The Physics Behind the 9

7/30/2019 The Physics Behind the 9

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The Physics Behind the 9/11/01 Attacks

First realized on 9/11/01 but not presented until May 2011

Usama bin Laden would have been a fool to only plan to kill the 3,000people he caused to die on 9/11/01. He was smarter than that. He clearly

intended to cause at least 50,000 people to die in New York that day

and possibly close to 70,000 people total, more than twenty times the

number of people he actually caused to die on that day.

In other words, as he watched the newscasts of the events of that day,

Usama bin Laden had to see each of the four attacks as DISMAL

FAILURES on that day, and he must have been extremelydisappointed!.

The events which occurred on 9/11/01 were terrible, but they werenowhere near as horrific as what Usama bin Laden had certainly plannedto occur. All four attacks were actually essentially FAILURES fromwhat UBL had wanted to cause, and so all four had to be extremedisappointments to UBL.

However, President Bush and others in the US government reacted so

hysterically on that day, that the PERCEPTION of events were

described as so horrific that clearly UBL soon discovered that he liked

the notoriety he was getting! Not bad for having planned attacks whichwere actually each failures! The fact that EVERY news broadcast wasmentioning the name Usama bin Laden at least 25 times was creating acelebrity for UBL that he clearly did not deserve!

It was truly unfortunate that there was no genuine scientist close to Bushand Cheney then. But it probably would not have mattered as Cheney wasalready making plans to attack Iraq and Afghanistan and Bush had madevery clear three months earlier (in a televised news conference with the

Prime Minister Goran Persson of Sweden on June 14, 2001) that he hatedSadam Hussein for having tried to "kill my daddy". As I watched that pressconference, the EXPRESSION on Bush's face as he expressed his hatred ofSaddam caused me to say to two friends "My God! We are going to invadeIraq!" That was THREE MONTHS BEFORE the events of 9/11/01!

At the time I had a long-term friendship with Peter Jennings of ABCNews, but that was the only day of more than ten years of knowing Peterthat he seemed so distraught that he seemed beyond the logic which I had

normally shared with him. Some of Peter's dear friends had just died in theTwin Towers disasters, and I did not see how I could present the followinglogic to him on that day. On any later day, it would have been too late

because the hysteria had spread everywhere even by the end of that day. So

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the fact that I could not convince anyone ON THAT DAY to describe theattacks as FAILURES, made it pointless to consider describing this on anylater day. So I waited until today, just after the death of UBL, where hewill not now ever be able to admit these failures in a deathbed confession.This was first realized on 9/11/01 but not presented anywhere. This presentation was first placed on the Internet in May 2011.

The best I accomplished with Peter was to encourage him to minimize the number of times he said the name

Usama bin Laden in each broadcast, where I got Peter to generally refer to UBL instead. Peter realized that aperson who had been nearly unknown a day earlier was now being made into a world celebrity, which Irecommended to Peter to try to minimize. Nearly always after that, Peter referred to UBL, which Iconsidered about the best I could hope for.

What was so wrong in the perceptions of the time?

Either Tower

UBL clearly intended and expected to KNOCK EACH BUILDING

OVER. He clearly knew that if a giant building with around 10,000 peopleinside it fell over in a few seconds, and LANDED ON all buildings withinthree blocks (the extreme height of those towers was roughly equal to threehorizontal city blocks), he could kill maybe 20,000 people INSTANTLY, formaximum terror effect. A couple hundred IN the airliner, ten thousand IN thetower and another ten thousand in buildings and stores that would get landedon. An airplane still nearly full of jet fuel (only having used up a smallamount of fuel by then in the short flight from Boston) would also have addeda spray of burning Jet Fuel onto other nearby buildings which were notdirectly landed on.

In other words, between the two buildings, it is realistic that UBLexpected to kill at least 50,000 people just in New York. The REALITYwas that only around 2,000 people were killed there, and many of themactually had a valid chance of getting out of the buildings in the hour and ahalf before they each collapsed.

TWO thousand instead of FIFTY THOUSAND? That was a dismal failure compared to what UBL hadplanned and expected. THAT should have been a true disappointment for UBL.

My thought was that THAT MORNING, the US government and all news media SHOULD HAVE

referred to the two buildings as terrible BUT AS FAILURES regarding trying to kill the 50,000 that

was clearly intended!

IF all news broadcasts repeated that, of the attacks being FAILURES, then the worldwide celebrity createdfor UBL would never have happened. He would have been seen as a terrorist who planned big, but who hadDISMALLY FAILED in what he had intended to do.

NO "terrorist genius" as was promoted. A "loser" who was able to kill a lot of people, but not nearly

what he had intended or expected.

THAT would have enormously changed the course of the next ten years! Thousands of people would NOT

have wanted to follow a LOSER, where they DID want to follow the "genius" UBL.

WHY would UBL have expected that? An airliner is a HEAVY object, on the order of 350,000 pounds, ofwhich around 150,000 pounds was flammable Jet fuel, AND it is traveling at around 500 mph. Fortunately,UBL was not a good scientist and he apparently did not have any good scientists around him. A POOR

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scientist might have tried to calculate the IMPACT of a 350,000-pound object moving at 500 mph against atall building, and might have told UBL that it would knock the building over.

Actually, that was a realistic expectation IF airliners were built to be sturdy! But in order to fly, airliners areessentially made to be like big empty beer cans, which crumpled up with far less resulting impact to the

building. Only parts like the engines, which were structurally more solid, would have tended to go throughthe buildings. The buildings both shivered but did not get knocked over. When UBL saw that neither of the

buildings got knocked over, he must have been very disappointed. HE HAD FAILED!

Fortunately for UBL, the American government and news media reacted with wild hysteria, where the resultwas that he managed to cause nearly as much "terror" as he had hoped to create. WE caused most of that!Again, if we had the insights to be referring to the 9/11 attacks as FOUR FAILURES, the overall importanceof it all would have been far less than our hysteria made it.

Again, it was truly unfortunate that Cheney and Bush both WANTED to create as much hysteria and terroras possible for the attacks they wanted to justify in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Any careful examination of the LOGIC clearly establishes these facts. IF UBL had wanted to TRAP

thousands of people inside the buildings, he would have instructed the pilots to aim much lower when hittingthe buildings. If several lower floors were destroyed and on fire, many more thousand people would havebeen trapped to die in the buildings. The fact that both airliners hit rather high on the buildings makes clearthat was NOT the intention! UBL had no way of knowing that each building might pancake an hour and ahalf later, and if they had not, or if fire suppression equipment could have worked, only a few hundred

people might have died in the two Towers. UBL would NOT have planned that when he had to realize that ifhe could have knocked both buildings over, he might have killed around 50,000 people that day.

To try to knock the buildings over, UBL had to realize that it was more effective to hit the buildingsrelatively high, for maximum LEVERAGE to try to break the buildings loose from the ground. And bothairliners DID hit relatively high.

It is also significant that both airliners had been given a flight path where they would hit the buildings flat-on from a side, and not from a corner. Again, this increases the leverage of the impact. Both flights alsoapproached from over the East River, where there were no other tall buildings in the way, so they each hadrather clear views of essentially the entire buildings. IF they had wanted to, both buildings could have beenhit relatively low, IF the desire was actually to cause fire and trap people above the destroyed floors.

So, for UBL to have PLANNED things to go as they did that day would have been immensely foolish. Hadthe buildings not later pancaked due to the effects of fire, there might have been more people killed insidethe airliners than in New York City on that day! He CLEARLY intended and expected to be able to knock

both buildings over. Al Qaeda has shown itself for wanting to try to get maximum media attention for its

actions, such as making movies of beheading people, and the videos of the two giant buildings beingknocked over and landing on many other buildings would have been far more in line with what they seem totry to do. That WOULD HAVE BEEN even more impressive and horrific than what we all watched thatday, but as it was, UBL MUST HAVE BEEN very disappointed at first. Only our hysterical reactions gavethe impression that UBL was smart or that he had designed an effective act of terrorism.

Pentagon

I have always considered the attack on the Pentagon as being easily describable as a failure. Yes, a FEWpeople were killed inside the Pentagon, but not enough to make any big claims over. A very small portion of

an extremely sturdy building was damaged, barely even affecting activities inside most of the building.Again, if the New York attacks had already been being described as failures, the Pentagon attack wouldhave easily fit right in there.


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Pennsylvania Airliner

As to a clear and dismal failure, as far as UBL was concerned, that fourth airliner certainly was it. It nevereven got near whatever intended target it had in Washington, when the heroic passengers took matters intotheir own hands. In fact, IF the four attacks had been described as all dismal failures, the Pennsylvaniaairliner would have added the punctuation, of showing the heroism of American passengers!

