Perpetual motion how does it work

For some people, perpetual motion machines hold the secret to everlasting free energy that will save the world. To them, it's a machine that is just beyond our grasp. If only we could tweak our design just a little bit, it would work. To others like me , perpetual motion machines are impossible —they don't fit with our well-tested ideas of the conservation of energy.

However, they can still make a fun puzzle, as you see above. OK, so exactly what is a perpetual motion machine? The basic idea is that these machines can operate in some manner say with a spinning wheel forever without an energy source. That's not so impossible, just not very easy since machines always lose energy to friction. A better perpetual motion machine not only works forever, but also has a positive energy output even if just a small amount so that it can save the world—but like I said, these don't exist.

Why don't perpetual motion machines work? It's all about energy. In short, energy is this quantity that we can calculate for some system. It turns out that because of the way we define energy, this quantity doesn't change for a system that doesn't have external interactions. That, in a nut shell, is energy conservation where "conservation" means "does not change".

Energy isn't really real—it's just something that works. Another stand out is that electrical devices are the predominant field of endeavour, outstripping mechanical devices by a factor of 3 to 1. This probably reflects the modern world where renewable energy generation and storage is a growing industry, and generating free energy forever for zero cost is an attractive proposition. This is a chart generated by PatBase Analytics that gives frequently occurring concepts or keywords found within the set of patent families more prominence, in this case with a larger font.

One last stand out is that some of these applications get granted, even when they are classified primarily in an alleged perpetua mobilia class.

In fact, almost two hundred per year are granted, as shown below. Most of them, about three quarters, are granted in China, and it appears that the majority of these are utility patents, where there is little or no examination and a lower requirement for an inventive step.

That still leaves a substantial proportion of granted patents theoretically with unpatentable subject matter. It may be that some of these applications had multiple inventions, and the unpatentable ones have been weeded out, or that at first glance it appeared to be a perpetual motion machine, but was not, or was suitably amended to enable acceptance and grant. CNA is a perpetual motion machine for drawing water from a low level reservoir to a higher level one using a waterwheel and siphon tube where a portion of the water siphoned is used to drive the waterwheel while the remaining portion is sent to the higher reservoir.

The interesting thing about this specification is that three quarters of it is dedicated to an essay on the futility of perpetual motion, before moving on to time travel, the space-time continuum, gravitation energy, and last of all, God. The last quarter, without a hint of irony, describes the invention. CNA is a gravity driven perpetual motion machine based on the idea that a circular chain, where part of the chain rests on a sloping surface, and by calculating the relevant gravity force vectors, conclude that the sloped portion of the chain weighs less than the portion of the chain that is vertical, and as such the heavier part of the chain will pull the lighter part up the slope thus creating perpetual motion.

Its sole utility appears to be as a toy. GBA relates to electric vehicles, where the vehicle has two batteries. The energy from one battery is used to propel the vehicle, while the vehicle engine charges the second battery. When the first battery is drained, the roles of the batteries are reversed, and the second battery now propels the vehicle while the first battery is recharged by the engine, thus negating the need to stop and refuel.

AU was withdrawn before examination occurred. All perpetual motion and over-unity devices must violate physics laws. So why do inventors even bother with such computer simulations? I'm not refering to animated pictures here. They can, of course, depict both possible an impossible situations. The internet has many examples of such animations of impossible devices and situations, done for amuseuemt. I'm talking about the professional and expensive software programs that engineers use to predict behavior of systems in the real world.

These use standard laws of physics and properties of materials, and are incable if properly configured and supplied with valid and complete data of predicting anything that would violate thoe laws. Similar caveats apply to folks who say "my idea works fine on paper.

Too complicated to understand. My design has gone through many changes and improvements. It's now so complicated that I don't understand how it works. But I'm certain that it will work. Can you help me? If you don't understand it, how can you be so certain that it will work? No, I can't help you. A wise colleague used to say, "The perpetual motion machine inventor concocts a device so complicated that he can't see any reason why it wouldn't work.

So therefore he assumes it must work. Should I buy stronger magnets? Strong magnets can be obtained at small cost, so buy some to experiment with and learn how magnetism works. Be careful, though, for some are strong enough to injure you if your finger gets pinched between them.

