The time is now to bring tesla back to life... im not sure what the **** these company's are waiting for but GeoThermal energy alone could save the planet and start a new revolution.

used oil and gas wells combined with tesla turbines would be enough to start a new revolution

The time is now to bring tesla back to life... im not sure what the **** these company's are waiting for but GeoThermal energy alone could save the planet and start a new revolution.

used oil and gas wells combined with tesla turbines would be enough to start a new revolution

TESLA!!!!!!!!!
You bet Man I dug there tunes. I been waiting for a Tesla reunion.

Rock On With Big Fattie, Bluesman

Nikoli Tesla. Not Tesla the group.

I still play thiers on the guitar though. :rainfro:

Aren't Tesla Turbines like 35% efficient? I'd think a standard steam turbine would be a lot more efficient.

There's nothing out there stopping anyone from making a Tesla turbine, or a Tesla coil, for that matter.

The one that mattered the most was the multiphase motor, that sure caught on big time.

The other innovations have more limited utility.

Too bad being a genius doesn't guarantee financial success. Interesting man.

--97T--

He made a RC boat in 1898
He could send power through the air and rectify it back.

Thats what the tesla coil was for, when it's throwing sparks its outta tune.

He's the reason we have A/C in our home's
Edison is the reason why they have A/C in electric chairs
Thats the real short list.

That guy was so far ahead of his time.

Think it was the wardencliff transmitter , a little EMP problem in colorado and the red scare that made him die in debt.

His musem is in serbia http://www.tesla-museum.org/meni_en.htm

Tesla coil ,now thats interesting toy.

A cool use for old neon sign transformers:rainfro: .
A wiki link on the turbine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_turbine#Efficiency_and_calculations


Dave

My 6th grade science fair project was a 250KV tesla coil. Would light a flourescent (burnt out even) bulb about 30 ft away. It was a big tuned transformer at about 100 Khz basicly. Also destroyed off air tv and radio reception over quite a range. Definately not good for computer circuitry in the near vicinity either.

As for the Tesla turbine, here are a couple of links...
http://www.teslaengine.org/main.html
http://www.phoenixnavigation.com/
http://phoenixnavigation.com/ptbc/home.htm

As for using old oil wells for geothermal, you would want to drill them quite a bit deeper in most cases. California has some geothermal plants in production, but of course they are near the pacific "ring of fire" where thermal energy is available nearer the surface. One test well in austrailia back in 2003 was over 14,000 feet deep. Many older plugged wells are only 2000 ft deep. Just have to look around.

Steve

The time is now to bring tesla back to life

Actually there is a company researching this right now. The application is that low voltage appliances, computers cell phones, led/ DC lamps etc will have small receiver coils that pull from a house wide field rather than using transformers to step down AC voltage for each and every charger, light. I read it in popular mechanics at the Dr.'s office the other day, aug edition I believe.

And you thought it was bad when your neighbor was just hacking into your wi-fi internet connection.

I don't pretend to know much about electricity beond basic wireing but, I 've always wonderd if you took the very high voltage and almost no amperage out put of a Tesla coil and turned it around ( by Omes law?) to reduce the the voltage and give a more useable amperage (as is done in a typicle arc welder) ??
I have seen kits in old Edmund Scientific catalogs that help build hand crank or wind powerd static electricity generators and I have often wonderd if there was a usefull application for somthing that produced this type of electricity beond running your gas engines or shocking the cat. I'm sure I'm mixing up a few diferent devices or terminologies here but you must see the point of my question. I simply want to know if I can extract a supply of usable electricity from these so called static electricity generators?

It is not ohms law; that is the law that relates voltage, resistance and current. What you are thinking about is using a transformer with an incredibly high primary voltage at a low current and a low secondary voltage at a higher current.

The problem is in static electricity the current is sooooo low; such as fractions of a microamp. You might have megavolts but power is voltage multiplied by current and a megavolt multiplied by a microamp is 1 watt.

Of course if you want to get carried away you can use Mother Nature's static electricity, lightening. that comes in megavolts and hundreds, or even thousands, of amps so the wattage can be spectacular. But it doesn't last for very long; fortunately .