In other words, by the end of 9/11/01, we SHOULD HAVE been all be expressing Thanks to the Lord forthe fact that only 3,000 victims died that day instead of close to 100,000 that UBL certainly had planned andhad intended to celebrate, AND we should have been CELEBRATING those hero passengers on thePennsylvania airliner as well as the NYC Firefighters who had gone INTO the two towers to try to save

people.

Yes, it WAS a terrible day for us. It should NOT have been anywhere near as terrible as our hysteria causedit to be. And IF the American public had been told, and explained as above, that we were LUCKY thatONLY 3,000 people were killed instead of the 100,000 or more that UBL had planned, we MIGHT haveseen some cause to feel some comfort.

Unfortunately, that is NOT how it all proceeded, as we all know.

I had always hoped that UBL might have someday ADMITTED that 9/11/01 had not gone anywhere near ashe had planned, but now that he has been killed, we will never hear him admit that. I suppose there is aremote chance that one of those computer hard drives that the Seals collected from his compound mightinclude some hint about that, but I doubt if UBL would have kept around anything for ten years that mighthave suggested he was not the miracle-worker that the world had credited him as being. Given that he got somuch unexpected "credit" for genius thinking, worldwide, he probably would never have admitted it toanyone anyway. In retrospect, in the long run, it all came out about as well as he might have hoped.

Shortly after 9/11, when my dear friend Peter Jennings was clearly so distraught, I made a foolish commentto him. I was trying to calm him down with my usual logic, but clearly did not! I tried to present some of thescience which he knew me for. I tried to point out that the US has around 310 million people, and that weeach have an expected lifetime of around 75 years or about 28,000 days. I tried to show the math division forhim to show that it turns out that EVERY DAY in the US, approximately 11,000 Americans die (mostly ofnatural causes, but of accidents and illnesses, etc). I thought that I should try to tell Peter that on 9/11, thetotal effect was that around 14,000 died instead of the normal 11,000. I was trying to remove the thought of"3000 died today when NO ONE normally does". Peter knew me well enough to know that I MEANTWELL in that comment, but the fact that some of his dear friends had just died in those acts of terrorism did

NOT allow "logic and science" to have any place that day.

UBL was NOT remotely the genius that pundits gave him the credit of being.

Making Electricity

Make All Your Own GREEN Electricity

Convert Solar, Wind, Water and other types of GREEN Energy

Sources into electricity, with high efficiency

First invented early 2003. Enhanced 2010 Text Font


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There are three processes necessary for this system;

First: Collect sunlight (IF that is the desiredsource) and convert it into warmth of air (like in a

closed car with a black interior, or in agreenhouse-like structure with a black floor.(Traditionally, people have assumed that theyneeded GREAT HEAT, and that is fine, but it turnsout that such conversions are generally rather

inefficient. This device is designed to use LOW,LOW, LOW pressure air (or water), but in largequantities. You already know that that car with a

black interior can heat up to being unbearable hot(actually around 140F) in an hour of summersunlight. A fairly small 16-foot (5-meter) squaregreenhouse-like collection structure is discussedhere. Since bright sunlight contains about 100

Watts of energy per square foot or 1,000 Wattsof energy per square meter, that means we aretalking about receiving around 25 kiloWatts ofsunlight on reasonably sunny days. 92% efficiencyof conversion is easy, (resulting in 23.6 kiloWatts

of heat energy)

Note: I generally refer to 'greenhouse-like'structure. Please cut me some slack in that phrase!

A BLACK closed car or a BLACK closed semi trailercan quickly become very hot due to sunlight. NOGLASS IS ACTUALLY NECESSARY! In fact, ifconventional construction sidewalls and northwall

are used, they could possibly have thermalinsulation in those walls to have LESS thermal heat

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loss than single-strength glass panels have (whichis a terrible R-1 insulation level). So even though Iconstantly refer to 'greenhouse-like structure', no

actual glass is necessary in any of it! The TOP

surface could be a conventional 2x4 and plywoodconstruction, covered by either black asphaltdriveway coating or the black FELT material thatis used under normal roofing shingles. All WE need

to do is to ABSORB solar heating over a decentarea, and then let that heat get INSIDE the

structure to warm up the air we have trappedinside! See?

Make sure that the chamber is sealed, so thiscreates a slightly increased air pressure. If you

warm the air by just 17F [or 10C] you are raising

the absolute temperature by about one part in

thirty (75F up to 92F or 298C up to 308C). Itrust that you see that it should be easy to raisesome air up to 92F. According to the Ideal Gas

Laws, in a constant volume chamber, the pressure

therefore also increases by about the same factor,up from the natural 14.7 PSI to 15.2 PSI, or

around 0.5 PSI increase.

Second: Use that slight pressure increase over aVERY large area, using something called Pascal'sLaw, to raise heavy weights so they then can then

fall and make a shaft rotate. 96% efficiency ofconversion is reasonable (we still now have 22.5

kiloWatts of mechanical rotary motion)

Third: This thing only rotates around 15 times per


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minute, as it is driven by gravity, and we need tomultiply the speed of rotation. The cheapest andsimplest way is to make a really big pulley to be

able to spin the pulleys on one or more standard

car alternator(s) (which having SMALL pulleys, wecan multiply the spinning speed by thirty to onepretty easily. (That is, a 48-inch diameter plywooddrive pulley driving a 1.5-inch diameter pulley on a

car alternator). (You can also use a much moreexpensive gear-train-drive to do this). So we can

now cause the car alternator(s) to spin at 450 rpm(or faster if you make an even larger pulley), fastenough to make electricity. 75% efficiency of the

belt and pulley and alternator is common. (We nowstill have 3 to 17 kiloWatts of electricityproduced)

This device can be built with around $150 ofnew materials!

The device described here can be built in a daywith simple tools by nearly anyone. I referredto a greenhouse-like structure, but that isactually not part of this actual invention, since

there are HUNDREDS of ways to create such alow-pressure supply of warm air. (In the 1920sand 1930s, there were hundreds of PatentsGranted on a wide variety of devices which cansupply the slightly compressed air).

Your (American) family likely uses around 15kiloWatt-hours of electricity in a given 24-hourday, so just one hour of sunlight is all you might


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then need (per day) (using around 15 standard carbatteries for storage and a bunch of caralternators.)! More practically, you may decide to

only use one or two alternators to generate one or

two KiloWatts of electricity, and do that for 8hours of sunlight, but that is up to you.

I have discovered that virtually no one realizeswhat a minimal pressure this device works on! The0.5 PSI pressure differential it was designed to

use is the same as the natural pressuredifferential which occurs when your barometergoes from 29.50" up to 30.50". That is not really

common but it does occur naturally! It is alsocomparable to the pressure that YOU producewhen you blow up a balloon! It is a very minimal airpressure differential! It does not require an

industrial air compressor! Or any air compressor atall! However, it uses a LOT of air at that lowpressure. It turns out that Pressure Differentialtimes Volume determines how much power is

available, and since we have conceded using verylow pressure, we need a lot of air to produce a lot

of electricity. Got it?

Actually, there appears to be a credible possibilitythat natural differences in atmospheric pressuresuch as due to altitude might be used to power

such a device. Also, the temperature differentialbetween an underground chamber and an above-

ground chamber can power this, even without anysun or wind! So can the Chimney Effect whichnaturally produces Draft in a fireplace or stove


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chimney. Maybe not a zillion ways to produce theslightly pressurized air, but close.

The public is significantly deceived about how

wonderful that Utility-supplied alternative energywill be. The fact that giant Corporations are sofocused on being involved in solar or wind or algaeor geothermal sources of electricity should tell you

something, that they expect to make billions ofdollars of profits from such efforts! The News

Reports and advertising and promotion always makeit sound like they are investing in such researchbecause they are so wonderful regarding caring

about customers, but the reality is that they reallyjust want to try to maintain the monopoly thatthey currently have regarding supplying electricityand heating fuels and gasoline, so their billions of

annual profits can continue. As long as few peoplecan and will make their own supplies, their futureprofits are secure. But a recent (4/25/2012) newsreport out of Japan provides useful information

for us consumers. Remember that you currentlyprobably pay about 8 cents to 10 cents per

kiloWatt-hour for your electricity, plus asignificant amount for "delivery costs" and a

variety of taxes to get your actual cost up to

around 15 cents per kWh. And that the wholesalecost of the electricity is even cheaper between

providers and Utility companies, commonly in therange of 5 cents per kWh. So the new News

Report from Japan should get your attention! Theymention that the Japanese government now


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expects the (wholesale) cost of electricity to be asfollows, which figures to happen very soon in Japandue to all their nuclear power plants now being

closed down after the tsunami of 2011: Electricity

from solar will be 52 cents per kWh; electricityfrom wind (tower turbines) will be 28 cents perkWh; and electricity from geothermal (due toJapan being in an earthquake zone in the Ring of

FIre) will be 34 cents per kWh. Add in the deliverycharges and the taxes and we can see this

represents a ten-fold increase in the cost ofelectricity!

