Do You Need to Install Basement Insulating Materials?
If it ever happened that your house interior got as cold as the breeze in your lawn or backyard, your first reaction would be to turn up the heater. Then it gets cold again. Again, you turn up the heater a little higher. If you are not aware of the cause of the problem, you might end up wasting a great deal of heat energy. Consequently you will be paying an additional cost in your bill that your not suppose to. For all you know, the solution is simply to set up some basement insulating materials to reduce this chance.
Basements are often cold and damp because of its proximity to the soil outside. And since the earth is exposed to cold air, negative heat is transferred from the soil to your basement walls and to your basement ceiling. If you didn’t get a basement insulating system installed, heat transfer travels fast down there. It’s best to have your basement insulated.
Basement insulation is usually done best when repairing or when remodeling. Check on the cracks on foundation walls or sill areas. Investigate if there are leaks of unwanted air through your basement windows. Your ventilation should just be enough to keep the temperature in your basement balanced. Often, it is practical and economical to install basement insulating materials together with waterproofing.
Here are a few facts about why heat insulation is important in your basement:
1. Imagine the boiling point of water. Then imagine its negative equivalent. In winter and when the snow starts to melt, it gets very cold outside. If you miss out leaks on your basement walls, you can just imagine how your meat feels when subjected to a freezer. All the negative heat that comes in from the cracked walls. You don’t want to freeze in your basement do you?
2. The ground or the soil is not an insulator. This means it doesn’t protect your basement walls from dampness. A good basement insulating material is usually design for the foundation walls because this is in contact with the earth. The basement ceiling only gets cold because of the heat transferred from the walls becoming a damp air and on to the headroom surface area.
3. Thermodynamics. What this simply means is the transfer or displacement of heat. It is a branch in science that studies the behavior of positive and negative heat. Basement insulating materials are designed based on the principles of thermodynamics. That is how engineers learn how to innovate ways in solving problems about basement insulation and other air conditioning concerns.
The most important thing is to understand and recognize the need of a well-functioning insulating system. Another tip here is that it’s best to do the installation right from the start. You don’t want to go into trouble of fixing your heater when it’s not even broken in the first place. Attend on this matter with high importance. Air leaks can cause unwanted shortage on your heating budget simply because repairs cost money. So go down to your basement and make sure all the cracks are sealed.
How to Can We Have Abundance in a World Like This?
Often in life we find ourselves constantly wanting more. Whether it be happiness, power, addiction, or simply time, we find ourselves in a constant struggle to have more. One of the most fundamental economic laws is the principle of scarcity. Unfortunately, this economic fact is a very depressing concept. This concept brings me to the primary focus of the article, how can we live in a state of abundance while being subject to an economic reality that seems to thwart our desires? Stay with me, and we will find through this generally negative principle, we will discover some amazing implications about life and what we can do to create the future we want.
The principle of scarcity basically states that all resources in our world are scarce; they run out, just like your car running out of gas. Every element of our limited existence is subject to this harsh reality. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be creates or destroyed only transferred (this is good news). The second law of thermodynamics also called the law of entropy basically states that when one form of energy is transferred to other forms, there is a loss in that form of energy and its applied usage. For example, if you burn a piece of coal the total energy emitted remains the same in the context of the universe, however, some of the coal is transformed into sulphur-dioxide while another portion goes up into space and joins the other elements and gases. Our Earth is what is called a closed system in that the amount of energy is fixed and will remain fixed. Unfortunately, the fixed amount of energy on the earth that makes up our mountains, trees, ect is being gradually used up and transferred into a non-usable form of energy. Basically, the earth’s clock is ticking and will run out.
This level of scarcity creates demand for our resources. Therefore, objects like gold, platinum, and other precious metals become the objects of our desire creating our economy. Looking at life from this economic standpoint, one does not achieve abundance without the expense of others. Our entire lives become a “game” of attempting to obtain what others hold valuable. Hence, no one can truly live in a state of abundance.
Fortunately, there are powers much stronger than the forces of entropy at work in the universe. The same forces that spurred on the instant creation of the universe and everything in it exist on a plane accessible for us to use. The Bible, the most publicized book in the history of the world, God says, ” Let Us make man in our own image in Our image, according to Our Likeness (Genesis 1:26).” Quite an amazing verse, and while I don’t pretend to know all of the implications, I believe that through God, The Infinite, The Supreme, The Alpha we have the ability to access the spiritual realm. The spiritual realm is where we transport our lives from the mundane to extraordinary.
Our method of accessing the spiritual realm is through the subconscious mind. Some source beyond the explanation of science is able to communicate with our subconscious mind enabling our most noble thoughts, tremendous achievements, and remarkable talents. Ever witness an athlete like Tiger Woods strike a golf ball, or a concert pianist play a complicated piece? Use the conscious mind, these feats would be near impossible, however, by tapping into the subconscious, these human beings are capable of seemingly supernatural feats and performing them with EASE. The subconscious mind needs only be aware of the goal - and the mechanical workings to accomplish it make their plans (if you let them and believe their accomplishment is inevitable).
Through the subconscious mind then abundance is possible. Creation of wealth is possible without diminishing resources, as the very powers of creation guide your best efforts. Through these principles, businessmen, scientist, teachers, and other leaders have been able to create abundance out of the power of the mind. Natural resources of the earth have been found converted to work in ways never thought possible, new inventions like electricity and the automobile have changed lives, new thought process have linked people and ideas creating abundance on a universal scale. These accomplishments overrule the principle of scarcity of new ideas reshape the Earth and its natural resource. Before the airplane, international travel for individuals was thought of as only for the rich and famous. Now, thousands of individuals can enjoy multiple cultures and exotic destinations while stimulating thousands of economies.
