it contributes to the pressure rise in the equalizer that only reaches the point of equilibrium and stops. My analogy of the pendulum is wrong because the pendulum does not encounter an increasing resistance as it moves toward the equilibrium point.

I could blame senility but it was really just carelessness and wishful thinking, wanting to be the discoverer of a new scientific principle.

That hasn’t changed so I’ll just say that the pressure equalization equations I have been learning are still valuable to the continuation of my work or play. Now that I know that the immediate result of mixing air masses results in equal pressures in both containers—barring other influences—the equations I was working on are now much better as there is no longer any fill-in-the-blank value throwing wishful guesswork into the math. Final tank and equalizer pressure are now equal and easy to solve. The only manually filled-in values are now the initial values of both vessels. The math might still be simplistic from an engineering viewpoint but I think it’s a solid starting place for now. I have to work on the dynamics of flow per time, it is something I’ve never studied.

I have plenty of ideas for new cheaper ways to compress air, aided by the existing pressure in a pre-filled tank and a second much smaller tank or equalizer inside the tank that is fed by a compressor that works against lowered resistance, not against tank pressure. My favorite right now is a movable intake check valve to the equalizer, comprising a piston with a check valve in it. After equalization, an outside energy source pushes the equalized air the rest of the way into the tank. This comprises a compression stroke that is mostly delivery so the PV change work is very small.

I have worked out the math on that so will put it on the blog. I will post the simplified equations for unbalanced pressure equalization too, since it’s still true that thermal effects take longer to even out than pressure equalization which takes place more quickly, or very quickly in an application like this where the two vessels are much different in size and initial pressure.

The most interesting aspect of unbalanced equalization is that if done in the tank as I suggest, the heat of compression is easy to conserve. That has always been the real ideal of what I’m working toward. A cheap way to compress air.

Thanks to everybody for their comments.

Luther

Forum Discussion about the Surge-Driven Equalizer

2010-03-17T23:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to what engineers have to say about my idea. So far not much, but I want to be objective, since I haven't built this yet, and present both sides.

I would encourage anyone who wants to build it to not use me as their only source of information. Better to waste a lot of time figuring out the math than to waste a lot of money building something to better understand it. A failed test with compressed air has invisible results unless you can afford several sensors and know how to use them.

As you can see by my latest response, I haven't changed my mind despite skepticism. If I am proven wrong, I'll just improve the idea.

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/51516

Luther