These web-pages are intended to enable eachperson to be able to provide their own electricityand other Utilities, whether from solar or wind ordecomposing organic materials or from other

sources, where the cost then drops to ZERO centsper kWh. We see solid logic in this, as long as theinitial cost is not too high and there is not massivelabor involved in using such devices to produce

electricity or heat or pure water or refrigerationor air conditioning or other important utilities.

One version of this system was first invented early in 2003. It was very complex in construction. It was extensively re-designed during the last half of 2010, where the

Configuration described here is the 33rd different version of the new device. This presentation on this Configuration was first placed on the Internet in April 2011. I do NOT

give any manufacturer any authorization to use this invention unless I have given written authorization, as related to a written and signed contractual arrangement. But I

authorize ANY INDIVIDUAL to build one or two such devices for personal use.

You can entirely eliminate your dependence on the Electrical Power Grid! That would eliminate theneed for anyone burning coal (fossil fuel) which is used to produce most of (51%) the electricity in the US.This simple device can use any of dozens of different energy sources, so you COULD use solar energy orwind energy or moving or flowing water, or even simpler and more readily available sources of energy suchas slight differences in atmospheric air pressure!


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I have invented something that SHOULD HAVE BEEN INVENTED 300 years ago! Isaac Newtonknew enough to come up with this. So did Daniel Bernoulli. Blaise Pascal certainly did! It is too bad thatthey had not, as the Industrial Revolution might have then been very different, without the massivedependence on coal, then later petroleum, then uranium, and then natural gas. The planet might still havemost of those natural resources now!

This is a side view of the standard-sized, four-foot square, rotating cube-shaped air cylinder of this device. Thevery large FIXED air ducts which needto slide connect to the (four) notches inthe side are not installed in this phototo be able to see the cube. This photoalso does not show the cube's top or

bottom panels. The two lower notchesreceive a large amount of very slightlycompressed warm air (from any ofmany sources, including sunlight) and

that supply of compressed air iscontrolled due to the rotation positionof the cube at any instant. The slidingshaft of the interior moving square

piston (not shown here) is barelyvisible at the very top.

One square foot of bright sunlight contains around 340 Btu/hr of the Sun's energy, which can also be described as

about 100 Watts. A closed car with a black interior quickly gets amazingly hot, as we all know. Consider making a

greenhouse-like structure which has a black floor inside and which is 16 feet (5 meters) square. The area of sunlight

is therefore about 256 square feet (25 m2), and the total amount of sun energy coming in is therefore about 25,600

Watts or 25.6 kiloWatts. This is a LOT of energy (actually, Power) It is also described as being nearly exactly TEN

HORSEPOWER!

For the record, virtually all biological plants are only around 1% efficient in capturing this solar energy by

photosynthesis, so the many experiments to try to grow algae or corn or other plants to produce electricityautomatically starts off with a real disadvantage of having a 1% energy conversion ratio. The tolerably-priced Cadmium Sulfide solar panels are only around 7% efficient. You are about to learn about a method ofcapturing as much as 70% to 90% of the sun's energy!

You might see some humor in that billions of dollars are being spent to grow algae (1% efficient atcollecting sunlight) and then trying to convert it into electricity. Many acres of greenhouses filled with algaeand equipment will eventually be required to produce the electricity we are talking about from a 16-foot-square greenhouse-like collector described here. Ditto for huge fields of relatively expensive CadmiumSulfide solar collector panels to do the same. And no one who spent $15,000 to buy a wind turbine has ever

produced 15 kiloWatts of electricity, even for a minute! This is an ENTIRELY different approach! It is

actually far better and far more efficient. Where other approaches tend to use a sequence of operations tomake electricity, and each of those operations has dreadful efficiency (like processing biofuels to producemethane gas, compressing it for storage, then burning the methane to produce 3800F heat to boil water, tothen drive a steam turbine, to then drive an alternator to make electricity). There is no way to get good

performance from such an approach because all the efficiency factors must be multiplied together which


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gives a rather low overall performance. Does that approach work to make electricity? Yes. But adisappointing amount of electricity. As noted, this is VERY different! It uses a source such as sunlight toSLIGHTLY warm a lot of air, which then slides a heavy weight upward to be able to fall downward due togravity. We then just add a belt and pulley to directly spin one or more car alternators to make electricity.There are actually rather few ways to lose much energy with this approach, so the overall conversionefficiency into electricity is amazingly high!

Wind and wood and biomass and algae and fossil fuels are actually various stored versions of solar energy,but each had terrible efficiency factors in being created. Instead of accepting that 1% conversion efficiencyof photosynthesis, this approach entirely bypasses that and simply uses the DIRECT heat of the Sun inwarming air (or water), which tends to happen naturally and tends to happen with nearly 100% conversionefficiency. This description is meant to show you WHY you probably should not be holding your breathwaiting for solar technologies or algae or biomass or such other technologies to develop. You ALREADYhave available to you a DIRECT method of collecting the Sun's power at dozens of times more efficiently!

In High School you probably learned (and forgot!) about the Ideal Gas Law, which is often described as PV = nRT. One

thing this formula says is that if you heat up a gas (T for temperature), it expands in volume (V) or increases in

internal pressure (P). Specifically, if you increase the (absolute) temperature T of the air inside our chamber by just

one part in thirty (which is only about 17F [or 10C] increase in temperature), and the structure does not have leaks

and is rigid, then the pressure (P) of the air inside increases by one-thirtieth (of the natural 14.7 PSI) or 0.5 PSI. That

might seem like an irrelevant increase, and it has apparently always been assumed that is so, but it definitely is not!

In fact, we will COLLECT most of that 25.6 kiloWatts of incoming solar power IN the slightly pressurized air which we

WILL cause, to later be USED to generate electricity!

We are using that greenhouse-like structure simply to COLLECT solar heat and to briefly STORE a modestamount of the energy created, by producing a very slight increase in the air pressure inside of it (but in

substantial quantities). We will then USE that slightly pressurized air to generate a LOT of electricity, bymaking a special device and sending that slightly pressurized air to it!

This capture process is quite efficient. IF you use standard glass in the greenhouse structure, the glass blocksa few percent of the sunlight, and our black floor inside also does not absorb quite 100% of the sunlightwhich hits it, but this is far higher in efficiency than any other approach to collect solar energy has ever

been. Getting 92% of the incoming solar energy to stay as warm air is fairly easy to do, at least for the fewseconds or the minute that we need to store it.

For the record, of the hundreds of known methods of collecting warmed or pressurized air, I felt that agreenhouse-like structure might be the cheapest to make and the simplest to assemble. I actually created

TWO half-greenhouse-like structures, right next to each other, each 8 x 16, rather than one 16 x 16 structure.Why? You may have already figured it out! I have ONE of the two COLLECTING sunlight and building up

pressure, as a CLOSED and SEALED chamber, while the OTHER one is connected to a large-diameter air-duct which allows the pressurized air in that chamber to be transferred to the actual main device to make theelectricity. My air ducts are LARGE, resembling the cold air return main duct of a house central furnace, to

be able to move enough air to drive the device and make enough electricity for my needs. I actually haveONE main duct connecting the heat-collection chambers with the main device, but I have a swingingdamper where the duct approaches the two collection chambers. I attached a skinny metal rod to the side ofthe rotating main device, on an offset pivot, so the rod slides back and forth as the main unit rotates. This rod

pulls and pushes the swinging damper to block first one of the chambers and then the other, alternately, andautomatically timed to the rotation of the main device. What this results in is that ONE of the heat collecting

chambers therefore always supplies the same side of the cylinder of the main device, and it is alwayspressurized (while the other collection chamber is then sealed shut and building pressure and while the otherchamber in the main device's cylinder is opened to the atmosphere to release any pressure remaining in it.


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I concede that this is somewhat wasteful of energy, which is against my basic principles. The idea ofcollecting the still somewhat warm and somewhat pressurized air from the opposite cylinder chamber, and inmaking more ducts to get that spent air to re-feed into the heat collection chambers seems to be an obviousfuture improvement. But for now, this thing makes SOOOOO much electricity that I guess I am somewhatspoiled! So for now, I lean toward simpler and cheaper construction than ultimate thermal performance.THAT will be enhanced later (or maybe by other people).

The device that will use that slight pressure is also extremely efficient.

A central feature of our actual device is an application of Pascal's Law, that the pressure of any fluid(such as air or water) exists EQUALLY against every surface that the fluid is in contact with. Ourdevice is essentially a VERY low-pressure version of a double-acting air cylinder.

