Capturing Wake Energy Without Drag ?

I'm quite serious about the subject but I must also confess that I've fallen out of the chair in laughter a few times myself. I suppose I shouldn't have called my very serious wave arresting electrical generators wings.

 

Ok. If you're serious please allow me to offer my condolences. I'll play along anyway just for a bit of fun.

You say you believe there is more energy in the waves than is being used to propel the boat. Assuming you are correct, please explain where this extra energy comes from. You are implying that as soon as something creates a wave it must also magically create extra energy just to bamboozle teh physicists. I want to know where this energy comes from. I'll cook up some nice, hot popcorn while you figure that out.

 

It comes from the extra energy in the wave

 

Damn. Why didn't I think of that?

 

I think he means that more than half the hp is used up making waves.

 

How is this 'extra' energy generated? Where does it come from?

And again: if there is more energy in a wake than was expended creating it, where doe it come from? What energy source is it tapping? It's impossible to create more energy by pushing water than it takes to push that water.

 

What our great inventor tries to tell us is (as far as I understand it), that he wants to harvest the part of the wavemaking energy which is not propelling the boat.

Well, the easiest way to achieve that is:

Don´t make waves!

Long and slender hulls make nearly no waves.

Go to the river banks and watch:

a 60.000 tonnes freighter......no waves
a 1000 tonnes Tug...... big waves
a 5 tonnes runabout.....big waves

 

You've just reminded me of one of the darker aspects of recreational boating.Some maliciously callous boat operators enjoy deliberately creating massive waves that threaten to tip over small fishing boats and knock over people on the beach. They are the equivalent of the psychotic biker that takes the muffler of his Harley and replaces it with an amplifying tailpipe so that they can terrorize everyone in the vicinity every time they start their engine at 2:00 A.M. . I was in a show room once when a buyer clearly stated that his highest priority was to terrorize everyone on the lake by overturning boats and knocking over bathers. At first the salesman resisted him but with a little prodding he proceeded to sell him the meanest and most powerful boat in his inventory.

 

Perhaps if Questor would forget about the sticks, it would be clearer. The sticks are a confusion factor as is most of what a magician shows the audience. Anything floating in the water is just another mass that is the equivalent of the displaced water and neither adds nor subtracts anything to or from the supposed problem. There is some energy absorbed by the floating mass though. One of Questors problems is that energy or force is being confused with work.

This is how to dispose of the weighty stick issue. All of us have had a wind force of a few pounds propel a boat weighing a ton or more across the water. No magic there.

There is no mystery here that I can find. It seems entirely possible that there is more energy in space than we currently know how to define or exploit but I don't think it is evident in waves generated by a boat.

 

I forgot to say it had to be perrier water.

 

uh no...quite far the other direction from reality in fact. The 'pull quote' from the OP:

In other words, Questor 'believes' that within the wake created by the passage of a 10 HP motorboat, resides afterward '10,000 HP worth' of stored energy ready to be harnessed.

 

you have to race the boat by 10,000 times

 

Hi Questor! Here is an excellent video you should watch regarding energy in vs energy out. In fact everyone should watch it. Its educational and entertaining. I think anyone interested in participating in a thread like this would enjoy it.

A machine to die for. The quest for free energy.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8585794339313791442#

Or download here

http://isohunt.com/torrent_details/50941404/a machine to die for?tab=summary

One thing you will notice in this vid is how pretty much every perpetual motion machine inventor appears to be mentaly insane, and the video doesn't appear to take sides either. You have to be insane to believe its true, or you will go insane trying to get it to work by just changing a little bit here and a little bit there for the rest of your life.

 

It is easier to demonstrate the hydrodynamic properties of water than to explain them. The surface tension and molecular cohesion of water can produce results that seem almost magical. The exponential growth of waves as they expand across a body of still water are awe inspiring.

As an illustration, fill the bottom of a bathtub with water and wait for the surface to become totally calm.Then take a flat surfaced object like a flat wooden ice cream spoon or stick and dip the end in one corner of the tub so that part of the object is slightly below the upper surface. Try to create a small wave that is no wider than the object you are holding by pushing the object a fraction of an inch towards the opposite diagonal corner. You'll never be able to do it. As the tiny wave you have created travels across the tub from one corner to the other it will be compelled by the laws of hydrodynamics to grow exponentially as it travels the distance. The only thing limitting the maximum width of the wave is the width of the tub. When the first wave reaches the opposite end of the tub it will bounce back creating new waves that will soon turn the surface of the water in the tub to total chaos as intersecting waves interact with each other.

Based on experiments like this I believe that perpetual motion is not only attainable but can also be exceeded by the appropriate development of hydrodynamic technology.

 

Richard, when I was tied up to a public pontoon in Newcastle which has a lot of traffic with large ships, I noticed that when the tugs were pulling along massive ships the resulting waves hardy rocked our boat, but then the same tug returning minus the massive ship almost mounted our Piver Nimble on top of the pontoon.