| Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002
01:07:52 -0600
Dear John,
You confuse COP with
efficiency, and they are two quite different things. Even many of the
textbooks confuse these terms quite often.
Rigorously, the
efficiency of a motor or system may be defined as (total useful output)
divided by (total energy input from all sources). No inert system can
have an efficiency of greater than 100%, for that would be a violation
of energy conservation.
The coefficient of
performance (COP) of a motor or system may be defined as (total useful
output) divided by (energy input by the operator only). If the operator
only has to input, say, 10 joules of energy and the active environment
freely inputs 90 joules of energy, then the total input is 100 joules.
Now suppose that the system has 50% efficiency; i.e., it wastes or
"loses" half the energy before it dissipates the rest of it in the load
to do useful work. In that case the system outputs 50 joules of work
for a total input of 100 joules, but with the operator only inputting 10
of those 100 input joules.
So this system has an
efficiency of 50% but a COP =5.0.
A windmill, e.g., may
have an efficiency of 30% or less, but its COP approaches infinity
because the operator does not have to input any energy at all. He just
pays for the siting, building of the windmill, repairs, and
maintenance. And hopes his winds hold good.
The common home
heatpump is usually not even 50% efficient, but in appropriate
conditions it has a maximum COP = 8.22, and any good heatpump will
actually produce about COP = 4.0.
In a sailboat, you
have to input some energy to move the rudder and steer it, but not
nearly so much energy as is used to propel the boat through the water.
The wind caught by the sail inputs the rest of it. Yet the sail is a
fairly sloppy process also, and unless well-designed will not be nearly
as efficient as a well-designed one.
So the trick is to get
the active environment to give you a "free wind" so you can have
something approaching a windmill. Or as close to that as you can get.
Fortunately, in
electrodynamics there are many "free winds" one can make with ease. The
simplest one is to just make a common dipole. Lee and Yang received a
Nobel Prize in 1957 for their work in broken symmetry and the weak
interaction. One of the broken symmetries that was proven was that of
opposite charges -- such as are on the ends of a dipole.
The very words "broken
symmetry" in power systems implies that something virtual has become
observable. In other words, the charges of the dipole continually
absorb virtual photons from the seething vacuum (that is proven and
well-known, and one does not have to prove it again). The spin of the
charges then coherently integrates that absorbed virtual energy into
real, observable EM energy. The dipole thus pours out EM energy in all
directions at the speed of light. Let it alone and don't destroy it,
and it will pour out that energy indefinitely. The dipoles in the
original matter in the universe have been doing that for some 14 billion
years or so. We used that fact of broken symmetry of opposite charges,
together with the known clustering of virtual charges of opposite sign
around any "isolated" observable charge, to treat the observable charge
as a set of composite dipoles. Hence this finally explained the
long-vexing source charge problem: how does a charge just sit there an
pour out energy in all directions at the speed of light, establishing
its associated fields and potentials and all that energy in them? We
explained that in 2000, after a couple or three years work on it.
A simple "free energy
system" can be built for a dollar. Just place a charged capacitor (or
electret) across a permanent magnet so that the E-field is perpendicular
to the H-field of the magnet. That silly thing will sit there and pour
out Poynting energy flow S = E x H, so long as you just let it alone.
Wait one year, and it will have changed the energy density of a volume
of space a light year in radius (reaching out beyond the solar system).
In solving the dipole
and source charge problems, it was found that the energy input comes
from the time domain into 3-space via the negative charge, and exits
3-space back to the time domain via the positive charge.
In electrical
engineering, it is recognized that the source charge pours out the
energy to create all its associated fields, but until 2000 there has
been no explanation as to what furnished the input energy. In effect,
electrical engineering and classical electrodynamicists for more than a
century have assumed that every charge in the universe is a perpetual
motion machine of the worst kind, creating energy out of nothing.
There is no problem at
all in extracting all the energy one wishes from the active vacuum,
anywhere in the universe, at any time. Just make a dipole.
The problem is in (1)
catching some of that freely gushing EM energy in a circuit containing a
load, and (2) dissipating the caught and collected EM energy in that
load to power it, without using half the caught energy to destroy the
source dipole(s).
That is the ONLY real
energy problem on the planet, and always has been.
It is ironic that the
National Academy of Science, the National Science Foundation, the great
national test labs, the universities, and the private research
institutes are not working on the sole energy problem at all.
Hope this helps.
Tom Bearden
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