In the case of air, a chamber filled with air normally applies normal atmospheric pressure of 14.7 pounds persquare inch against every square inch of the surface of the chamber. Generally, there is also the exact sameatmospheric pressure which exists against the opposite side of all the chamber walls, and so no net force

exists. (Tornadoes change this balance by reducing the outdoor pressure by a couple PSI and buildingsexplode due to the normal air pressure which is still inside of the building.) We will describe here a SLIGHTincrease in pressure, for example raising that normal 14.7 PSI atmospheric pressure up 0.5 PSI to 15.2 PSI.We then create a rather large chamber where all walls are fixed except for one, a very large area wall thatwill act as a piston, in our case, a SQUARE piston of 44" by 44" size or having an area of 1936 squareinches. The result is that the movable wall has 14.7 PSI against its opposite wall and 15.2 PSI against theinterior wall of the chamber, meaning that there is a NET pressure differential of 0.5 PSI. This differential

pressure is very minimal, but it applies against each of the 1936 square inches of the piston's surface, whichmeans that it applies a TOTAL FORCE of 968 pounds against the movable wall!

That enormous force is used to SLIDE a very heavy barbell (UPWARD) through the middle of the device,

and the resulting unbalanced weights then cause the whole device to become top-heavy and to thereforerotate, with spectacular force and torque produced! You may have noticed that since we can apply anupward force of 968 pounds to the piston, we actually could have barbell weights up to around 450 poundseach (or 900 pounds total to lift). Performance is really amazing! We then USE that rotary power to makeelectricity!

Remember that there is around 10 horsepower of sunlight power and that we can collect around 9horsepower of that? Now see how we will USE that power! IF our barbell-weight totals 900 pounds, and weare going to arrange to LIFT that 900 pounds by nearly FOUR VERTICAL FEET, in a period of aboutTWO SECONDS, that is a need of around 1800 foot-pounds per second. Since 550 foot-pounds per secondis defined as ONE HORSEPOWER, our NEED is just over THREE HORSEPOWER to do this lifting at that

rapid rate. The fact that we can constantly COLLECT around NINE HORSEPOWER of solar energy inbright sun, means that we will still be able to be collecting the NEEDED 3.3 horsepower even during partlycloudy skies or when the Sun happens to be fairly low in the sky! We have an abundance of available energyand power for what we actually need! We actually could even enhance performance more by either makingthe barbell slide further (longer stroke for the cylinder) or building a larger device where the piston has moresurface area or increasing the 900 pounds of the barbell's weight, but those enhancements seem unnecessary,as even this relatively crude version can generate more than three horsepower worth of rotary power, whichis around 2,500 Watts, far more than the (average) 1,000 Watts of electricity that most families normally usein America.

THIS is a tremendous force to be available from pressure differentials which might normally have seemed to

be irrelevant! We are going to LIFT as much as 900 pounds of weight, as much as four feet vertically! Italso turns out that this method has an efficiency of energy conversion that is far better than anycurrent processes of creating mechanical energy (and then electricity from that).


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The 3.3 horsepower we have just been describing is therefore MOSTLY converted into electricity, whichprovides around TWO KILOWATTS of produced electricity. The device can actually have far heavierbarbell weights to produce far more electricity, but this brief description shows that even this simple andlow-cost device can supply amazing amounts of electricity for any family, in this case from sunlight.

And the SUN is actually NOT even (directly) needed to drive this system! Since we ONLY need atemperature differential of around 17F [or 10C], we might even dig a pit and run the device on thetemperature differential between DEEP SOIL (which is always around 52F near Chicago) and evensummer NIGHTTIME air which might be at 69F. Oddly, in winter, it would work BETTER in that method,if the outdoor night air temperature was 0F and the deep soil was still around 52F (although a slightchange then needs to be done to make it run "backwards"!)

All sorts of OTHER sources can be used, including flowing or falling water or modest windspeeds or even avariety of ways to use NATURAL DIFFERENCES in air pressure to drive it!

You need to first know HOW MUCH SUNLIGHT you will collect (9 horsepower here).

Then you need to know HOW MUCH POWER you NEED to raise YOUR barbell weight up the verticaldistance that your device needs, (900 pounds times 4 feet here or) 3600 ft-lb. Then you need to know howlong it takes gravity to make the top weight fall (which IS a fairly difficult calculation but for the size ofdevice described here, is around 2 seconds. (We must RAISE the weights in that same interval of time tomake it work best.) Therefore we NEED 3600 ft-lb per 2 seconds or 1800 ft-lb/sec, which is about 3.3horsepower. THIS NUMBER MUST BE LESS THAN THE (9 HP of) power you can collect!

And then you need to know how efficient a belt and pulley drive is and how efficient a car alternator is.Additionally, you need to know that a SINGLE car alternator is generally limited to being able to producearound 60 amperes at 14 volts, or 0.84 kiloWatts, so you MIGHT need to consider using more than one such

alternator.

Along those lines, you then need to decide HOW MANY car batteries you will want to have to STORE theelectricity you will be producing. You PROBABLY want to USE most of your electricity in the evening, butit gets generated hours earlier. For this, you need to know that a standard car battery can reasonably storearound 1 kilo-Watt-hour and still have a decently long life. So you are likely to want to have several

batteries!

Finally, you need to know HOW MUCH AIR FLOW is needed, as it is quite significant (due to the very lowpressure). Each time the piston moves (four feet here) to push the piston and weights up, you will need about59 cubic feet of air (the entire volume of the cylinder). BOTH SIDES of the piston get pushed, back and

forth, so this needs to be provided every two seconds, or 30 times per minute. This means that 1770 cubicfeet of the slightly pressurized air is needed every minute. (Yes, the greenhouse-like structure WILL becycling where it can draw in new air to replace the air you keep stealing from it!) This means that the AIRPATH must not be tiny but actually quite large in cross sectional area, comparable to or larger than the coldair return main duct in a house. THIS amount of Mass Air Flow provides the needed POWER to raise theweights and then make the electricity. IF you should happen to only provide 1/4 of that air supply, then thesystem still works, but then the piston only moves one foot per stroke instead of four feet, and it then onlyhas enough power to make about 1/4 as much electricity. So on heavily overcast days, the system generallystill works, but since it receives less sunlight, the piston moves in shorter strokes and it makes lesselectricity.

These simple calculations tell you what you can build for any desired amount of electricity! It is ALWAYSgood to design it more powerful than you think you will actually need, for days that are only PARTLYsunny.


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You think this is all silly and impossible!

In 2003, during efforts to try to help save the city of Venice, Italy from disappearing under the Adriatic Sea,I did a small demonstration to prove that this basic concept works, at least the Pascal's Law part of it. A

person has internal blood pressure which is roughly 1/8 of atmospheric pressure ( 95 mmHg / 760 mmHg) ornearly 2 PSI. That can therefore drive the many processes in the human body up to that pressure. So you can

blow up balloons, spit water, urinate, etc.

I realized these facts and happened to have an old water bed. So I arranged a pattern of boards to distributethe weight of my car, and drove my Corvette up on top of the deflated waterbed. Only half the car fit on topof the waterbed, so I could only put around 2,000 pounds load on the bed. But the king-sized waterbed isaround 80" by 60" in area. I realized that the 4800 square inches of the top of the waterbed surface areacould raise the 2,000-pound load, more than six vertical inches, VERY EASILY! In fact, LESS THANHALF A POUND PER SQUARE INCH differential would be sufficient. Since I knew that with my mouth,I could easily provide four times that much pressure, I knew it would be easy to squirt water by mouth intothe waterbed to raise the car! However, I discovered that it quickly becomes extremely boring to be mouth

squirting water into a hose for hours straight! So I eventually cheated a little and used a mechanical deviceto provide the necessary 1/2 PSI pressure. It took several hours to add the many gallons of water into thewaterbed at such minimal pressure, and through a small hose, to raise the car, which is shown in the timelapse movie I made of the adventure.

Here are TWO AVI videos of that day. The first is a better quality movie, but it is about 5.7 Megabytes insize. The second is a grainier movie, but it downloads a lot faster as it is only 2.1 Megabytes in size. The twoPHOTOS are different, before and after pictures!

here (5.7 MB)
http://mb-soft.com/public2/waterb10.avihttp://mb-soft.com/public2/waterb10.avihttp://mb-soft.com/public2/waterb10.avihttp://mb-soft.com/public2/waterb10.avi


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orhere (2.1 MB)

The point I was making that day was that Pascal's Law permits even a very minimal pressure

differential to be able to create enormous net force to accomplish amazing results!

Regarding Venice, I was saying that even 1 PSI of differential water pressure, pumped down undergroundover a hundred square miles could LIFT over 200 million tons that were above it. In other words, I was

proposing to RAISE the entire city (at the rate of about an inch per month, very slowly, roughly five verticalfeet in five years.). (Venice leaders showed no interest!)

