I am just wondering if perpetual machines can replace battery dependence?
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Perpetual machines are theoretical machines that run forever without any energy added to the system. They are not possible to create, and even if they could be created we would not be able to extract energy from them without stopping them from working.
The reason they are impossible is the combination of two things: the law of conservation of energy (which states that energy in a closed system is constant), and the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect conversion of energy without any loss.
Basically imagine I have a system where water falls down and spins a turbine, generating electricty. I then use this electricity to pump the water back up to the top. Since the energy in the system remains constant, the absolute most possible energy I can get from the water is exactly the amount I need to move it back to the part it falls from. If that were the only problem, these machines could exist, but they wouldn’t be practical for energy generation because to use them for energy would be robbing them of the energy they need to reset themselves. The reason even that doesn’t work is because we cannot actually get enough energy to pump the water back up. When the water hits the turbine, it spins it, creating energy, but it also creates heat via friction. This heat is wasted energy, and every bit of energy lost to heat is energy we cannot use to pump water back up. After one round, maybe we can get 99.99% of the water back up, but even if we only lose 0.01% of the energy each round, after 10,000 rounds we only have enough energy to pump about 36.8% of the water back up to the top, and eventually we’ll just run out.
Similar problems exist with any form of “perpetual” machine. There’s always some type of waste, and eventually they stop without outside assistance.
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