And keep them out of the hands of small children, who might swallow them. You will soon learn that even with larger magnets your magnet wheel won't turn around even once by itself.

My wheel-type device doesn't turn by itself even once around. Will reducing friction help? Reducing friction won't fix an unworkable device. Friction is never the sole reason for the failure of a supposed over-unity device. Even if you could remove friction entirely it wouldn't work.

Look for the real reason for its failure. You can be sure the reason isn't friction. Likewise, viscosity is never the sole reason for failure of perpetual motion and over-unity devices using liquids.

Assume an over-unity machine that is free of friction, viscosity, and all other dissipative processes. Analysis will always show that it still can't work even if completely idealized. Most machines depend on friction to work. Imagine a world without friction of any kind. You couldn't walk, vehicles could not move, belts would slide over pulleys, knots would come undone, structures would collapse.

Removing all friction may not even be a good idea. Looking at books and websites, I conclude that all the simple perpetual motion ideas have been tried, and all have failed. Can some of these ideas be modified, improved or combined to be successful? Designer hubcaps don't improve the performance of square wheels. That has been tried, too. Any clever improvement or ingenious mechanical gimmick increases a device's mechanical complexity and degrades performance.

The closest you'll ever come to a perpetually turning wheel is a simple flywheel with frictionless bearings. Any "improvements" you add will bring it to a stop sooner.

I want to tap energy from natural sources. Which would be the best source, gravity or magnetism? These are not sources of energy. They are natural forces important to the operation of many machines, but no working cyclic machine has ever extracted any energy from gravity, buoyancy or magnetism. All the machinery of mankind has not diminished the strength of the earth's gravitational field by even a smidgen.

If you want sources of energy from nature, try something that moves, like wind, tides, or falling water. Or something that can be burned, like coal or oil.

Or something that varies in temperature naturally driven by energy from the sun. Or something that actually emits energetic particles, like the sun, or radioactive ores. But someone objects. Doesn't that come from gravity? When we are talking about perpetual motion we are dealing with cyclic machines, devices that complete a closed cycle of operation, indefinitely.

When you go to the ski resort the potential energy you have at the top of the ski run came from the work you did walking up the mountain, driving up in an automobile, or taking a ski lift. At the top you have potential energy relative to the bottom. That potential energy is what gives you kinetic energy as you ski down the slope.

Gravity was not the source of that energy; it was an intermediary agent. But couldn't gravitational fields provide an unlimited source of energy? All our machinery operates in a gravity field, and some depend on it. Force fields are a mathematical way of describing what will happen when things are placed in the field and move in that field.

They a conceptual mathematical convenience, and are not sources of energy. No one has ever extracted energy from a gravitational field. The gravitational field of the earth acts downward toward the earth's center. Always downward. You never will see a stone rise upward from rest by itself. Cyclic motion of a body in this field may have increases and decreases of kinetic and potential energy, but the net change of energy over one cycle is always zero. Someone may bring up waterwheels. Isn't that a cyclic motion dependent on gravity?

Waterwheels are cyclic, but they are only part of a larger process which isn't a closed cyclic process and doesn't extract energy from gravity. The energy comes from water flowing from higher to lower elevation.

The water then flows down streams to lakes or oceans, where radiant energy from the sun evaporates some of it and atmospheric circulation also sun-driven moves it elsewhere and dumps it as rain. Some of that rain falls at higher land elevations, forming streams which power waterwheels, and so on. This is a cyclic process, but not a closed one.

It requires energy input from the sun. And gravity, though necessary to the process, is not a source of energy. The energy came from the sun. The fact that gravity is not diminished by all of our machinery, space satellites, etc.

Now some things may steal a bit of energy from the rotating earth they'd have to be pretty massive events , slowing it slightly. But that doesn't come from the earth's gravity and it doesn't diminish the earth's gravitational strength.

The gravitational strength of the earth is strictly dependent on the mass of the earth. Gravity is always directed toward the center of the earth. We can get energy from the wind with windmills. Couldn't we make a gravity windmill to extract that energy that is blowing toward the earth? This is a very old, and mistaken notion, going back to the 17 th century at least.