It turns out that there are MANY different ways where you can produce such minimal pressure differentials! I

suppose that if you happen to have a thousand close friends, you could all BLOW air into it??? When the air in a

closed car gets heated on a hot sunny afternoon, the increased air temperature creates more than 2 PSI increase in

air pressure (but it leaks out of the car!) NORMAL windspeeds of 10 mph can be used to create pressure differentials

which can be used here (see the Community Wind system web-page to see a complete description of that process).

If stored or flowing water falls just one foot vertically, or is one foot deep, it creates around 0.5 PSI increased

pressure. Flowing water also has pressure due to its kinetic energy, which could be used. There are a LOT of ways

which can be used to supply the very minimal pressure differential needed by this device!

Since I designed the basic device to operate on such VERY low pressure, it turns out that even the Sun is not(directly) needed! It is possible to dig a large PIT, where the air inside that greenhouse-like structure isactually several feet BELOW the ground surface. Near Chicago, the soil down there is always at about 52F

temperature. In that case, even at night, air can get HEATED by the deep soil or COOLED from nighttimeair temperatures, and the airflow needs to be reversed, but it works just as well! It actually still IS Sun'senergy, but that solar energy had gotten stored deep underground, so it IS technically still solar energy! Aslong as there is the 17F temperature DIFFERENTIAL to produce the 0.5 PSI pressure differential to power
http://mb-soft.com/public2/waterb21.avihttp://mb-soft.com/public2/waterb21.avihttp://mb-soft.com/public2/waterb21.avihttp://mb-soft.com/public2/waterb21.avihttp://mb-soft.com/public2/waterb21.avi


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the unit's large piston, it works perfectly well! And if the piston is made even larger, then even LESSpressure differential is needed!

The basic unit CAN be built to produce so much electricity that a single hour or so of good sunlight canproduce enough electricity to fully charge 15 car batteries, to provide all the (15 kWh of) electricity that amodern American family uses in a 24-hour day.

With this new device, you can also easily produce so much electricity that you might even also use electric heating to

eliminate any need for natural gas or heating oil to heat your house in winter or heat your domestic hot water all

year. In other words, you SHOULD be able to eliminate any ELECTRIC BILLS and NATURAL GAS BILLS and HEATING OIL

BILLS forever!

(We tend to believe that making a $200 HG 3a device to heat the house is probably simpler and moredesirable!)

One of MANY possible energy sources is solar energy. It would be very expensive to buy PV (photo-

voltaic) panels of 256 square feet, and you would immediately already be down to only about 1.4 kiloWattsof electricity at the best, from something like $25,000 of purchased solar PV panels and the neededaccessories. But here is a system where the overall efficiency is MUCH higher, on the order of TENTIMES the efficiency of those PV panels, so we are looking at producing between 3 and 14 kiloWatts ofelectricity instead, and the cost to do this is mostly dependent on the cost and availability of the generic glassfor the greenhouse walls, fairly cheap! Even one hour of good sun can realistically produce 3 to 14 kiloWatt-hours of electricity, most of which would then be stored in a bunch of car batteries (each of which cannormally store around 1 KiloWatt-hour of electricity). Capturing and storing enough electricity for an entireday of NORMAL electrical usage by a whole family in a whole house, has become very practical!

Some more math confirmation: That size greenhouse-like structure contains around 2050 cubic feet, or

about 150 pounds of air. Air has a Thermal Capacity of around 0.24 Btu/pound, so about 40 Btus arenecessary to raise all that air by 1F. With 25,600 Watt-hours or 80,000 Btus of Sun's energy being collected

per hour, that is about 1300 Btus per minute. To warm our 150 pounds of air by the 17F that we want, wetherefore need about 680 Btu. Our greenhouse collects that much every 30 seconds or so. Even if weconsumed ALL the pressurized air inside the chamber, and had to entirely RE-HEAT ALL THE AIRINSIDE THE GREENOUSE in just 30 seconds it would all again be pressurized! We actually do NOT useup all that 2,050 cubic feet, but only a small fraction of it (59 cubic feet for each stroke) for our device. Sowe have PLENTY of pressured air for our purposes!

Actually, there is a side benefit from this! The Sun does NOT stop just because your greenhouse has risen by17F! So, in actual operation, the air tends to rise far MORE than the desired 17F, and it may rise even fourtimes that much. What this then results in is warmed air that is at 2.0 PSI pressure rather than 0.5 PSI. (Todesign it to use this higher temperature might seem attractive, but the higher temperature tends to cause fargreater heat losses from the [uninsulated] greenhouse walls, which reduces the overall efficiency of thesystem. I prefer to Design for a higher efficiency, where a side-benefit of providing higher pressure air to the

piston/cylinder is nice!

You might have thought ahead and realized that an (airtight) BLACK hot air balloon, trapped in a rigidframework which fixes its size and volume, and is 18 feet in diameter also presents about the same area tothe sun (254 square feet), but I consider that to not be durable enough for long-term electricity generation.

I personally don't even care if you do this or not but your wallet should have a lot more in it if you do!Additionally, if a lot of people would decide to save this money and become electrically and otherwise self-sufficient, the US might not need to import ANY petroleum or natural gas or uranium, which we do now inastounding quantities, and we might not need to mine or burn any coal, with lots of additional benefits forthe environment and planet. It's entirely up to you!


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I trust you noted above that by intercepting 10 horsepower of sunlight, and collecting 9 horsepower of that,even if you should build this device ineffectively, it will likely STILL provide at least 2 horsepower ofneeded power used to drive the device, to supply you with more than a kiloWatt of electricity, which is quitea bit. So even if you should really mess up the construction of the components, it STILL should supply allthe electricity your family should ever need! So this all does NOT require a brain surgeon or an expert

builder to create a very useful device! However, it is REALLY important to MAKE IT STRONG so that ITIS SAFE for anyone or any pets to be near. It DOES have rather heavy weights moving around at faster thanwalking speeds, and it would be bad if anything should break! Got it?

In fact, I ENCOURAGE everyone to START OUT with far less than 900 pounds! In fact, I encouragebeginning with FIVE-pound weights on both sides (or ten pounds total). AND of using restrictors to keepthe piston to only travel a total of FOUR INCHES (instead of four feet). In this configuration, it will likelyonly produce a few Watts of electricity (about one one-thousandth of what it is capable of producing). It alsoonly needs an amazingly tiny pressure differential, even far less than the 0.5 PSI usually described here! Butit only then uses 5 cubic feet of warm air during each stroke, AND there is no danger of your having builtsomething poorly where a rapidly moving 500-pound weight might come loose and hurt someone! You canthen EASILY add additional weights and or increase the stroke of the piston, to generate about any amountof electricity you are likely to ever want!

The idea of building a later second unit might also seem attractive, to be constantly charging a group of carbatteries to power an electric car, to eliminate even THOSE expenses and imports.

Several different versions of this device and system can produce amazing amounts of electricity, easilyenough for an entire American house. Entire descriptions and instructions are provided below for a unitwhich was designed to produce an easy 15 kiloWatt-hours of electricity every day (with some

configurations, even in just one hour of really bright sun!), which is more than most Americanfamilies use up. It can be built requiring only around $150 of standard building materials to build, alongwith two or three hours of simple work in assembling it. You MIGHT even be able to improvise regardingfinding glass or a surplus weather balloon to collect the sunlight, to reduce the overall cost even more.

The concept and the devices are also scalable, so much larger devices may be similarly created. There seemsa valid chance that extremely large versions of it might be made to replace current fossil-fuel-fired andnuclear-powered electric power plants with systems which can use solar energy, flowing water or fallingwater, or any of dozens of sources of low-grade heat to produce very large quantities of electricity.

Most of the following discussion will be about a moderately bulky device, which resembles a big cube with weird

antennas sticking out of it, which constantly rotates around 15 times every minute, and where the cube is about four

feet in all dimensions. This motion would then FOREVER be able to provide all the electricity that an entire family

should ever need, without ever needing to pay for any fossil-fuel-burned coal to produce any electricity for you, as

this device can receive its needed energy from either sunlight, wind, waterflow, water head (of a few inches), a

simple woodstove, an HeatGreen 3a decomposition heater system, a Sub Basement heating system or any of dozens

of other possible energy sources. Not bad for $150 of materials!

This system is based on a FLUID which is under rather low pressure. That fluid can be any of many liquidsor gases. The discussion here will only consider and discuss either air or water, with the discussion about the

primary unit being one that uses normal air. It turns out that certain principles of refrigeration could also beused, where a SEALED system of a refrigerant could be contained. The premise there is that the refrigerantchanges state from liquid to gas, where a more compact form of energy storage is then possible, where all

the needed power to push the weights upward is provided. We see that approach as unnecessary here, andwill not comment on that modification any further here.

A piston and chamber for a water-based system can be made, and is much smaller in size, but that adds insome leakage issues which we can ignore in the very low pressure air-based system described here.


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Complete construction instructions will be presented below, for the air-based system.