Through our connection with the infinite we can find great wealth, physical health, and mental health. On a deeper level we find through this same connections we can find courage, belief, faith, love, and happiness. It is our only escape from the worldly level of scarcity and the economic pressures felt by the world. The principle of scarcity then serves as a tremendous light pointing our only way of escape - through The Infinite.
Weight Loss Tips - How “Thermodynamics” Help You Lose Weight Fast
One factor involved in losing that jelly belly is something called your metabolism. Your metabolism is how many calories your body is burning at rest and/or at play. This process is determined by a multitude of factors including hormone levels, muscle mass, and work load.
The “Law of Thermodynamics” states that if you burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight. When you apply this to human beings, it works a little bit differently. This is because of the starvation response we talked about earlier, which is caused by an immediate lack of food that throws your hormones in a frenzy.
This is why you have overweight people who eat 1000 calories a day who are not losing weight. The way to make the Law of Thermodynamics work for you is by multiple eatings, proper nutrition, and utilizing metabolic stimulation exercises such as weight lifting large muscle groups .
CARBS, PROTEIN, AND FATS, OH MY!
These are the three basic building blocks of your body. I’m not going into great detail about them because it is not important for our purposes. However, you MUST have quality sources!! Think of your body like a house. Do you want to build your house out of bricks, or out of straw? In other words, eat healthy sources of carbs, proteins, and fats.
Don’t forget a good multivitamin. These things represent the raw materials needed to fuel your body and prime that fat burning pump! A list of foods will be provided at the end of this book. I urge you to print it out and stick it on your refrigerator.
CARBOHYDRATES: Carbohydrates are simple and complex sugars that the body uses as energy. Carbs hold water in your tissues. Aha moment: When you eat a lot of carbs, you not only gain weight from the carbs being stored as fat, but also from the water that they hold in your tissues. You end up with a swollen, bloated look. Sounds pleasant, doesn’t it?
Good Carbohydrates: The more natural, the better. Fruits vegetables , potatoes, and whole grains such as oats are all great carbs to eat.
Bad Carbohydrates: White flour, enriched products, pasta, anything that has refined sugar or high fructose corn syrup.
Basic Computer Thermodynamics
That desk in front of you and everything else around you is made up of atoms. An atom consists of electrons orbiting around a nucleus. An atom is increadibly tiny. You could line up 10 million of them inside a millimeter. What if we could scale up an atom so that the nucleus was the size of a basketball? The orbits of its electrons would then be 15 miles away.
From this you can understand that atoms are almost all empty space. The nucleus of the atom is composed of quarks. If you could see a quark or an electron up close, it might appear as a tiny vibrating glow of energy. It turns out this world, which is causing us so many problems and so much stress, is mostly an illusion!
The electrons orbit the nucleus at about the speed of light. If you could see them, they might appear as a blur. They do not orbit in a plane like the pictures in books. They create a shell. Sometimes two or more atoms will share electrons, causing them to link together forming a molecule.
Looking at that desk in front of you again, it looks pretty solid. Actually, unless your desk is floating in deep space where the temperature is close to absolute zero, the molecules of your desk are vibrating like crazy. Picture the molecules bouncing around and smacking into each other like balls on a pool table.
If you have ever played pool, you’re very familiar with how when a pool ball hits another pool ball, it transfers it’s energy to the second pool ball. When heat causes molecules to vibrate, they transfer energy between each other in a similar fashion. This action is called “conduction”.
Now picture the CPU of a computer cooking away because the designer wants to push too much power through a small piece of silicon. If we don’t take away that heat as fast as it’s created, that CPU will fry!
The problem is usually solved by mounting a heat sink on the CPU. Conduction causes the heat to move from the hot CPU to the cooler heat sink. Because air doesn’t conduct heat as well as metal, We apply a thin layer of heat sink compound between the CPU and the heat sink to fill in any gaps.
You’ll notice that a heat sink has fins on it. The fins allow the heat sink to conduct the heat to the air adjacent to the fins. The fins provide more surface area to aid in conduction. Eventually the adjacent air will get as hot as the heat sink and conduction will cease.
If we move the air away from the heat sink, it will take the heat energy with it. A fan mounted on the heat sink is used to move the air. This method of heat transfer is called convection. Eventually all the air inside the computer case will get hot, so fans are used to blow the air out of the case of the computer.
The heat has moved from the CPU, to the heat sink, to the air inside the case, to the air in the room where you’re sitting at your computer desk. The room starts to get hot, and eventually the air conditioner turns on.
You can view an air conditioner as a “pipe”. A fan blows the hot air from your room through fins that transfer the heat to a liquid. The liquid is piped to fins outside the house. A fan blows cooler outside air past the fins to remove the heat from the liquid.
The air conditioner has an evaporator valve that changes the liquid to a gas after the heat is removed. In a gas, the molecules are further apart than in a liquid. This causes it to cool down quite a bit more. The gas goes through the fins inside the house, picking up heat. It is then compressed into a liquid to concentrate the heat so the outside fins can remove the heat more efficiently.
Shuttle’s I.C.E. (Integrated Cooling Engine) Heat Pipe uses a very similar method to cool a CPU. The CPU has a heat sink with copper heat pipes. The heat of the CPU causes liquid coolant inside the heat pipe to change to a gas. Convection created by the pressure of the gas moves the coolant to a second heat sink where a fan is used to blow the heat out of the computer’s case. Releasing the heat causes the coolant to change back to a liquid. Gravity then carries the coolant back to the CPU heat sink.
