That’s nothing! I saw a video on MSNBC.COM a couple months ago demonstrating a car that runs on ordinary water! I wrote to the MSNBC science editor twice imploring them to take that ridiculous video off their web site. They finally did take it off, only because they needed to make room for something equally stupid — or ---- maybe it was a cover up by “Big Oil.” All depends on your point of view.
Perpetual motion? Escher had that figured out years ago.
You can run a car on water - if you throw some calcium carbide in the tank before you ‘gas it up’ with water.
CaC2 + 2 H2O => C2H2 + Ca(OH)2
You probably did this in high school chemistry class. It is the formula for acetylene made from water and calcium carbide. As near as I can figure, the cost would be roughly equivalent to $100/gallon gasoline. Sounds pricey, but it is a rich source of revenue for scam artists looking for ‘investors’ who think they can get rich by investing in a water-powered car.
We all know that Isaac Newton worked for Exxon-Mobile.
This is what they did 100 years ago to generate the acetylene for the headlights on those old cars.
He seemed to think that each wheel would have a compressor that would recharge the air tank. I tried to explain the concepts of efficiency, drag, etc, and that you can’t get more out of a process than you put into it unless you are splitting atoms, but he still insisted that it was possible and, in fact, had already been built. Truth is that they have been built but it requires periodic recharging of the air tanks and has very limited range and speed. There are electric cars that do better and all you have to do is plug them in to an electrical source, instead of looking around for a high-pressure air compressor.
A French company had developed a compressed air car. Tata (an Indian conglomerate who makes cars among many other things) had either licensed or bought outright the design, and from what I'd read it may even be on the market now. But, it's DEFINITELY not a perpetual motion device -- it relies on hooking it up to an air compressor to recharge the compressed air. Possibly it can regenerate, pumping a little air back in when braking or slowing down... but that is not going to even approach breaking even (and, really, is no different than the regenerative braking on electric or hybrid cars, which noone would claim makes them perpetual motion machines.)Hi all,
There is a “Stirling engine” that runs on temp’ changes, I have seen one running and it looks like perpetual motion.
Not quite - you have to have an energy source to generate the temp changes. Here’s a good short explanation in Wikipedia. Note that you have to have a hot and a cold side.
You seem to already know the answer. No truth to it.
While there are multiple ways to “get back” some typically wasted energy (Counter-Electro-Moto-Force Braking, compressed-air recharge while braking or going down hill.) You always lose some to the 2nd Law going into 1 of the 2 directions and 99.9999% of the time you lose in both directions (making exceptions to super-fluids, super-conductors, 0K situations, etc.)
You can have self-charging/fueling/compressing vehicles during braking or going downhill, etc. etc… But there is always a loss so you don’t get it all back. 49% would be pretty remarkable and 100% impossible.