A Potentially Perfect Energy Source! - mir

The huge multi-National oil companies employ tens of thousands of reasearcher whose sole function is to find new locations to drill oilwells. However, it is reasonably well established that, assuming that we find it all, we will manage to use it all up by around the year 2050, in just 50 years. (That petroleum took hundreds of millions of years to form.)

A natural side effect of the formation of that oil is that massive accumulations of natural gas (mostly methane) also exist underground, and we are using it up an amazing rates, too. It appears that we may not use it all up for a hundred years or so.

We use these un-replacable natural resources in some pretty disappointing and wasteful ways. Our attitude seems to be "It's here, so why not use it all up. I won't be alive when it runs out!" But, hopefully, other people will be!

Around 1990, I realized an interesting situation, which seems to show promise of being a source of electricity and mechanical energy billions and possibly trillions of times the total available energy in all existing oil, gas and coal. I am bemused that so many tens of thousands of researchers struggle to find oil supplies while exactly zero are even exploring this far more vast potential source of energy.

Say that an average American family/home uses around 800 kWh per month (around an $80 electric bill, probably high for an average). That's around 10,000 kWh per year. There are almost 100,000,000 families in America, so collectively, they use around 1012 kWh per year. Now say that they all continue to use electricity at that rate for, say, the next 1.4 million years! (Some of them might die during that time, I admit!) And, yes, I said MILLION! During that 1.4 million years, they would collectively use up 1.4 * 1018 kWh.

Now, consider that the Earth is rotating. It has kinetic energy of rotation. It is known to have a rotational inertia of 8.070 * 1037 kg-m2. It rotates once a day, so it turns at the rate of 6.2832/86164.09 radians/sec. The Earth's kinetic energy of rotation is 1/2 * (I) the rotational inertia * the square of this rate, or 2.145609406 * 1029 kg-m2/s2. That unit of energy is also called Joules.

Now say that, over a period of 1,400,000 years, the Earth's rotation somehow SLOWED by ONE SECOND per day. Instead of a day being the current 86164.09 seconds, it would then be 86165.09 seconds long, an absolutely unnoticeable effect. The kinetic energy calculation above would be the same except we would now use 86165.09 and the Earth's kinetic energy would be 2.14555960 * 1029 kg-m2/s2.

A basic law of Physics is that energy must be conserved. By slowing down by just that single second, an unnoticeable effect, and one with no consequences whatever, the Earth would have had to have given up the difference in those two energy totals, or 4.98 * 1024 kg-m2/s2, or 4.98 * 1024 Joules. A Joule is a watt-second. To convert this into kWh, just divide by 3600 seconds/hour and 1000 watts/kW or 3.6 million, and get 1.4 * 1018 kWh.

This amount of energy is the same as if a large 50 megawatt electric power generating plant operated constantly for 2.7 * 1013 hours, or around three billion years!

See my reason for fascination? If someone could figure out how to tap into this enormous energy of rotation of the Earth, to somehow convert a tiny part of it into electricity, we could totally supply all the electricity needed for all American homes for 1.4 million years while only making the day one second longer. No burning of any coal, oil or natural gas to deplete those supplies or pollute the atmosphere with their waste products and their global warming. All the known supplies of oil, coal and natural gas together will probably be used up in only around 100 years. And then what? IF somebody can figure out how to convert that rotational energy of the Earth, WOW! Even a conservative view makes clear that there are billions of times as much energy present as we could ever hope to discover in all the coal and gas and oil we will ever find.

It actually turns out that the Earth is slowing down anyway! The effect of the Moon's and Sun's gravitation on the waters of the oceans causes the tides, and there is a frictional loss due to the drag of the ocean tides along the bottom of the ocean and against the continents. That process that is occurring now will slow the Earth's rotation by around 22 seconds over the next million years. Essentially, the effect of the massive usage of energy described ablve, would make this a little less than one second longer. Instead of increasing by 22 seconds, it would increase by 23 seconds over that million years.

I currently have no really productive thoughts on the area. I have known about this for around ten years and have investigated dozens of concepts, all of which have been dead ends. But maybe, some day . . .!

Absolutely no one seems to even be aware of this theoretical resource! I am absolutely convinced that some practical (mechanical) mechanism can be invented to accomplish the conversion, and I have a suspicion that it will not be inordinately complex. I intend to keep trying to figure one out!

I am also certain that Euler's Equations hold the key to whatever sort of mechanism would be needed, but they become unbelievably complex for many situations.

We all know that Newton's Laws of motion apply to all objects. His laws were refined by Euler into a set of three generalized differential equations for when an object is moving in a three-dimensional motion. The three equations are of the form:

Euler's Equations

with the usual symbols for angular velocities and such. I am convinced that, for the right mechanism, the solution to this set of equations will establish the energy (production?) conversion performance. So, in my opinion, we even already have the basic equations!

This subject continues to fascinate me, even though I still have absolutely no clue!

This page is at:
http://mb-soft.info/public5/earthrot.html

This presentation was first placed on the Internet in November 2002.


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C Johnson, BA Physics, Univ of Chicago