One last method of heat transfer we haven’t discussed yet is radiation. Some of the heat of the CPU and the heat sink is released as infrared radiation. Similar to light (although invisible to human eyes), the radiation strikes the insides of the computer case, causing it to get warm. Ultimately the computer case itself acts as a heat sink conducting heat to the outside air.
This article explains the three ways - conduction, convection, and radiation - that heat is transported from a computer CPU to the air outside the computer case. You now understand the thermodynamics of a computers and why it is important to maintain its various components.
Hydrogen is Not an Energy Source
Though Hydrogen is the most abundant element on Earth’s surface, it mainly is bond with Oxygen in water, one of the strongest chemical bonds known. This means that it takes quite a lot of energy to split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, around 120 MJ per kg. The same amount of energy is released, when Oxygen and Hydrogen recombine to water (combustion). Why the same amount of energy, one may ask?
The First Law of Thermodynamics says that if energy is applied to bring a system from one condition into another, the same amount of energy must be removed to bring it back into the original condition and this regardless how it is done. If there would be any difference in applied and removed energy, then we could create energy from nothing, by adding (input) less energy to bring a system into one condition, than what is removed (output) to bring it back into the original condition - a perpetual mobile of the first degree.
Thus let’s consider an ideal hydrogen (water)engine, by which we poor water into it on one side and the same water (firstly as steam, but than condensing back to water at the original temperature), comes out on the other side. Then the first Law of Thermo says that there cannot be any mechanical energy developed on the shaft of that engine - it would have been created out of nothing!
If there is an output of mechanical energy anyway, then this energy must have been added as an input as well. This is exactly what happened with the experimental cars, that were said to run on water only. No, they ran on the electrical battery in the system, that initially was charged from an external source. Claiming anything else, as the ‘inventors’ do, means to declare the First Law of Thermo to be invalid. None of the ‘inventors’ ever made such a declaration, has one? No, because they never considered the First Law and neither did “the Powers that Are”, who believed the ‘inventors’ and therefore allegedly threatened, imprisoned, or even killed them - what a waste, if it is true.
Many researchers, car manufacturers, inventors, etc, erroneously bring Hydrogen forward as an energy source. From the above we can however understand, that whatever energy Hydrogen would develop in any kind of engine or device, originally came from other sources that were needed to produce and prepare that Hydrogen. Most likely these other sources were fossil fuels, so where is the environmental advantage? Moreover, as the total efficiency of the Hydrogen production process is far lower than 100%, these other sources delivered accordingly more energy, than what the Hydrogen can set free at combustion. Hence, Hydrogen is an energy converter and not an energy source. In terms of environment, the pollution with Hydrogen has moved from the engine to the production installations - it has not been eliminated, as erroneously is claimed by many.
How about using solar energy to produce electricity with photo voltaic cells and using that electricity in an electrolysis process to split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen? Well, know that the typical efficiency of voltaic cells is around 25% and that of electrolysis 60% and thus the overall efficiency is 0.25 x 0.6 = 0.15 => 15% Then you just have Hydrogen and Oxygen gas, but especially the Hydrogen gas is very difficult to handle. Its volume is around ten times that of air at atmospheric pressure and it exudes through most metals. Compressing Hydrogen gas to smaller volumes takes a lot of energy (that must be cooled off as waste heat). To distribute it to the consumers takes energy also and in the end, the overall efficiency may even become negative, or hardly more than a few percent. This all has to do with entropy. If you don’t know what that is, read my article:”What is Entropy”, for an explanation.
Know that the World presently burns fossil fuels to the equivalent of around 100 million barrels of crude oil per day (60% is coal -still being the World’s main energy source). One barrel is 167 liter, ca 140 kg of mass and the energy content is roughly 40 MJ/kg, whereas the average solar intensity at sea level is in the size of a few hundred watts per square meter (around what the human body gives off in heat). Do you want to calculate on how big areas of photo voltaic cells would be needed to replace say only 1% of our present fossil fuel consumption? Even more, do you want to pay for it?
There is much expectation from fuel cells, that run on Oxygen and Hydrogen, converting them to water and electricity without combustion. Also here we are talking about energy conversion, because where did the Oxygen and Hydrogen come from? A fuel cell is thus not an energy source. There are concepts for fuels cells that can run on natural gases instead, such as Methane. Because the output is water(steam) and not the original Methane, the First Law allows a net energy output and so it does. However, it shows that the total cycle efficiency is somewhat less than burning the Methane directly in a combustion engine. The fuel cell alternative definitely causes less pollution than the combustion alternative, but the economics remain in favor for direct combustion. How much more do you want to pay for your environmental friendly car?
How Useful Is Solar Energy?
When considering environment and solar energy, or energy at all, the first question would be what energy actually is. The answer is very simple - nobody knows! What we do know however, is how energy behaves. It has two main characteristics:
1. It can not disappear into, nor be created from nothing (first law of thermo).
2. It flows all the time and tends to disperse, if it is not hindered to do so (second law of thermo).
Our energy technology is about converting energy from one form into another - there is no “energy production”, nor “energy consumption” (first law). While doing so, the thus converted energy spreads out and finally decays to heat at ambient temperature (second law). This means that it has become unrecoverable, but it is still there, not “consumed”. We can and do consume fuels and that is what we pay for, but not the energy that we freed from it in a conversion process.
Matter is the highest concentration of energy we know - one gram of it equals 25 million kWh (E = m.c^2). This is what we use in nuclear power stations, converting matter into pure energy. Chemical energy is the next highest concentration of energy. One gram of water has a bond energy of 120 kJ, the highest known and around three times more than fossil fuels. As 1 kWh is 3600 kJ, fossil fuels just contain around 0.01 kWh per gram.