As I said above, a gravity field is a mathematical model, not anything material, and field lines pointing toward the earth do not represent a "flow" of anything. The error here is to use a false analogy between gravity and wind. I know people today who still think a gravity windmill is possible, but I won't name names. But don't magnets have unlimited stored energy? A refrigerator magnet will support itself on the wall of the refrigerator forever, continually exerting force against gravity to keep itself from falling.

So isn't it capable of unlimited work? So I suppose the nail driven into the wall is also doing unlimited work supporting the picture frame hanging from it? I have heard the "refrigerator magnet" example from many people over the years, and find it incredible that they can so confidently make this absurd claim without even thinking of obvious counter-examples. Force and work are different things. Work requires motion. A force that produces no motion does no work, and consumes no energy. Some magnet motor and magnet engine proposals have continually moving magnets.

Can't these extract energy stored in the magnets? Permanent magnets are used in motors and generators worldwide, and none of these machines ever extracts any energy from their magnets. The magnets merely facilitate the conversion of mechanical to electrical energy or vice versa.

After many years of operation, the permanent magnets in these devices still retain their original magnetic properties. The stored energy in a magnet is only that due to the magnet's manufacturing process. It is a small amount. In normal use, the internal stored energy of a magnet is not used or diminished at all. Heating or hammering the magnet can, however, destroy its internal domain alignments, and therefore, its magnetic effect.

Besides, if the magnet did "contain" such a tremendous amount of energy, it must have required at least that much energy to manufacture it, and magnets would be far more expensive.

It's irrelevant, but interesting, to consider just how much energy is stored in a small experimenter's magnet. That information isn't easy to find on the web. I was astounded at how small it is, and asked Rick Hoadley to do an independent calculation, which agreed with mine. The energy stored in an Alnico-5 magnet bar of that size is 1.

A typical hair dryer uses Watts while it is running. If, however, you had a similarly sized NdFeB magnet, it could run the same hair dryer for almost 13 ms! Wow, one hair might get dry!

So anyone supposing they could "extract" considerable energy from magnets to solve the energy crisis had better rethink the matter. Is centrifugal force a good energy source? Centrifugal force is a widely misunderstood concept, often badly presented in physics courses. It is not some exotic kind of force found in nature. It is nothing more than a convenient mathematical concept used when physicists and engineers do analysis of rotating systems using non-inertial rotating coordinate systems as the reference for measurremenets.

Forces are never sources of energy. Forces occur when bodies interact, and, if motion of either body occurs, that interaction may result in one body losing energy and the other gaining an equal amount of energy.

No energy is ever created from a force. Technically, centrifugal force, Coriolis force and Euler force are called "fictitious" forces that arise from analyzing a system in a non-inertial reference frame. All physical results are the same as if the system was analyzed in an inertial frame where these fictitious forces are not present.

So ficitious forces can never be the "cause" of any physical effect. I've seen many analyses that show perpetual motion wheels can't work. When they do an analysis of forces and torques, they consider the wheel at rest, showing it is in equilibrium in any position. But if we gave it a push and set it into motion, might it continue motion, undiminished? Shouldn't we do the analysis of it in motion?

Static analysis of perpetual motion wheels usually shows that the system is in equilibrium only at certain positions. If the wheel has N-fold symmetry, then there are N positions of stable static equilibrium and N positions of unstable static equilibrium between them.

If set into motion, it can move for a while, with slightly jerky motion, till friction slows it to a stop in one of the positions of stable equilbrium—the same positions we found in the static analysis. The dynamic analysis can be done, and is more lengthy and difficult—too involved to discuss here. But it reaches the same conclusion. The wheel will not exhibit continual undiminished motion unless it is spun so fast that it acts as a simple flywheel.

How about converting momentum to energy? Momentum and energy are two different concepts, and are not convertible one to the other. They have different physical dimensions and units. Mathematically, momentum is a vector and energy is a scalar. Energy is conserved in every closed system we have ever studied, and energy is neither created nor destroyed. Momentum is also conserved in such systems, and the two conservation laws represent independent facts about nature.

