Any physics hotshots in the house?

[wazzickle]

A friend's dad has invested in a company that is promising cheap, green energy. I can't work out whether it's a perpetual motion machine, or not, but at the very least, it seems like a complete scam, but I wanted to see what others thought. I'm seeing red flags all over the place, but need the weight of a few more opinions before I go back to him and tell him to sell (again).

http://www.ki-tech.international/

https://rosch.ag/uk_kpp.php



I appreciate your time and so does my friends dad, though he doesn't know it yet.

[kalniel]

I think the energy is coming from compressing the air and pumping it, so it's more a mechanism for converting energy stored in compressed air to electricity.

[Zhaoman]

Where does the energy for pressurising the air and then injecting the pressurised air and air bubbles come from? It's definitely not coming from itself because it would be producing a pitiful amount of energy compared to what is required to keep it running. I don't doubt that air bubbles could reduce the water density to the point of making one side of it sink and cause it to turn but air bubbles don't come for free. The actual efficiency of using air bubbles to modify water density to turn a generator based on buoyancy of a few balloons sounds horrific even if you got free energy from the ground or solar to make the bubbles. In which case just use geothermal or solar to turn the generator...

[Pob255]

I'm half way through and don't know where to begin with this perpetual motion machine bullrubbishrubbishrubbishrubbish

You're passing bodies through water, that's a heck of a lot of resistance to overcome compared to air, yes a stream of bubbles on the downward side will reduce the density of the water so it's less dense than normal water but still a whole load more than air.

Speaking of air, you need a large compressor out on the surface that has to compress the air in order to force it down to the bottom of the contraption.

so what we're looking at here is energy required to push a volume of air down below the water to both lift the buckets and air to reduce the water density in the down stream
The energy you will recover will only be the lift energy of only the air you pumped down - the friction of all that moving through water (dense compared to air) - the energy required to pump extra air for the down stream - generator efficiency
So you're looking at an overall net negative energy gain, does not matter how efficient any of the parts are, you're generating a total negative because you have to push the air down against the force of the water trying to push it up.

All that talk of buoyancy makes me think there's a flat earther behind this . . . need I say more?

[Pob255]

I think the best thing you could call this is an aero-pumped-storage station? it's a sort of opposite of a hydro pumped storage station like that at Llanberis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jx_bJgIFhI
These are still net users of power, they work because we don't have constant demand, our power demands peak (oh and they are far more efficient than that "KPP" is ever going to be)

So your best bet for clean power generation is a load of hydro pumped storage stations connected to wind+geothermal+solar+nuclear generation stations

[DDY]

Scam.

For the reasons as mentioned above. It’s effectively a really contrived way to convert pneumatic potential energy to electricity.

Looks like the thing is driven by air from a conventional air compressor station. From the video at the 2:00 mark, you can see the compressor and large accumulator tank with a long pipe leading down to the base of the kit which does the bubble thing, which I assume is what allows the thing to work as the video describes.

In the same 2:00 frame you can also see the generator that’s driven by the gears and mechanical links between the pods.

So, uh.

Why not just hook up the drive to the compressor directly to the generator? I mean, they’re right next to each other.

That way, it eliminates the inefficiency losses of, I don’t know – the air compressor station, pneumatic line loss, hydraulic tank loss and mechanical losses in that behemoth contraption?!

Or even better, if the compressor is driven by an electric motor. Just hook up the cables from the motor to what the generator is supplying!

Boom.

Just solved world hunger.

Pay me.

[Zak33]

I'll admit to not knowin g much about KPP

but magnets... to make them is not environmentally neutral ...at all

Ask the elec car brands about that

https://www.first4magnets.com/permanent-magnets-i155

To make a permanent magnet, ferromagnetic material is heated at incredibly high temperatures, while exposed to a strong, external magnetic field.

so even if it all works, which i think is ... smoke and mirrors....

this sentence is nonsense "zero inputs, zero emmissions"

everything made by man needs to be made .... with energy

[hb904460]

The details could be deliberately being kept ambiguous as they are scared of giving too much to competitors. On the other hand it looks like a lab scale experiment and that is a long way from a commercially viable technology with payback.
In the right environment it may work well, potentially used at sewage treatment works as part of the anaerobic digestion where the bubbles are from methane gas already under pressure.

In theory it may well be viable but in practice is a totally different ballgame. Personally i wouldnt invest in it.

[philehidiot]

This is on its way to thunderf00t and Dave Jones.

One simple thing is enough to debunk it - it says the generator is acting as a brake and that it is self propelling once it is going (self-looping as they describe it).

Generously, take out the generator from that system and just assume that it is able to keep itself going. It still has to be over 100% efficient just to overcome the energy lost from friction and the energy loss as heat due to cavitiation. Energy will leave this system and, as such, it violates the laws of thermodynamics if it is to be "self-looping" as energy entering the system is not accounted for.