The intensity of the solar radiation on the Earth’s atmosphere is around 1400 Watt/sqm. Part of it is reflected, part absorbed by the atmosphere and what is left at sea level, varies around 500 Watt/sqm, plus-minus a few hundred watts, depending on the location on Earth. if we assume 500 Watt/sqm as average and compare this with fossil fuels, then one square meter of solar power during one hour equals around 50 gram of fossil fuels, giving 0.5 kWh in energy.
A volume of one liter contains around 800 gram of gasoline, diesel, etc, thus roughly equals 16 sqm of solar power during one hour. Say you drive you car for one hour at a speed of 100 km/hr, you may use 10 liter for that, thus, if it was powered by solar energy instead, it would have to carry a collector area of 160 sqm for the same efficiency as with the liquid fuel (around 20%). As we cannot do that, it’s obvious that we need the solar collector to be somewhere else, where it can charge a battery, that we can have in the car instead. How big would that battery have to be?
A normal starter battery in a car, you know how big that one is, contains say 80 AH (Ampere-Hour) at 12 Volt, equals 80 x12 x 1, is roughly one kWh. In the car trip above, you needed a supply of 80 kWh, thus your battery for that would have to be 80 times bigger than the regular starter battery in your gasoline, or diesel car. Not quite, because an electrical motor has a much higher efficiency than a combustion engine, roughly 4 times higher, so your required battery size reduces to 20 times that of a normal starter battery - “small” enough? Well, you now have the equivalent of 10 liters of liquid fuel, so if your fuel tank contains 60 liters (around 15 gallons), your equivalent battery would have to be 120 times larger than a normal starter battery. Because we are talking about the same car here, only with a different drive source, you may understand that your car is “somewhat” too small for carrying those batteries, right?
Never mind, you may say, I just have to charge a lesser number of batteries more often. True, but charging takes time. No problem, I can change batteries at a “gas” station, don’t have to wait for charging them. Instead of fueling up the tank, I just change batteries. True again, but we still are faced with the volume problem.
For every say 100 liter of liquid fuel, the “gas” station needs to have 120 x 100 = 12,000 liter of batteries in stock (12 qbm) - it’s gonna get a kind of BIG, doesn’t it? Alas, not big enough, cause it also needs a solar power plant to charge all the empty batteries that come in, 1600 sqm for every replacement of 100 liter fuel. Not true, because this solar power plant may have an efficiency of just 20%, as we assumed before, so the real figure becomes 5 times bigger, 8000 sqm to replace every 100 liter of liquid fuel. This “gas” station will become the size of a small city! Of course it then needs an infra-structure, transport systems, etc, etc and who has to pay for all that nice stuff? Yes, YOU have to!
On top of it, your solar energy powered battery car will not be as convenient in use, as your gasoline or diesel driven car was. Because of the limited number of batteries it can carry, you will have to make many more stops at “exchange battery cities”, than at regular gas stations before.
High Efficient Energy Conversion Technology
I live in the tropics and am plagued by frequent power outages. The tap water holds around 28 Centigrade and sometimes I fill my bath tub with it to lay and cool down in, when the fans and airconds strike and I’m sweating too much. When I get out of the tub, I don’t always drain it, because I expect to take a cool dip again a few hours later, or even the next day. When the next day, it shows that the water in the tub has become quite cold, much colder than the tap water. Why doesn’t it have the higher air temperature around, how can it give off heat to a warmer environment? I can ask my sweating body the same question, how can it cool my body to an ambient temperature, that is the same or even higher than my body temperature?
The answer of course is, must be evaporation, which causes heat to flow spontaneously from a colder to a warmer region. This has been known for thousands of years and practiced by keeping water and wine cool in jars of porous material, through which some liquid exudes and evaporates. Hence, if you ever believed that heat cannot spontaneously flow from a colder to a warmer region, go to the tropics and experience that this is not true.
Nevertheless, you were likely taught this in school, but then your teacher failed to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that heat cannot flow from a colder to a warmer region, WITHOUT causing other effects.
Other effects in my bath tub and body are surely there. If I do not replenish the water that evaporated, my bath tub will finally get empty and my body will die. This all has to do with entropy and if you don’t know what that is, read my article: “What is Entropy” for an explanation.
Now, suppose we could expand a saturated vapor at ambient temperature in an expander, where it comes on a lower pressure and temperature and contains a certain amount of cold liquid and equally cold gas. This is basically what happens in a steam engine, where the rest gas is condensed to water also and it shows that the drive power, to heat and compress the condensate back to usable steam, is far more than the mechanical power that the expander delivered on the shaft.
Ever since the days of James Watt, keeping the machine size down required to operate steam engines on full pressure, not letting the steam expand. Also in our modern steam turbines, the expansive power of steam is not used (the thermal energy is converted to kinetic energy instead). However, James Watt did make experiments with the expansion of saturated steam and from the results that he documented, I found that the power it develops is nearly the same as needed to compress the expanded mixture back to the original steam condition. My calculations show that the same is valid for ammonia vapor and this likely is the case for all saturated and wet vapors.
This would give the opportunity to convert heat (from fuel combustion) to mechanical power at very high efficiencies, 100% in an ideal machine, but 80% in practice, I deem as fully possible to achieve. If ammonia is used, even ambient heat could be converted into mechanical power and this is not in conflict with the Second Law, even though all scientists would say so today - they never considered the sweating bodies and jars in the tropics, while Watt’s experiments have been forgotten, or at least overlooked.