Tesla's whole thing was the wireless transmission of power.
Think he was doing 30 miles and lighting light bulbs.(colorado ?)
Rectifying and converting the EMP (wave) to a useable level.
When a tesla coil is throwing sparks its out of tune .

Debogus,
Actually the sparks will be there if the "radiator" or "antenna" is out of tune. If you took a 130 Khz Tesla and connected it to a 1/4 wave whip it would most likely not throw sparks.

Thanks for the reply Geof, I begin to see the depths of my madness.
I have asked this same question of a couple of electricly knowlagable people that could not give me a saticfactory answer. I wonder if you would be willing to explain, in laymens terms, why a typical gen set that is producing useable power requires the motive power that it needs to produce the electricity yet if I mearly wipe my hand across a synthetic carpet I can also produce a certain amount of electricity, given that it has no real use other than to annoy the cat.
In short, what is it about the production of amperage that requires so much effort to create it?
Again thanks for the reply from bothe Geof and debogus

Cruise the Tesla forums and sites.
Tons of info of what and why .


Mostly those guy's are into making sparks but on that path you will find some history and what Tesla was up to.

He even thought he could use the coil as a weapon, by directing the energy.
But alas after a few law suits and the red scare ( and the fact that he was so far ahead of his time didn't help )he died penny less.

He did R/C first before 1900, that says something .(date on patent list)

One account I found was Tesla powering a car with wireless power.(not sure of date was a "news" type story from a wittness account)



I got bit by the bug and built a coil , not hard really.

That was hobbies ago .
Now its here and metal casting forums

Im thinking what he did was more like how they now use microwaves to powerstuff.

hey debogus, thanks for the reply.
I dig what your saying about "transmitting " power through the air to remotly power a vehicle. That would be astonishing for any day and age not just 1900.
Now that I have that little kernel of knowlage I will go and check out the material on the Tesla coil from my local library as a start.
I can imagin there are some serious draw backs to utilizing that kind of power or we would surely be all using it today.
My first project would be an electric powerd garden tractor to replace the gas one I use to mow my lawn with now, cordless of corse! (no batteries either)
I think the American use of the lawn mower is a very significant cause of air and niose pollution.

Thanks for the reply Geof, I begin to see the depths of my madness.
I have asked this same question of a couple of electricly knowlagable people that could not give me a saticfactory answer. I wonder if you would be willing to explain, in laymens terms, why a typical gen set that is producing useable power requires the motive power that it needs to produce the electricity yet if I mearly wipe my hand across a synthetic carpet I can also produce a certain amount of electricity, given that it has no real use other than to annoy the cat.
In short, what is it about the production of amperage that requires so much effort to create it?
Again thanks for the reply from bothe Geof and debogus

It is just a matter of how much energy you are dealing with. Energy the ability to do work. Work; a force acting through a distance. Such as for instance living a weight of 550 lbs up 1 foot vertically. You are doing work against gravity. I guess maybe 550 is too much; lets make it 157 lbs lifted 3-1/2 feet, I can just barely do that. Lift that weight that distance and you have done 550 foot pounds of work. I deal in the Imperial system because I am too old to reprogram my brain. Now if you lift the weight in one second you have done work at the rate of 1 horsepower. Is this sounding familiar from your high school physics classes? Where your instructor probably said you had to know it for the exam but would never use it again. So where am I going?

Lets say you want to generate 1500 watts for whatever; some big flood lights on a construction sight maybe. At 100% efficiency 1500 Watts is equal to 2 horsepower but generators are more like 85% efficient, maybe a bit more, so to get the 1500 watts out you need to drive the generator with nearly 2.4 horsepower. But little gasoline or diesel engines are always ovverrated so a 5 hp engine is probably only capable of producing 2-1/2hp in the middle of its rpm range. that is why your 1500 watt generator needs something like a five horse engine driving it.