Explanation of WHY it works

A hundred years ago, thousands of people tried to think of ways to create devices based

on a concept called the Unbalanced Wheel. Virtually all of those people thought theycould create an impossible goal, but none of them knew enough Science or Engineering

to know that "perpetual motion" is completely impossible!

But it can be useful here to present the general idea they TRIED to use, because amuch better application of that concept is the basis for this system and device. A

bicycle is lying in your driveway. You STAND IT UP, which requires you toEXERT WORK (to raise the weight of the bicycle against the force of gravity).Then you let the bike fall over (DUE to that force of gravity) but now you wouldhook some string or rope or pulley or lever to try to make the falling bike "turnsomething" or "move something", in other words, the FALLING BIKE would doUSEFUL WORK in the process of that falling. Then you stand the bike up againand let it fall over, over and over and over.

The REALITY is that there is something called the Conservation of Energy thatpeople like Helmholtz learned about hundreds of years ago. And NO process is"perfectly efficient" due to things like air friction and crash noise sound

production and other things. So the REALITY of what I just described

ALWAYS requires you to have to exert MORE work in standing the bike up

than it could ever possibly release as useful work in falling over.

Those people who dreamed of inventing perpetual motion and getting instantly rich and famous, never knewthat or a few other details of science that make their dreams absolutely impossible.

But it DOES turn out that if you got rid of all the air around the bike or made it fall over slowly, you couldminimize air friction. And if you put a cushion on the ground where it would land, you could minimize theamount of crash sound that would get created. THESE are important variations, and if they were done reallycarefully, they could make it NEARLY efficient, that is, the amount of work you had to do each time you

picked the bike up might only be a tiny bit more than the amount of energy that might be recaptured as it fellback over. NOT perfect efficiency of energy conversion, but fairly close. We WILL refer to this shortly!

More Technical Discussion regarding HOW this system works

Most people may want to skip the next few paragraphs. They are sometimes somewhat technical. You might also

want to just skim the text of these next paragraphs as they explain the drawings and photos which are below. There

IS some math here!

I am going to use several simple drawings to present some basic concepts now. Imagine the first drawingbelow to be a really strong weightlifter's barbell, where the shaft happens to pass THROUGH a hollow tube.Ignore that tube for the moment. The two large rectangles at both sides represent the heavy weights, 50

pounds at each end of the 100-pound barbell. We are going to say that the barbell is 4 feet long for thepurpose of this discussion. Ignore the little rectangles and the rectangle in the middle of the hollow tube for

now!

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You are now going to copy the bike example by standing the barbell upright. It will now look like thedrawing below. What did you have to do to accomplish this? The ONE weight did not get lifted at all but theOTHER one had to get lifted FOUR FEET UP. In other words, you did WORK that was equal to 50pounds times 4 feet or 200 foot-pounds in order to do this.

Now that it is standing up, it is no more stable than the bike was, and it WILL quickly fall over. Again, theweight that was at the bottom would not really move much, but the one at the top has to fall four feet beforehitting the floor! IF your desire was to create big dents in your hardwood floor, then you have found a wayto do it! The upper fifty-pound weight will build up some decent speed as it falls that four vertical feet, andyou will essentially have a really big sledgehammer!

OF the 200 foot-pounds of work that you added to the barbell by standing it up, the Conservation of Energytells us that ALL that energy (or Work) has to still be in it, except for a tiny amount that gets used up bymoving air out of its way (which can give up energy by both slightly warming the air due to friction and bymaking a quiet whistling sound as the weight goes past air). So, regarding having a really effectivesledgehammer, that is certainly true, as well over 199 foot-pounds of that energy is otherwise still in it. Foran instant BEFORE it hits the floor, nearly all that 199 foot-pounds has been CONVERTED into what is

called Kinetic Energy, that is, energy of motion, which is the energy that the falling weight now containswhich is in this different form.


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And a moment later, the weight is no longer falling due to having hit the floor, so the Kinetic Energy hasbeen converted into some other forms, specifically SOUND energy of the crash and INTERNALDISTORTION ENERGY of the floor itself.

What seemed to be a very simple action, has actually involved a fair amount of science, where the energygot converted several times all in only a couple seconds!

But you COULD again stand it up and let it fall again, but I trust that you are smarter than that! Howeverthere ARE giant machines that do essentially that, called piledrivers. They usually have a big diesel enginewhich turns a very large hydraulic pump to LIFT a weight of several tons straight up and then releases it sothat gravity can make the big weight build up some speed and smash into the ground under it. This drivesthe soil downward and out of the way, and in half an hour, a piledriver can install a foundation post for ahighway bridge (which is probably where you saw it and heard it work!)

The important part for us is that the AMOUNT of that 200 foot-pounds that you put into the barbell bystanding it up is NEARLY ALL STILL AVAILABLE. This is a VERY EFFICIENT process, fairly close to100% efficient. That is relatively unusual in machinery or equipment. In case you are curious, your car is

probably around 21% efficient at converting the energy in gasoline into actual movement of your vehicle. A

giant electrical powerplant is generally about 32% efficient at converting the chemical energy in the coalinto electricity which they then send to you (many miles away). And YOU are only around 20% efficient atconverting the chemical energy in the food you digest into becoming useful work!

Now let's add in some more details. We will mount a SHAFT on the outside of that cylinder in the drawing. We can't

really show that shaft in a two-dimensional drawing as it would stick out of the paper! This shaft will come out of the

drawing directly toward you and also deeper inside the drawing BEHIND the cylinder. What we have actually done

here is to give the thing an AXLE which it could rotate around, which could permit the barbell to fall over sideways

(in the plane of the picture). We are describing arranging it so the barbell could rotate counter-clockwise in our

drawing. But we have caused a new complication, which we will soon see is not a complication at all!

We are going to say that the cylinder is three feet long, for this part of the discussion.

BEFORE, we had the barbell forever laying on the floor or standing up on the floor, always in contact withthe floor. But NOW we have that cylinder SUPPORTED by an AXLE, so the barbell is now ALWAYSactually HANGING and not EVER sitting on the floor. Only the center of that cylinder is now supported atall, by a (horizontal) axle which is supported on sturdy bearings (much like the wheel bearings on your car).We have added another object to the barbell, which is a big flat DISK mounted to the exact center of it, andwhere that disk is TRAPPED inside the cylinder.

Now we see the seeming complication I just mentioned! With nothing to SUPPORT the heavy barbell, itSLIDES THROUGH the cylinder to move as far down as it could possibly move. That is, it slidesDOWNWARD until the upper weight of the barbell runs into the outer end of the cylinder. This nextdrawing shows what has happened (because of gravity!)


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Fortunately, you have planned the height of the supporting axle to be high enough where the sliding androtating bottom barbell weight still does not ever hit the floor!

But you have a situation now where the barbell has sunk even farther than we had before, meaning we willneed to apply even MORE work to it to raise it back up to where we want it to return to.

We now have this set up so that IF you can just figure out how to get PRESSURIZED AIR INSIDE THECYLINDER, but only inside the LOWER half of the cylinder, then we could use that PRESSURE to pushup or lift up both that piston and the connected entire barbell, vertically upward.

NOW we have gotten to the importance of the two small rectangles (which are HOLES through the side wallof the cylinder) and the larger rectangle (which is actually a [double-acting] PISTON INSIDE the cylinder.)

NOTE: The small rectangles are rather small in these drawings, to not distract from the main concepts beingpresented. These are drawn for a WATER-based system, where the water passageways might be quite a bitsmaller than the size of the necessary air-ducts and passageways which are needed for an air-based system.

Also, these drawings are presenting a fairly small version of this system, which could only generate a fewhundred watts. Using numbers (again???) if five gallons of water falls one vertical foot to enter the chamber,that DOES produce the 0.5 PSI of pressure, and it is also about 40 pounds of water falling one foot everytwo seconds, or about 20 ft-lb/sec, which is about 1/28 of a horsepower or about 30 Watts of power. Fine,

but smaller than what we want or need! (IF the water fell FIVE feet instead of the one foot necessary toproduce the pressure, we would then have about 150 Watts of available power, nearly all of which can beconverted into electricity).

NOW we have something important!

Look at the drawing just above and now consider the two small rectangles. We will now OPEN the smallrectangle at the top, which would RELEASE any fluid pressure which remains in the UPPER CHAMBERinside the cylinder. At the same time we will also open the rectangle at the bottom BUT we connect that oneto a SUPPLY OF FLUID AT 0.5 POUNDS PER SQUARE INCH PRESSURE. (YOUR blood pressure is


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much more than that and you produce more pressure than that in blowing up a balloon, so this is aMINIMAL air pressure that we are supplying.)