Suppose we could separate the expanded liquid and gas, then we could compress that cold liquid back to the original pressure, which would require very little work to do, zero if no change of volume occurs in the ideal case. This cold liquid could then absorb heat from the source (fuel or ambient) and evaporate back to gas, at constant temperature and pressure. The expanded gas part could be compressed in a normal compressor, by which it gets hot and this heat can be cooled off to ambient. Together with the evaporated liquid, the medium returns into the original condition, ready to expand again in the next cycle of the process.
As the mass of this gas was less than that of the total expanded mass of vapor previously, the compression heat energy becomes the same as the absorbed heat energy of the cold liquid. In the ideal case, the net work done becomes zero (compression work = expansion work) and heat flows spontaneously from a colder (liquid) to a warmer (gas) region. But this is in the ideal case, which the Second Law forbids. There will be losses in a practical machine, that yet would constitute a refrigerator, working at a far higher efficiency than today’s technology can achieve. The Carnot Rule can be broken, there is no physical law that forbids it!
It may however show very difficult to separate liquid and gas in the expanded phase, the more as it must occur spontaneously. It will have to be tried out and I have my ideas on how to do that. High efficient power conversion on the other hand, where no such separation is needed, even has to be avoided, would be far easier to do and I do have a machine concept for it. All it takes, is a developer, who lets me work with it…
The Laws of Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics is the area of physics which deals with heat and temperature. There are four laws of thermodynamics, the zeroth through the third. (The zeroth law was proposed after the first but is more fundamental, so it precedes the first in importance.)
The Zeroth Law states that if two thermodynamical systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other. In other words, thermal equilibrium is a transitive property. This is intuitively obvious in terms of temperature, i.e. if A and B each have the same temperature as C, then A and B have the same temperature.
The First Law states that the total change in energy of a thermodynamical system is equal to the sum of the amount of heat transferred to the system and the amount of work performed on the system. This is a statement of conservation of energy.
The Second Law states that the entropy of a closed thermodynamical system tends to increase with time and can never decrease. This is the most controversial law since it’s the only physical law which does not treat time symmetrically, i.e. does not remain unchanged when time is reversed.
The Third Law states that there is a minimum temperature, called absolute zero, which a thermodynamical system can approach but can never attain.
Every now and then, some crackpots claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine. This would be a machine that can run forever without being supplied energy. There are two kinds of perpetual motion machines. Perpetual motion machines of the first kind violate the First Law of Thermodynamics and perpetual motion machines of the second kind violate the Second Law. No perpetual motion machine has ever been demonstrated to work.
The Basics of Mechanics - Dynamics and Thermodynamics Explained
You who read this, may be an engineer, a mechanic, an inventor, a student, or even someone without an engineering background. My observation is that the general public has little knowledge of basic science and even engineers and other professionals often lack in basic insights, in spite of being advanced in their specific fields. This often leads to unfeasible projects and wrong choices, based on wrong assumptions, that no computer can correct.
I myself am a graduated engineer on B.Sc level in both mechanics and electrics. Nevertheless, most of what I know worth knowing as an engineer today, I learned from practical experience and backing it up with own theoretical studies afterwards. It forced me to focus on basics. When you have the basics right, the rest is just methodology, where the computer can be very helpful, but don’t let it “think” for you!
If you have no engineering background, why would you need to have some basic knowledge of all this, you may ask? Well, we live in a technological society and so we are confronted with technological matters and products, that we need to understand the basics of to make proper choices. Ever bought expensive “energy-saving” lamps, while in the same time needing to heat your home? Do you think hydrogen and/or fuel cells are energy sources? Do you think energy can be produced and consumed? Would you invest money in solar panels, or other renewable energy technology for your home? The more these kinds of things apply on you, the more you need to read this article.
The Laws of Newton
The metric, or SI system of units is based on the laws of Newton and so is most of modern mechanics and dynamics. They are essential for basic understanding:
* 1. A mass object persists in its momentary motion to speed and direction, unless it is forced to change it by external forces working on it.
* 2. The acceleration of an object is proportional with the force F working on it and inverse proportional with its mass m. Hence, the acting force is given by: F = m.a
* 3. A force acting on an object, will yield a counter force of the same strength in the opposite direction: action = reaction.
Although these laws sound simple, they are often wrongly applied, or overlooked. Especially the third law appears to be the most fundamental one, still not fully understood by Science and subject for discussions on the highest levels (how can you move a table for example, as it pushes back with the same force?).
Power and Energy.
Power and energy are very often mixed up. For example a lightning, causing a tree to split into half, is very powerful, but it has very little energy, because it lasted only a fraction of a second. Energy is the range of power and time. Power is expressed in Watt and energy in Joule - 1 Watt thus is 1 Joule per second, inversely 1 J = 1 Ws (Watt second). If you during one hour would apply a power of 1000 Watt (1 kW = 1 kJ/s), which approximately is what a flat iron takes, the energy involved is 1 kWh and this is thus equal to 3600 kJ. If you instead would develop that energy in one second, the power becomes 3600 kW, or 3.6 MW - a small power plant! If thus a lightning would have a power of say 10 GW and lasted 1 millisecond (it looks much longer, because of the glowing air around it), it contained an amount of energy of just 10 MJ = 10,000 kJ, not more than 2.8 kWh, or to power a flat iron for around three hours! If you in brochures would read dimensions like kilowatt per hour, or horsepower per hour, you can know that the author has no idea what he/she is talking about.