Please, tell anyone you know investing in this to get their money out fast. Even if it can, somehow, harvest energy from gravity and so on, the amount produced could never be enough to provide an economically viable power supply.

This is a scam or driven by someone who is a theorist and has no experience in practical engineering, with everyone else smiling and nodding. No effort is even made to consider the energy required to compress the air. This can not be "self looping" especially whilst a generator is operational.

I expect their lab based tests only measured the energy produced. In which case, you may measure the energy produced by my farts as being "free energy". If you ignore the input of beans, beer and sprouts.

[Pob255]

here's a fun one look up the address of their uk office on google maps/street view
it's a home converted into a chartered account office, next to a pub and checking the accountant, yes they are still practising from that address

have some fun go to their about about us page and they list addresses for their "offices"
Just checked the french one, it's a rental business & conference space

[matts-uk]

The details are ambiguous because it's snake oil. The contraption will not work in practice at any scale. What we have here is animation skills, not physics. The sort of thing a CAD student might dream up with after eating mouldy sandwiches at their PADI Scuba Diver course.

The principle of using cavitation to control the buoyancy of a body submerged in water doesn't work.
https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcon...xt=publication

The short version is introducing micro-bubbles to the water column surrounding a submerged body increases the apparent buoyancy of the submerged body. The linked paper proposes a hypothesis for the counter intuitive result, although I am not sure I agree with it entirely. The researchers do not appear to have explored the characteristic of micro-bubbles to cling to surfaces.

The animation doesn't even attempt to show how gas in the micro-bubbles might be reclaimed. The gas pressure inside a bubble is energy. (PV=nRT) If you don't reclaim the gas, you lose the energy.

There are so many things wrong with the design and accompanying *explanation*, it is no more than buzzword-salad BS.

[DanceswithUnix]

I assume buoyancy and lubrication of the machine in snake oil rather than water would lead to even better results

Seeing the lovely animation and the pointlessly built prototype does remind me of a story from decades ago when I worked as a draughtsman in an engineering firm, and someone was told off for doodling during their lunch break. Apparently someone had once idly drawn something that went round and round, and in another lunchtime another person had added a bit that went up and down. Over the months it grew in complexity and silliness, until one day on a customer site an engineer was asked what this does, and there beautifully fabricated was something that went round and round and up and down. Someone had accidentally printed off the drawing, and send it. Doodling was banned from then onward .

The story is probably not true, but funny enough that it should be

So that's what I think this is. Things that go up and down, and round and round, and doesn't do anything actually useful.

OFC what you really want is a friendly university Mechanical Engineering department to do a proper analysis, if they haven't all been shut for not being as profitable as other departments.

[Pob255]

Ahh yes it's more than probably lubricated with Ophidia elaion distillate

But as too functionality there is one very important key function for this device, raising capital

[wazzickle]

Any advice as to how to handle this? I will probably be directing him to this thread, but there's no guarantee he will take a simple volume of your opinions over mine; I have a facebook contact that has a PhD from Stanford in theoretical physics that has promised to look at it for me but I don't know how much time I can expect him to give me on this. The help I'm specifically looking for is how to get through whatever psychological biases he has (eg sunk cost fallacy, the idea that because he's a good investor in general, that means this is unlikely to be a bad investor; all the other reasons people stick to their guns despite the logical part of their brain throwing up warnings, e.g. OneCoin). There is clearly a part of him that's worried, otherwise he wouldn't have asked me to look at it, but when he told me he'd invested, and I immediately said 'sell it, sell it all, now', and then gave my reasons, he told me that he's heard these arguments before and he could answer all my questions or issues, so it may take more weapons in my arsenal than I currently have.

[kalniel]

I doubt text by strangers will help. He'll need to ask his own questions and find the answers out for himself. If he doesn't understand the science then no amount of scientific rationale will help, so start with the usual investor sense ones - who are the company directors, where is the company registered etc. Then he can ask whether the numbers make sense - what is their business model, what are their costs, how much initial funding do they need to raise, how long will it take to turn a profit, what are those figures based on (eg what price do they think they'll get for the electricity, how much are they generating etc.), are they planning on becoming a whole sale supplier or are they planning on getting bought out by someone else, if so, when etc.

[cheesemp]

The obvious one is - If its so good why are then turning to small investors to invest? Something like this with potential would have had venture capitalists fighting to finance it. Its the usual 'if its too good to be true it probably isn't'. Also how many of these energy crisis solving companies have had a breakthrough (hint its none)? But hey I guess there is a 0.001% chance its real and he'll make 'millions'. The big question is can he take the loss? Also how easy is it to de-invest. I suspect if its a scammy as it feels the money might already be gone on 'R&D'.