Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Green Schemes

I had a couple of things come across my desk recently. They were electrical power generation ideas developed by entrepreneur - inventors who were seeking some engineering assistance or wanted us to incorporate them into a facility. The business development guy kicked them down to me for comment.

Let me start by saying one thing:

You Cannot Disobey the First Law of Thermodynamics.

The First Law states, very simply, that energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but cannot be created or destroyed.

Yes, I may be a Luddite in that I refuse to recognize the genius of your invention/machine/idea and stick with the old ways but I have never been mislead by the First Law and I won't ignore now on the pain of going to Engineering Hell. And your case isn't helped when you quote power generating capacities that don't make sense and are in units that don't exist. And how much sense does it make to capture the kinetic energy in the pressure from a natural gas well by expanding it in a mechanical device when there are oodles more energy available if you just burn the stuff?

And a video of your machine just chugging along with no load on it and no voice over describing how it works and what is happening just does not do it for me. You should try selling it to the Shark Tank or the Dragons Den.

And for that reason, I'm out!

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