Energy is also the range of force and traveled way. If you lift up a mass of 1 kg to a height of 1 meter, the force needed for that is the range of mass and gravity acceleration, as per Newton’s second law. On Earth, gravity acceleration is 9.8 meter per second square, which we can round to 10. The lifting force then becomes 10 kilogram meter per second square, which is called the Newton (N) and the work done is then 10 Nm (Newton meter), which is 10 Joule: 1 J = 1 Nm.
The same confusing exists around temperature and energy. What would you rather have in your hand, a 1 inch red glowing sewing needle, or a 4 inch red glowing bolt? Though both have the same temperature, the needle will just cause you a blister, whereas with the bolt, you won’t have a hand any more. The bolt contains much more energy (more mass) than the needle and that makes the difference, not the temperature.
If you would be interested in a solar panel to heat water in your home, the temperature it can yield is therefore not that important. You pay for energy instead and that is what you want to save on. Ideally, a solar water heater should work on a low temperature, so it doesn’t loose too much heat through its insulation and produce a larger water flow instead. You then save more energy = money, because of the higher efficiency on which your solar panel works. To reach your desired water temperature in the kitchen and bathroom, you can heat additionally with say an electrical heater. Combination with a heat pump, also taking up heat from your warm waste water, would give the absolute best results (but high installation costs). Read more about that at the end of this article.
However, manufacturers of solar panels optimize on temperature, which is a good selling argument for the energy-unaware public. At higher temperatures, the size and thus the costs of the whole installation, including storage tank, become lower, which also sells better. They don’t talk very much, or at all about efficiency, being the relationship between how much solar energy hits the solar panel and how much of that you can use in the end. They talk about capacity instead - solar energy is “free”!
Next to consider is Pressure. Usually it is that of a fluid, like a gas. It is expressed in Pascal (Pa) which is force (N) per unit of area and thus 1 Pa = 1 N/sqm (Newton per square meter). Atmospheric pressure at sea level is roughly 100 kPa, thus 100,000 N/sqm. In technical descriptions it is also often called the bar - 1 bar is thus atmospheric pressure. Pressure can also be seen as stress in materials, tension. In the SI system of units, pressure and tension are thus both expressed in Pascal.
Then there is contact-pressure. This is what makes a knife work. The sharper a knife, the smaller its edge area (A) is and for a given force (F), the contact-pressure (F/A) becomes larger, also expressed in Pascal. With this, all units in the SI-system are given. It has only three basic units, the kg for mass, the meter for length/distance and the second for time. No conversions are needed
Circular Motions.
From Newton’s third law follows the perception that on an object in mechanical rotation, two forces are working, a centripetal one, pulling the objects towards the center of rotation, and a centrifugal one, tending to push it out radially away from that center. If the mechanical contact with the center of rotation suddenly is broken, in that very moment no forces are working on the object any longer and thus it will move as per Newton’s first law, meaning it keeps its speed in the direction it had in the moment just before losing contact. That speed was directed tangentially and thus the object will “fly out” in the tangential direction, not radially. In fact, centrifugal forces do not exist, because then there would be no resulting force to keep an object in its circular path - only the centripetal force exists. This is a hot discussion point in Science - Newton’s third law.
Hence, when you are in a car that makes a sharp curve, your body does not push against the inside of the car (centrifugal), but the inside of the car pushes your body into the curve (centripetal). As per Newton’s first law, your body wants to keep its direction of motion, straight ahead, just before entering the curve - it’s called inertia. There is only one force, the centripetal one (free motions in gravitational fields, such as orbits of planets and satellites, are described in General Relativity, which we won’t discuss here).
From this follows the notion of “inertial” systems, which are frames of reference in which Newton’s laws are valid. An accelerated system is thus not an inertial system, because motions described in it, would not follow Newtonian laws. This causes a severe point of confusion, as follows:
If you are an inventor of “fantastic” mechanical machines, your really should understand the implements of impulse. Impulse (p) is the amount of motion, being the range of speed (v) and mass (m), which is equal to the range of working force (F) and the working time (t): F.t = m.v = p. An impulse has a direction, which (kinetic) energy has not and therefore impulses can have a positive or a negative sign between opposite directions of motion. Because impulse is a function of force (the time-derivative of it), Newton’s third law requires that the sum of all impulses of moving components within a system (machine) must be zero. However, many inventors, not being aware of this, “create” a resulting impulse, that accelerates the system.
What they do is mixing up reference systems and impulse with energy. If you consider a mechanical system (machine), that has a certain total mass, but also internally moving parts, the resulting impulse of those parts, the sum of all impulses, will be zero relative the system’s center of gravity, but not necessarily relative a resting frame of reference (an observer) in which the whole system (machine) may be moving (at constant speed). The sum of kinetic energy of all the internally moving parts, is of course a positive value (negative energy is less than nothing). This value is the system’s internal (kinetic) energy. Since this internal energy is needed to keep the internal parts moving, there cannot be any energy left to accelerate the system (machine) as a whole. On the contrary, energy must be applied all the time to overcome the friction that the internally moving parts are subjected to, otherwise they would come to a halt. This applied energy converts to heat.
Sadly, there are several patents on according designs, claiming to be “inertial drives” for space-ships or whatever. Their inventors, some of which may have ruined their private economies on this, were not confident with the basics of dynamics, as outlined above. See some of those unfortunate examples here: http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/IPEmain.htm
Mechanical Engineering Concepts
Now, imagine you had a ball that is perfectly spherical and a table that is perfectly smooth, so when the ball is placed on the table, the contact area becomes a dimensionless point - zero whatever. Then the contact-pressure F/0 becomes infinite, regardless how light the ball is - something must break. No material could withstand an infinite contact-pressure and from this follows that not even with the most fantastic materials, yet to be developed, a frictionless machine could ever be built .