Now to the carpet and annoying the cat. How much force to you put into moving your hand across the carpet? Probably not much. How far do you move it? Also not much; so you are not doing much work and you are probably doing it not very fast so the rate at which you are doing work generating static electricity is measured in micro-gnat power :). But now we come to the voltage, amperage and resistance thing. Static electricity only builds up on very, very poor conductors, non-conductors really, so even though you are only creating a very small amount of electrical energy it can build up to a very high voltage because the current cannot flow anywhere. Whereas with the genset and lights, the lights are designed to consume their rated 1500watts at 120 volts so that is what the generator puts out.

I hope this helps. Do you know how difficult it is to compress half of grade eleven physics into a few hundred words?

Geof, I bow deeply to your wisdom and thank you for sharing so freely.
I do fully understand your answer but,( there is always a catch )this is not exactly what I'm after.
Let me try to explain a little more of what my thought prosses is here.
In my mind (wether I'm right or wrong) I see these two forms of electricity, one has a relitivly low voltage ( say 120vac) and a some what higher and more useable amperage of 20amp and all this is contained in a circit in my house.
the other form of electricity contains a very high voltage of say 10000 volts with a small fraction of a milli amp of amperage, caused by an ion build up on the surface of my skin when I rub the carrpet.
I know that to make the small lite bulb of a bicycle generator powerd headlamp work takes a noticable amount of leg work and creating enough voltage to jump an 1/8 inch gap with a static electrical charge only requires one to get up out of the arm chair and walk across the floor (usually in stocking feet) to change the TV channle.
I'm skirting around the old conservation of energy issue (can't get more out of a system than you put into it) because it seems to be working inversly here.
If I wanted to produce a lot of static electricity for some reason it could be done without much effort or "work" but, we have no apparent use for this type of electricle power. So this is my question again,
"Why" does it require " X " amount of work input into the system to produce the higher amperages ?
Some time ago the Univercity of Wisconsin at Madison was involved in a project to develope a means of capturing and storing the electrical energy given off in a typical lightening strike.
They were going to use a bunch of enormous magnets as a kind of capasitor to capture and hold the charge of later use on the grid.
Long story short the project was scraped or put on perminent hold because of consern over the heavy magnetic fields effect on miggrating birds.
So I thought why not try to contain and reuse the power from a much smaller more managable arc? This is were I'm realy going with all these questions.
BTY, I know the rule as: 1 HP = the effort needed to raise 33,000lbs, one foot (12") in one minets time

To any one else that my be interested, I have another question.
A few years ago they tried an experiment on the space shuttle to try and extract electricity from the vast amount of ions flying through space.
The premis was that an electrical current could be collected from a wire of suficient length that was beeing towed through space behind the shuttle craft.
Aparently it was somthing like a mile or more of rather lite guage wire on a spool to be deployed by a space walk mission.
The deployment apperatice didn't work right so they only got about 1000 feel of wire out, not enough to be usefull but enough to prove the therory.
If a Tesla coil could focus its output to a pinpoint spot or a certain earthbound collector and be hooked up to one of these "ion/wire" current producers out in space, would we not have a continuouse supply of power that didn't rely on when the sun is shinning or how hard the wind is blowing?

..A few years ago they tried an experiment on the space shuttle to try and extract electricity from the vast amount of ions flying through space.
The premis was that an electrical current could be collected from a wire of suficient length that was beeing towed through space behind the shuttle craft......

Yes their deployment failed but their premise was also faulty. Actually the electric current in the wire would have come from it moving in the earth's magnetic field. Yes it is likely that a voltage would develop along the wire but if any current flowed the wire moving through space would have experienced a drag which would have slowed the shuttle and pulled it out of orbit.

To some extent you are answering your own question when you mention the bicycle generator. When you have it connected in a circuit through a bulb you are doing work on the generator, the energy of your work is converted into electrical energy which lights the bulb, a current is flowing. Open the switch and there is no current flow and you would not have to do so much leg work. If you put a voltmeter across the open switch you would see you are still creating a voltage but because there is no current flow then no energy is being consumed so you are not having to do legwork. The situation is somewhat similar with static electricity; there is no current flow. Remember I mentioned static electricity only builds up on things that are very, very poor conductors, they are insulators. Because there is no current flow the static voltage can build up very high until a spark occurs. Actually you have done a little bit of work building the voltage up but it is so small it is not noticeable. And the spark that occurs does carry current but it is a very small amount of current flowing for a very, very short time. It does not represent much energy, i.e. it does not need much work.