Now consider the PISTON inside the cylinder, which we make with a BIG DIAMETER, such that itssurface area (on either side) is 250 square inches area. So what happens now? We FILL the lower chamberwith fluid (either air or water) that has our slight (0.5 PSI) pressure. We have plenty of air or water availableat that very minimal pressure! Once we have sent enough fluid into that lower chamber, we will have 0.5POUNDS PER SQUARE INCH fluid filling that entire (lower) chamber. A basic law of any Fluid (Pascal'sLaw) is that EVERY square inch of EVERY SURFACE inside any tank or chamber of fluid has the SAME

pressure applied to it. Now get back to that piston which has 250 square inches of surface area on the underside of it, each of which is being pushed with 0.5 PSI of air pressure. The total effect of this is that the pistongets pushed UPWARD with 250 * 0.5 or 125 (vertical) pounds of total force. The entire barbell only weighs100 pounds and the piston maybe another two pounds. So what happens now? Right! There is NO (net)

pressure on the upper surface of the piston (because we opened the upper fluid release hole to let anypressure out) and we are now pushing upward with 125 pounds of upward force. The piston and barbellSLIDE UPWARD, all the way up as far as it can go.

That minimal air (or water) pressure (in fairly large quantity), when applied over the large area of the piston,therefore EASILY pushes the entire barbell upward, around three vertical feet. In other words, we haveadded 100 pounds * 3 vertical feet or 300 foot-pounds of work or energy to the barbell. YOU had done wellwith your muscles in adding 200 foot-pounds in standing the barbell up but now we have given the barbelleven more energy. Remember, that energy cannot disappear, and can only be converted into some otherform of energy!

We have now converted solar or wind or water or other energy sources, first into very low pressure fluidpressure, and now into POTENTIAL ENERGY of the raised and now top-heavy barbell. We then LET it fall

which again converts the energy, now into rotary power of this device turning due to the effects of gravity.But we have now managed to get this very heavy barbell to ROTATE (continuously), all by supplyingamazingly low pressure air or water, to raise it as necessary, which was obtained from any of a variety ofenergy source!


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Only one more step is required, that of adding a belt and pulleys or a gearing system for this now (slowly)rotating barbell to drive an alternator (which needs far faster spin rates to perform well) which then convertssuch rotary motion directly into (DC) electricity, which can then be stored in car batteries.

This all results in extremely efficient energy conversion from a variety of sources, eventually into eithermechanical power or electrical power. No current methods of making electricity are remotely as efficient!

Dimensions and Calculations regarding Performance

We will now start specific discussions regarding construction instructions building an even larger device. It includes a

square cylinder which is actually a 46" cube (made of 3/4" plywood or even 1" blue foam insulation), which has a 44"

square piston inside which is mounted to a nine-foot-long pipe shaft, which has (as much as) 450-pound weights at

each end. It all rotates around an axle that is supported slightly over six feet above a floor or the ground. If you

would add clamps which would be put on the sliding shaft to fix it in the exact center of its range of motion, then the

entire (heavy) device is perfectly balanced and easily rotated. But get rid of such clamps for actual operation!

Assume for the moment that we can provide a good supply of AIR which is just 1/2 PSI higher pressure than

the ambient air in the room. Our PISTON is square, 44 by 44 inches so it has a surface area of 1936 squareinches on each side inside the cylinder. For the record, air which is only at 0.5 PSI pressure does NOT movevery fast, and in fact, it can be barely even noticeable! We will now arrange to provide that 0.5 PSI airsupply INTO the one side of the cylinder chamber (the lower side), which will apply against every squareinch of the inside surfaces of the LOWER chamber inside the cylinder. We multiply 0.5 * 1936 to find thatthe total pressure upward against the bottom side of the piston is 968 pounds along the direction of thesliding shaft. When the device is oriented vertically (maximum load), we can see that slightly over 900

pounds of weight needs to be supported by that piston, and the fact that we constantly and forever have theavailable 968 pounds of force easily provides that. The result is that the piston and sliding shaft WILL slideupward as a direct result of that very minimal air pressure (because there is such a large surface area of the

piston involved).

Since we have already OPENED the release valve for the UPPER chamber, there is no pressure loadingholding the piston down, and air from the upper chamber is simply released out to the room.

Since the available 968 pounds of force will easily lift the 900 pounds of the weights, the upward motionrate of the piston and sliding shaft and weights is primarily determined by the size of the airpath we providefor the supplying 0.5 PSI air. There are also considerations regarding momentum and acceleration of theheavy weights, which are simple physics problems, but it turns out that the (very large) airpath can bedesigned to have an appropriate airflow rate to match the other characteristics of the device. For the momentwe will not specify the time it will take for the piston to move the four vertical feet to get to the top limit of

its motion, but we will be able to determine this shortly, to properly match the airflow needed to provide thepressure and motion.

Once we have the weights up to their highest location, we have a situation resembling the unstable

bicycle or the vertical-standing barbell.

We CAN see that we needed to apply 3600 foot-pounds of work to raise the two 450-pound weightsvertically upward by 4 feet, that is 2 * 450 * 4 or the 3600 ft-pounds USED.

We STARTED with the weights sitting at their very lowest points, that is, the top one at 2.5 feet above theaxle (the piston was then at -2.0 feet with the weight 4.5 feet above that, or +2.5 feet position), while the

bottom weight is at -6.5 feet below the axle (again, the piston was then at -2.0 feet with that weight 4.5 feetbelow that, or -6.5 feet position.) If we use the axle as the origin of a location system, we can say that wethen had +1125 and -2925 foot-pounds of potential energy or a net of -1800 foot-pounds of potential energyat that moment.


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Now that we have applied the pressurized air and moved the sliding shaft vertically upward, we now have asituation is very top-heavy. Similar to the analysis we just did, we now have one 450-pound weight which isnow SIX AND A HALF FEET ABOVE the axle (two feet INSIDE the cylinder and then four and a halfmore feet of the exposed sliding shaft above that), while the other 450-pound weight is TWO AND A HALFFEET BELOW the axle (now mostly inside the cylinder since the bottom weight is now nearly pressedagainst the surface of the bottom end of the cylinder). This is then therefore -1125 and +2925 foot-pounds of

potential energy, respectively. Describing this as POTENTIAL ENERGY, and again considering the axle asan origin, we now have a net of +1800 foot-pounds.

We have therefore ADDED (+1800 ft-lb -(-1800 ft-lb)) or 3600 ft-lb of new POTENTIAL ENERGY to thenow very top-heavy device, which fully accounts for the 3600 ft-lb of work that we provided to it as a lot ofslightly compressed air.

Gravity now causes that POTENTIAL ENERGY to become converted into the KINETIC ENERGY ofmotion of the rotating device. We CAN now estimate how FAST the device will do half of a rotation. To dothis accurately requires Calculus, so we will approximate the result here. Let's first consider the falling fromvertical to horizontal, which is ONE-FOURTH of a full rotation. IF a weight fell STRAIGHT DOWN,without any restrictions, we know from Newton's Laws that an object in the Earth's gravitational field falls

so that D = 0.5 * g * t

2

, the standard formula. We know that D is 6 feet for (the vertical motion of the upperweight from vertical top to horizontal) our device and g is 32 ft/sec2. We can easily calculate that t wouldhave to be 0.612 second (so that 6 = 0.5 * 32 * 0.375).

A FULL revolution of the device might then seem to need around 2.5 seconds, or 24 rpm. Unfortunately,that is not quite true! The weight does NOT fall directly straight down, but it falls along the arc of a circle.This causes two fairly simple modifications of that calculation, each of which adds a factor of the SINE ofthe angle which the sliding shaft happens to be at, at each instant. A bit of Calculus is then needed toIntegrate that effect over the entire one-fourth revolution which results in this device rotating around 19 rpmif NO LOAD is applied to it. If some of the available energy is drawn off to produce electricity, then itwould rotate slower, again calculable with Calculus. Given realistic loading of the alternator, it is

realistic to expect this device to rotate around 15 rpm in actual normal operation.

We can now do some further calculations. In an entire revolution, we need to raise the weights TWICE, inother words, we must add 7200 ft-lb of energy, 15 times every minute. That is around 108,000 ft-lb/minute.One horsepower happens to be 33,000 ft-lb/minute, so this is therefore around 3.3 horsepower of mechanical

power. A horsepower is also equal to 746 Watts, so we are talking about 2500 Watts of mechanical power.

A car alternator has a usual overall efficiency where it can produce around 840 Watts of electricity fromthis, as a maximum of 60 amperes at 14 volts of DC electricity, directly compatible with standard car

batteries, and within the range which used car alternators from a junkyard can produce.

We would clearly need THREE car alternators to be able to USE the 2500 Watts of power available in thisconfiguration. We COULD use weights that were less than the 450 pounds each described here, and if so,the performance of the system is proportionally reduced. We could also choose to reduce the stroke of the

piston, in order to use less of our compressed air, but that again would reduce performance proportionately.