Some inventors have a problem with that, like a patent I once saw, where a 15 cm (6 inch) diameter cylinder was rotating at 1500 rpm in a somewhat larger cylinder, supported by a number of smaller rollers in the size of just a few millimeters - it looked like a ball-bearing in cross section. These rollers would rotate at roughly 50,000 rpm. You look in any bearing table what the admissible speeds are and you would see that this design exceeds the limits by far; self-destruct through friction!
Another problem that many inventors have is judging leakage potential. Leakage is a function of pressure ratio, not of pressure difference and it varies to the third power with the clearance gap between the boundaries. It means that the same sealing device, that would leak in an however deep submerged submarine, would leak more in a space craft, because there the pressure ratio to vacuum is infinite - many don’t seem to know that. In addition, even less known, is that the best sealing is obtained with a single, unbroken sealing line, ideally a circle.
Therefore, the reciprocating circular piston machine will always prevail over any rotational displacement concept, that contains several broken (discontinuous) sealing lines. These rotational concepts can be used and are used in low-duty applications, where they have their advantages, such as in air-driven hand tools, industrial compressors, etc, but not in heavy-duty combustion engines. This is why the Wankel never became commercial, except a few years in cars from German NSU, that went bankrupt on it in the 1970-ies.
One can see the most ‘horrible’ designs in various patents, the worst I saw being an engine, consisting of a torus shaped tube, with a slot over its inner length to let through a piston rod, attached to a circular piston moving in that torus, while flat plates were sliding radially in and out the torus to form alternate compression and expansion chambers - at best a good cream-wiper (but it got a gold medal in an inventors contest - its glorious funeral)!
Many inventors have tried to find a linear transmission, that can replace the pendulous crankshaft. It has various disadvantages, such as causing vibrations of higher order, but most of all causing side-forces on the pistons, resulting in excessive wear and leakage there. I once read a statement from a development manager at Volkswagen in Germany, that the crank mechanism alone stands for 20% of the fuel consumption. All alternative designs I have seen, indeed convert the linear piston motion into a rotating one on the shaft and without causing side forces on the piston, but instead they generate the same or higher side forces on sliding parts elsewhere in the design, causing excessive friction and wear there - definitely no fuel savings. I have found a design that does not contain any sliding parts, but consists of rotating components only (I got the idea, when I was with my kids in a merry-go-round). Had I only come up with this a good 100 years ago, I could have made it, but now the pendulous crankshaft is so well established in automated production lines, that it can’t be changed any more. I almost hade it made with Compair-Reavel in the UK, around 20 years ago, but also they found it in the end too costly too change their production line - my bad luck!
Thermodynamics
Another basic thing, often misunderstood, is that energy can’t be “used up”. Surely, the gasoline you put in your car is used up, but the energy it developed is still there, to stay around for all eternity. All the chemical energy that was stored in the original fuel, is converted to heat. Firstly at high temperatures in the car’s engine, but then decaying to heat at ambient temperature. The rest is also converted to heat by friction, the tires on the road, the transmission, air resistance, etc. All energy that we “use” with our technology, finally decays to heat at ambient temperature, even the light from your lamps at home does that.
So is there the term “waste heat”, as opposed to “useful heat”.What is useful? Take “energy-saving” lamps for example. If you live in a cold climate, where you have to heat your home, a normal cheap hot glowing light bulb actually delivers 100% useful energy, 5% of which is light, the rest is heat, that helps heating your home, but this is not what you are told. Only the 5% light is brought forward as “useful” and you are told that you are “wasting” 95% with a normal glow bulb. Only in warm climates, especially third-world countries with very expensive electricity, or in cooled rooms, the use of energy-saving lamps makes sense!
The misconception by the public is that useful energy is “consumed” and waste energy is not. The real situation is that the useful energy is just used, but not “consumed” and is wasted after usage just the same. That’s why your energy bill comes back every month - nothing of what you used, is left. Therefore you read everywhere about “energy production” and “energy consumption”, not in the least used by decision makers in energy politics! It indicates that there is no basic understanding in public society, what energy is about and so unfeasible projects are initiated, wasting time and (your tax) money.
The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created (produced), nor destroyed (consumed). We can only convert energy from one form to an other and the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that it all finally must decay to heat at ambient temperature and so it does. Even though many know this, that is end of story for them, as far as the First Law is concerned. However, the scientific definition of the First Law says that if you add energy to a system to bring it in an other condition, you must remove the same amount of energy to bring it back in the original condition. Naturally, because if we could remove more, energy would be created from nothing and if less, energy would disappear into nothing. This formulation has great consequences, as follows:
Let’s consider an ideal hydrogen (water) engine, by which we pour water in it on one side and the same water AND useful mechanical energy comes out on the other side. Because the engine returns the same water as was applied (firstly as steam, but than condensing to water at ambient temperature), there cannot be a net output from the engine - it would have been created from nothing. If there is an output anyway, this means that the according energy had to be applied as well, not only the water. Indeed, we must apply energy to split the water in hydrogen and oxygen. If that could be done at an efficiency of 100% (electrolysis has only 60%), then that energy could appear as mechanical work on the shaft. This then means that the hydrogen only was an energy converter, definitely not an energy source!
Hydrogen does not occur in free form on Earth, like fossil fuels do and therefore hydrogen can never be an energy source. Give me a dollar for every article that says different and I will be well off!If there would be a method to obtain free hydrogen at considerably less energy input than what combustion with oxygen gives in output, yes, then it would become an energy source, but such a method has not yet been found.