[quote=Geof;377006] Actually the electric current in the wire would have come from it moving in the earth's magnetic field.

Geof, I seem to recall it beeing described as somthing ahkin to catching the solar winds so that the charged ions passing by the wire and through it are what created the current. Are we talking about the same thing?
I recall thinking at the time "why didn't they, if they needed a certain amount of wire to attain a certain amount of output, make the wire into a collapsable sail or dish? Perhaps I heard it wrong or the reporter got it wrong....?
Again let me thank you for your wise discorse on this matter!

I found this on Wikipedia:

Electrodynamic tethers are long conducting wires, such as the one deployed from the tether satellite, which can operate on electromagnetic principles as generators, by converting their kinetic energy to electrical energy, or as motors, converting electrical energy to kinetic energy. Electric potential is generated across a conductive tether by its motion through the Earth's magnetic field. ....

But as you see it is kinetic energy being converted to electrical energy; that is the kinetic energy nof the satellite or Shuttle. This means the satellite or Shuttle has to slow down. It is like using dynamic braking in an electric vehicle, the kinetic energy is converted into electrical energy which is either dissipated through a resistor or put back into the batteries, the vehicle slows down.

Geof,
I finely see the base of my question and have my own answer to it.
You can't get somthing for nothing in this universe. If I want to create a type of electricity that can do little apparent work (static electricity) then it won't take much to create it. If I want to produce a type of electrical power that can do some real work I will need to put at least that much kinetic energy in. Simple logic is too often over looked.
Thankyou Obi-Wan, for correcting my mind and body...

Low amperage/ high voltage. Static capture and use ?
Capacitors?
Large capacitors have to be shorted during storage due to their abilty to charge from static in the air (enough to kill you!)
Same goes with high voltage power transmission lines they can be unhooked at both ends can charge up to lethal levels.

So you need to get some large ass caps and then a method to convert it down to usable levels.

Do it and win a nobel.
Or die in a conspiracy therory

I've been reading along here and have seen the light-bulb come on more than once.. :) Just what does it take to power a light bulb? 100 watt bulb to make it easy. If the bulb draws 100 watts of "power" at 120 Volts RMS AC, then the current through the circuit will be 0.8333.... Amperes. So what's an Ampere? 1 Coulomb of electrons (or units of electric charge) past one point in 1 second = 1 ampere. 1 Culomb = 6.241506×10^18 electrons. Now, lets look as those electrons as little BB's and if you look at their height above the ground as their "potential" to do work (the reverse of raising 550 lbs straight up 1 foot in 1 second) The more BB's you have 100 feet up in the air the more work you can do as you extract "that" potential energy on their way to the ground. Or, the higher you raise 100 BB's above the ground the more work you can do as you extract "that" potential energy on their way to the ground. If you look at the altitude as the Voltage and the number of BB's as the Amperage..... So to power that light bulb... just take about 172,197,817,339,176 electrons and force them through the resistance of the filiment of the light bulb in 1 second, and it will light, for 1 second.

Here is a little experiment for you. Take one of those really strong neodymium magnets hold it at the top edge of a sheet of aluminum that is almost vertical. Let it slide down the aluminum sheet.

Tesla was a bit ahead of his time in many respects. Not just the his coil, look at the turbine too, not to mention polyphase motors and the AC electric grid (as opposed to Edisons recomendation that we use DC) etc.. etc...

Till next time.
Steve

light-bulb come on?

Drop the magnet down a copper pipe also.

Geof is right for the most part but there is "free" energy to be had sort of....

The universe is in constant flux and forces are acting on every particle at every moment. You can draw energy where there was seemingly none before.

We just haven't found a way to exploit the "free" (sort of) energy into a usable medium yet.

sources of potential energy: gravity, earths rotation threw magnetic field, previously mentioned Ionic particles, solar winds, etc....

Any thing that is moving threw space has the potential to supply energy, of course by using this energy you will slow or stop the particle/body, but I'm thinking, if its a body as big as a planet your not going to slow it down appreciably.