In the early history of physics when these were not yet understood, there was much debate over which was the "better" or "proper" way to describe motion. This debate was settled in the 17 th century, when we realized that both concepts are necessary to fully describe how mechanical things work and how bodies interact.

Many physical problems simply cannot be solved using only one, but not the other, of these concepts. Both concepts must be used simultaneously. Could we convert angular momentum to linear momentum, or vice versa? Some have tried to convert rotational momentum to linear momentum. The Dean Drive was one such example. Norman Dean was taken in by a stick-slip friction phenomena that he didn't understand.

His device, if it actually worked on the principle he claimed, would violate not only energy conservation but momentum conservation as well. Others still hold out hope of making such a third-law-violation device sometimes called a "reactionless thruster".

But most inventors totally ignore momentum of all kinds because they simply don't know anything about it. They may not even realize that the conservation of momentum law is just as solidly established in physics as the conservation of energy law that they generally despise. Rotational kinetic energy is just ordinary kinetic energy, since kinetic energy is a scalar and does not depend upon the direction of a body's motion or whether the path of a moving body is straight or curved.

So there's nothing more to say about that. Energy, angular momentum and linear momentum are all different beasts. They have separate conservation laws, different dimensions and units, and aren't convertible one to the other. In your analysis of perpetual motion proposals you never include centripetal and centrifugal forces in the math. Isn't it possible that if you did include them, you could show that the idea could really work after all?

I have never seen a perpetual motion machine proposal where it was necessary to deal with centripetal or centrifugal forces in the analysis to conclusively show why the device wouldn't work. There are usually easier ways. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that that an isolated system will move toward a state of disorder. Additionally, the more energy is transformed, the more of it is wasted. A perpetual motion machine would have to have energy that was never wasted and never moved toward a disordered state.

Still, the inviolability of the laws of physics has not stopped the curious from ignoring them or trying to break them. According to Simanek's online museum, the first documented perpetual motion machines included a wheel created by Indian author Bhaskara in the 12th century. It supposedly kept spinning due to an imbalance created by containers of mercury around its rim.

Other attempts include a 16th-century windmill, 17th-century siphons, and several water mills. While most perpetual motion attempts have been in the spirit of scientific inquiry, others have aimed to deceive and make money. The most famous perpetual motion hoax was devised by Charles Redheffer in Redheffer's perpetual motion machine enthralled the Philadelphia and New York communities and brought in thousands of dollars. It was debunked twice by engineers, which ultimately led to Redheffer being run out of town, according to " Perpetual Motion: The History of an Obsession " Adventures Unlimited, by Arthur W.

Nineteenth-century America was a prime time for hoaxes. According to Kimbrew McLeod, author of " Pranksters: Making Mischief in the Modern World " NYU Press, , the Age of Enlightenment's focus on science, learning and gaining knowledge through personal experience and observation led increasing numbers of people to seek out phenomena that they could judge for themselves.

Additionally, increasing literacy rates meant that more people were familiar with concepts like perpetual motion and were eager to see a machine that achieved it. But, as Barbara Franco wrote in " The Cardiff Giant: A Hundred Year Old Hoax ," "people were interested in the new sciences without really understanding them … The nineteenth century public often failed to make a distinction between popular and serious studies of subjects. They heard lectures, attended theaters, went to curiosity museums, the circus and revival meetings with much the same enthusiasm.

People seem to enjoy being taken in by a story that they know might be untrue, falling for it anyway and then being surprised upon learning they were duped. That Redheffer was actually run out of town suggests that early s audiences perhaps hadn't yet fully embraced that form of entertainment, though they would in subsequent decades. Historians do not know Redheffer's background prior to the hoax, according to Ord-Hume.

He appeared on the scene in when he opened a house near the Schuylkill River for public viewing. Inside was a machine he claimed could keep moving forever without ever being touched or otherwise aided. Redheffer's machine was based on an "assumed 'principle' of perpetual motion that assumes continual downward force on an inclined plane can produce a continual horizontal force component," said Simanek.