Instead of splitting water, hydrogen can be obtained from natural gases, such as methane. It shows however that the overall efficiency of such a hydrogen loop in a combustion engine would have a somewhat lower overall efficiency than using the natural gas (or bio-gas) directly in a combustion engine. Moreover, hydrogen is a very tricky gas to store and to handle. Not only is it very explosive, but it tends to exude through most metals as well. It is very voluminous, around ten times more than air and thus needs to be brought on high pressures to keep the volume down and that takes a lot of compression energy. Liquefying it would even take more energy, plus a temperature problem for storage as well. There are materials that can absorb hydrogen gas at a lower temperature and give it off again at a higher temperature, surely the better way, but also not very cheap and practical in a distribution system. All together, there is no economy in hydrogen engines, but it may have an environmental advantage - the only viable argument for using it, provided the consumer wants to pay the higher costs, do you?
The same can be said from fuel cells, working on hydrogen - they produce water (steam) and need a steady supply offresh hydrogen and oxygen to work continuously- whereto get how? Yes, the energy that fuel cells are supposed to “produce”, originally came from fossil fuels to manufacture the input hydrogen. Can we call that “non-pollutant” energy? A fuel cell is NOT an energy source, just an energy converter.
The importance of using spontaneity in physical processes is largely unknown, because it has to do with entropy, something not explained very well in schools. So I had to learn in practice, by trial and error, that if you want to separate fluids from each other, you must try to find a design by which this happens as spontaneously as possible, for example with “smart” piping, rather than using filters. The more you try to force it about with various design details, the more you will lose in efficiency - you “produce” entropy as it wrongly is called. The more you force about a process (introduce “irreversibilities”, as it is called correctly), the greater the change of entropy is, the lower the efficiency becomes. Entropy is an essential part of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not to say the whole of it, but yet there is no general agreement among scientists, what entropy actually is - very confusing.
The Second Law is actually not a “real” law, because it is based on observations only, not on any physical principle. This means that if the observations would change, the Second Law would have to change too, but this hasn’t happened yet, which makes it a law. In everyday life we experience that most things don’t happen spontaneously, only accidents, or coincidences in general, do (”Murphy’s Law”). If we want things to happen, we usually have to do work for it. Hence we could formulate the Second Law as: “for free only the Sun goes up”. On the internet, this formulation of the Second Law is widely violated by millions of web sites, trying to let you believe that for a small investment, you can become rich very soon. But that is not engineering (rather “religion”), so I leave you with that.
In engineering, especially when it comes to renewable energy sources, the Second Law is also widely violated, or rather ignored. Oh yes, solar energy is free, but you can’t use it for free, why not? Because it is widely spread in Nature and thus the effort to collect it into one point of usage and to present it in a usable form, is very large and you have to pay for that effort. Using fossil fuels is cheaper and easier and that’s what we do instead. The same would be valid for nuclear power, but there the “environmentalists” have been successful to obstruct it - with thanks from the Arab oil sheiks.
Renewable energy is something the Second Law is very much against, because it wants to spread it out in the environment, not to collect it for our use. Therefore these renewable energy sources are high-entropy ones, meaning you must do a lot of work to make use of them (low efficiency). There is one exception though and that is hydro-electric power. The forces of nature actually do all the work for us, by collecting rain water in high situated reservoirs, ready for us to use; they are low-entropy sources. But also here the “environmentalists” choose to favor the oil sheikhs instead.
Next would be heat pumps, which are inverted refrigerators. A heat pump absorbs heat from the environment, usually from the ambient air, by generating a cold surface there. This surface is small, but it actually collects heat from large, remote areas, brought by the wind. Also here, the forces of nature do the collecting work for us, a second exception on the rule .
The heat pump, as the name says, pumps up the ambient heat to a higher temperature that we can use, for example to heat water. Also its drive power is given off as heat at usage temperature, is thus no loss (where it is in a refrigerator) and so a heat pump can give off between 3 and 4 times more energy than what it takes to run it. If all the billions of dollars that to date and ongoing are wasted on wind propellers and solar collectors of various kinds, would have been used to provide all households with heat pumps, many power plants could have been shut down by now and no more oil would be burned in homes for heating. This however is a truth with modification. A huge polluting industry, likely using fossil fuels, would be behind all those heat pumps, but that would be the same also for wind propellers, solar panels and the production of hydrogen and fuel cells, all having to be financed by the consumers and making profit as well - the Second Law all right:”For free, only the Sun goes up”
The Laws of Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics is the area of physics which deals with heat and temperature. There are four laws of thermodynamics, the zeroth through the third.
The Zeroth Law states that if two thermodynamical systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other. In other words, thermal equilibrium is a transitive property. This is intuitively obvious in terms of temperature, i.e. if A and B each have the same temperature as C, then A and B have the same temperature.
The First Law states that the total change in energy of a thermodynamical system is equal to the sum of the amount of heat transferred to the system and the amount of work performed on the system. This is a statement of conservation of energy.
The Second Law states that the entropy of a closed thermodynamical system tends to increase with time and can never decrease. This is the most controversial law since it’s the only physical law which does not treat time symmetrically, i.e. does not remain unchanged when time is reversed.
The Third Law states that there is a minimum temperature, called absolute zero, which a thermodynamical system can approach but can never attain.
Every now and then, some crackpots claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine. This would be a machine that can run forever without being supplied energy. There are two kinds of perpetual motion machines. Perpetual motion machines of the first kind violate the First Law of Thermodynamics and perpetual motion machines of the second kind violate the Second Law. No perpetual motion machine has ever been demonstrated to work.