Armchair physics at its finest!



Maybe wishful thinking but I don't think so. After all nuclear energy is a "free"(sort of) energy because nature supplies it.

debogus, I have a question related to your comments about the charging of capacitors from static electricity in the air.
Are you saying that storing the static electrical charge in a capacitor somehow turns it in to usefull electricity (voltage and usable amperage?) or do we still have to find some way to convert the static charge.
I have to run but, when I get back I want to lay out the beginings of an idea for power generation to see what you all think.

Not sure of potential stored in one , just that it was enough to hurt(kill)from static. Nor have I personaly discharged a static stored capacitor to even guess.

I was stating that static like carpet shock could be stored.
But how much , before you gained a usefull charge would be another question.

Van graph(?) generators work on the same principle .


But I'm just guessing that given a certain storage capicity ,discharged through a "something to step it down" gizmo

They electronicly step up low dc to high dc discharge voltages.save that to a capacitor then dump it to "BLOW STUFF UP" and make crazy strong short lived electro magnets.(wire goes bang)

Just seems to reason you could step it back down some way.

But like I posted earlier

You figuire out how and you'll be a conspircy story.:confused:(nuts)

Tesla made high voltage into a electro magnetic wave and could rectify that back down.( but then again ,thats induction not static)

So the knowlege is probably buried with him.

Interesting idea though.

My 6th grade science fair project was a 250KV tesla coil. Would light a flourescent (burnt out even) bulb about 30 ft away. It was a big tuned transformer at about 100 Khz basicly. Also destroyed off air tv and radio reception over quite a range. Definately not good for computer circuitry in the near vicinity either.

As for the Tesla turbine, here are a couple of links...
http://www.teslaengine.org/main.html
http://www.phoenixnavigation.com/
http://phoenixnavigation.com/ptbc/home.htm

As for using old oil wells for geothermal, you would want to drill them quite a bit deeper in most cases. California has some geothermal plants in production, but of course they are near the pacific "ring of fire" where thermal energy is available nearer the surface. One test well in austrailia back in 2003 was over 14,000 feet deep. Many older plugged wells are only 2000 ft deep. Just have to look around.

Steve

This very true. I've been to the geothermal area near Clear Lake Ca. I spent about a week there doing small steam line (2"-3" pipe) clean up for a company called Rain for Rent. The lines were used in the process of drilling the steam wells in the area. Some were upwards of 15,000 ft deep.
Geothermal is a filthy power source. The areas around the plants were covered with signs warning about the organic arsenic and other cancer causing contaminates in the areas. There were no animals or vegatation around most of the power stations (it looked like a moonscape around them). I was warned to stay away from the local streams.
Essentiality it was one of the most polluted and envriomentally ruined areas I've ever seen.

Good post
makes good old fashioned coal ,look pretty green

If it wasn't for CO2, plants would not be green. That's a scarry thought. The "Think Green" movement is ok, but we don't need to take it to excess.

Electrical energy stored in a capacitor is a static charge. That capacitor can take on many forms. In a VanDeGraf generator it is generally the smooth surface of the sphere on top. The larger the sphere, the more electrons it will store. Voltage is the force or pressure behind the flow, and Amps is the quantity of the flow.

Tesla was "transmitting" power via electomagnetic waves (radio waves). Not a bad idea, just the implementation of it was really not viable.

If we had to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses to zero, we would not be able to burn or combine with oxygen any carbon based fuel. This would include wood (includes charcoal and wood products), coal, oil (includes plasitc, wax, and any oil product) and natural gas. We would also have to stop eating carbon based foods. We intake carbohydrates convert that to energy to live and expel the CO2 thereby produced through a process we call breathing. Not to mention the methane we expell from other areas of the body. Oh dear... we need to stop creamating our bodies too... and oops, I guess just the eventual decay of an embalmed body actually releases greenhouse gasses too... we need to stop dying !

Have a great new year :)
Steve

well seve i think the idea with anything is not to get carried away i agree with you on that one but the ice is outdated and we as a whole need to move on
sorry little off topic but relevant