Now we can look at HOW it works!

We will look at the positions of the WEIGHTS, in several different positions of the cube. The cube itself is well

balanced and so it can be ignored for the performance calculations we are about to do!

Vertical Sliding Shaft, having been slid UPWARD all the wayWe essentially now have a top-heavy situation, just like we described for the bicycle or the barbell that was standing

on end. At this exact instant, the device does not create any new energy, but it is provided with a FLYWHEEL-EFFECT


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to get the device past this point to where it starts creating a LOT of energy. That is much like what the flywheel does

which is connected to your vehicle's engine. But at this instant, power production is zero.

Having rotated 45 degrees

We now have the UPPER weight SIX AND A HALF FEET outward from the exact center of the device (and its main axle

shaft). Being at a 45-degree angle, we need to multiply this by the SINE of 45 degrees or 0.707, to find the distance

that weight is SIDEWAYS from the axle shaft, which is therefore 4.6 feet. We now multiply this by the weight up

there, 450 pounds, to find that 2070 foot-pounds of TORQUE is now acting to ROTATE the cube and weights.However, we have another large weight which is also at that same 45-degree angle, but much closer to the axle

shaft, just two and a half feet away. So we have a SECOND torque acting, this one being 2.5 * 0.707 * 450 or 795

foot-pounds of torque, but this time in the OPPOSITE direction. Therefore we have a TOTAL of 2070 - 795 or 1275

foot-pounds of net torque then acting to turn the cube.

This amount is VERTICAL (gravity), but the device requires the weight to move at an angle outward (at thislocation) which again has a factor of the sine of the angle. Therefore the actual ROTARY TORQUEproduced at this instant is about 900 foot-pounds.

Having rotated 90 degreesWe now have the OUTER weight SIX AND A HALF FEET outward from the exact center of the device (and its main axle

shaft). Being at a 90-degree angle, we need to multiply this by the SINE of 90 degrees or 1.000, which confirms that

the distance that weight is SIDEWAYS from the axle shaft is therefore 6.5 feet. We now multiply this by the one

weight there, 450 pounds, to find that 2925 foot-pounds of TORQUE is now acting to ROTATE the cube. However, we

have another large weight which is also at that same 90-degree angle, but much closer to the axle shaft, just two and

a half feet away. So we have a SECOND torque acting, this one being 2.5 * 1.000 * 450 or 1125 foot-pounds of

torque, but this time in the OPPOSITE direction. Therefore we have a TOTAL of 2925 - 1125 or 1800 foot-pounds of

torque then acting to turn the cube.


We now have the LOWER weight SIX AND A HALF FEET outward from the exact center of the device (and its main

axle shaft). Being at 45 degrees angle, we need to multiply this by the COSINE of 45 degrees or 0.707, to find the

distance that weight is SIDEWAYS from the axle shaft, which is therefore 4.6 feet. We now multiply this by the

weight down there, 450 pounds, to find that 2070 foot-pounds of TORQUE is now acting to ROTATE the cube.

However, we have another large weight which is also at that same 45 degree angle, but much closer to the axle

shaft, which is now ABOVE the supporting axle, just two and a half feet away. So we have a SECOND torque acting,

this one being 2.5 * 0.707 * 450 or 795 foot-pounds of torque, but this time in the OPPOSITE direction. Therefore we

have a TOTAL of 2070 - 795 or 1275 foot-pounds of torque then acting to turn the cube. And again that other factor

gets it down to 900 ft-lbs.


We have a BALANCED situation at this instant, exactly like we had when we started this sequence, except that the

weights are now down near the vertical bottom instead of at the top. Still zero actual production at this instant. And

we obviously now need to inject some more air to push the weight and shafts and piston upward, as when we have

done that, we again can start the EXACT SAME SEQUENCE we just described (for the other half of a rotation). So we

actually do all this TWICE during each rotation of the cube.

PositionInstantaneous

Torque Produced

UP ( 0 ) 0 ft-lbs

UP ( 45 ) 900 ft-lbs


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UP ( 90 ) 1800 ft-lbs

UP ( 136 ) 900 ft-lbs

UP ( 180 ) 0 ft-lbs

AVERAGE TORQUE is around 900 ft-lbs

If we provide sufficient air which is slightly pressurized, we now see that we produce an average of around900 ft-lb of torque continuously, which is an immense amount, greater even than what high performancecars can produce for a few seconds! This device creates that constantly and continuously!

The weights follow a curved path, but they must still always follow the Conservation of Energy. Our airpressure RAISES the 900 pounds of weight a vertical distance of four feet (3600 ft-lbs), twice during eachof about 15 revolutions per minute, or 30 times per minute, in other words, our energy source ADDED 3600* 30 or 108,000 ft-lb / minute.

We noted above that is about 2500 Watts of mechanical energy being produced by the rotating cube. Wealso noted that a standard used car alternator from a junkyard could take that and produce a consistent 840Watts of electricity, continuously, around 20 kWh each day.

We can also note that we used incredibly low pressure supply air to do this! If we just DOUBLED the airpressure up to 1.0 PSI, still extremely minimal, and if we built it strong enough to withstand stronger forces,the piston now could raise 1800 pounds of weight! All the logic presented above is still true, except that nowwe would be raising DOUBLE the weight to become potential energy, which means that two times themechanical energy of rotation would be created by the cube. You would likely need to use a LOT of caralternators, but you could then produce nearly 5,000 Watts continuously, or around 120 kWh every day,FAR MORE than any normal family needs. However, there could be some danger in having such really

heavy weights moving around in a home made structure! I just don't want something to break where a veryheavy weight might come loose and hurt someone! So even though the DEVICE should be able to performto even higher standards, the question might be whether you can build things which can handle all thatweight!

Most of the Technical Stuff is done now!

Parts Materials

(Prices shown are retail prices from 2011 from a local home supply store)

Function Quantity Item Retail Cost

Main Structure Frame 2 pieces of 2"x10" 8-foot framing lumber. $7.64 * 2 = $15.28

Main Structure Lag Screws 16 3/8"x6" standard lag screws. $13.18

Washers 16 standard fender washers. $3.92

Cast-Iron Floor Flanges 4 2" $51.12

PL 400 Adhesive 1 tube foam adhesive (like PL400). $3.99

Axle Half-Shafts 2 2" iron pipe, 12" long $7.24


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Cube Walls 3 sheets 1" thick blue (underground) foam insulation, 4'x8' sheets $31.98

Plywood Sheet 1 3/4" by 4'x8' type A-D exterior plywood $18.48

Automotive Main Bearings 4 from a junk V-8 engine $0.00

Used GM car alternator 1 or 2 from a junk car $0.00

This should total around $150 of materials.

By adding a few car batteries to STORE some of that energy for a few hours (each standard car battery can nicely

store 1 kWh of electricity), this can then provide roughly the same amount of electricity now used by an average

American family during an average day, without ever having to buy any electricity from any Utility company!

If you are really sure about your source of energy (discussed below), maybe only ONE car battery may beneeded, since the device can CONSTANTLY and CONTINUOUSLY make that 600 Watts during everyminute of every day or night. However, when you decide to make toast, or blow-dry your hair, you needaround 1500 Watts to run the toaster or blow-drier for that half-minute, so some amount of electricitystorage gives more flexibility. You would NOT be able to operate the toaster for every minute of every daywith this configuration, but you probably only need to use devices which are electricity-intensive for a short

period each day.

By also buying an INVERTER to convert the 12 volt DC electricity (from EITHER your car batteries orfrom the device directly) into 120 volt AC electricity, you can have total energy independence by being able

to run your televisions and computers and other appliances on their standard AC electricity, so no element ofinconvenience is involved.

Actually Building it

The main structure


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These four pictures show the Main Frame of the device, in four different positions, as it will spin around itsaxle. Notice that two standard 2x10-8 foot pieces of lumber (a total of around $15 cost at any lumberyard),

bevel cut at 45 degrees, forms a large square, slightly more than four feet on each side. Since this squareneeds to STAY square, under significant weight loading, the corners are connected with 6x3/8 lag screws(and washers) and also, with high quality construction adhesive, which is used in all joints.

Then notice that two 2" Pipe Flanges arebolted to the two sides, to attach the short pipe

nipples which become the axle upon the wholething rotates. It IS possible to buy high qualityroller bearings or ball bearings (as shown inthe photo to the right). IF you have piles ofmoney you want to use up, fine. Such bearingsgenerally cost several hundred dollars each.They ARE capable of having their shafts spinat around 5,000 rpm.


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But in the interest of economy, I chose to use PAIRS ofENGINE MAIN BEARING SUPPORTS (face to face) froma junkyard V-8 car or truck engine (as seen here, with1/2"x8" Lag Screws replacing the bolts tha

The Physics Behind the 9

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