Posted: Mar 10, 2011 7:53 pm
harleyborgais wrote:To Paul Almond:
In order to "extract energy from the random motion of air molecules in my room" you could use an array of smaller wind driven turbines. Auger or screw shaped turbines pointing upward are more efficient because they are driven to spin the same direction no matter which direction the wind moves, as long as it moves past the spiral.
"If one molecule nudges my windmill one way, shortly afterwards, another molecule will hit it from a different direction and nudge it a different way." Most electrical generators produce AC or alternating current, and you can do that from an oscillating or vibrating motion almost as well as from a spinning motion. Electro-Magnetic generators are all about the number or magnetic lines, number of wires and velocity.
The fact that you think that an array of miniature turbines could extract useful energy from the random motion of air molecules in a room shows how lacking your understanding is of this subject. Suppose you set up this array of "microscopic wind turbines". When a molecule strikes one it generates an electrical current - but when another molecule strikes one it generates an electrical current the opposite way. To get usable power, you would have to add all these currents together - you would have to put them into some device that combined them to make one big potential difference - and then you will find that they are all randomly distributed this way or that way and the average result will be close to zero. Nature, at the microscopic level, has no preference for what you want to do at the macroscopic level.
The term "free energy", in thermodynamics, means the amount of energy available to do work - here the more informal idea of "free energy" is in use. As used by the "free energy" community the terms seems to be vague and can refer to anything from energy sources that don't need an obvious source of power to energy sources that require little money to set up. In the way that you are trying to get energy, you are trying to get "free energy" in the sense of disregarding the second law of thermodynamics.
Let's make this really simple: do you think you know how to make a machine that breaks the second law of thermodynamics?