A vehicle which breaks the laws of physics...

[Munkul]

A Physicist and a YouTuber Made a $10,000 Bet Over the Laws of Physics

Experts including Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson were witnesses to this new high-stakes wager over the claims of a wind-powered car.

www.vice.com

According to some poor deluded souls, this experiment proves that "over-unity" and "perpetual motion" are possible, which violates the fundamental laws of energy conservation.
Obviously no physics laws are actually being broken and neither of these two clever people involved believe in such rubbish.

It's an incredibly interesting experiment.
I can't say I fully grasp what's going on but I believe it's possible if you can build a device to collect energy from the wind with respect to the ground, not with respect to the vehicle velocity, you can then travel faster than the velocity of the wind.
How this works without all of that energy immediately being wasted to friction loss, I don't know. Conventional thinking would indicate that any extra speed would be so incremental that it could be written off as gusts in wind.

 

[rtcosic]

In the video, at 23 seconds the propellor is spinning quickly whilst the vehicle is almost stationary. Is the effect the propellor and all the attached rotating mass building up stored energy which is then released as the vehicle begins to move?
Rather like those toy flywheel cars of my childhood.

An interesting tangent to the aeroplane on the conveyor belt as the wager involves a treadmill.

 

[AVI_8]

I hope no one shows that to Nicola Sturgeon, she’ll make it law up here and we’ll all have to be driving windmills by 2030

 

[Munkul]

I'm still baffled. Surely if it was as easy as propelling stuff from the ground, we would all be making working models when we were at primary school, and ships would have propellers driven by paddles.

 

[hotponyshoes]

Sailing boats can go faster than the wind...

 

[sako243]

I only skimmed part of the article but surely building such a vehicle that is powered by the wind but travels faster than it is simple. Use turbine to collect energy into a battery / super-capacitor, use said collected storage to accelerate and travel faster than wind briefly, wash, rinse and repeat.

Yes I know it's probably not what they're trying to achieve but fulfills the description somewhat

Sailing boats can go faster than the wind...

By tacking but the bet is around parallel to the wind direction.

 

[Munkul]

lots of unscientific experiments indicate that sailboats can roughly go around 2.7 x wind speed with some clever design and operation, with multiple racing sailboats achieving this. This would tie in with the Blackbird's figure.

I suppose the total friction losses in the blackbird's mechanical system and wheels would probably be similar the friction on a sailboat hull moving through the water.

I just can't understand why, if it is so simple, that this sort of design wasn't invented decades ago.

 

[Munkul]

I only skimmed part of the article but surely building such a vehicle that is powered by the wind but travels faster than it is simple. Use turbine to collect energy into a battery / super-capacitor, use said collected storage to accelerate and travel faster than wind briefly, wash, rinse and repeat.

Yes I know it's probably not what they're trying to achieve but fulfills the description somewhat

I believe the bet between Muller and Kusenko is based around proving there is no stored energy providing the extra velocity - that the vehicle can move at that speed in a sustained state with all forces at equilibrium.

 

[Seadog]

I can't say I fully grasp what's going on but I believe it's possible if you can build a device to collect energy from the wind with respect to the ground, not with respect to the vehicle velocity, you can then travel faster than the velocity of the wind.

Modern racing yachts generate their own virtual wind and do travel considerably faster than the wind speed.

To add to this:

"Wind-powered vessels can exceed wind speeds when they are oriented at an angle to the wind direction, they argue, but not when a vessel is exactly parallel to the downwind force."

Surely the aerofoil sections of the blade will be crossing the direction of the wind and thereby generating lift, and generating lift in the same way that a sail does?

 

[mike os]

Any sailing device can exceed wind speed only when travelling at an angle or their sail is at an angle to the wind… running downwind the maximum speed is equal to the wind speed.
This is because of the way sails work, basically an aerofoil section in a wind stream… as far as I understand it.

Not enough real data in the article, can’t be ar5ed with the video based on what’s in the article.

 

[jerrytug]

Sailing yachts routinely sail faster than the wind, from hydro-foiling Moths, right up to old square-riggers in ideal conditions.
As said above, if the vessel is going dead downwind all bets are off, and dead upwind.. you are going astern!

 

[hotponyshoes]

I suppose the total friction losses in the blackbird's mechanical system and wheels would probably be similar the friction on a sailboat hull moving through the water.

some of the modern racing boats have some very slippery hulls but even then the amount of friction created by water must still be way greater than the friction from wheel bearings.
A 90hp boat uses 20x more fuel than a 180hp car does!

 

[Munkul]

A 90hp boat uses 20x more fuel than a 180hp car does!

care to elaborate on that rather misleading statement? I know what you mean though, the drag through water is generally way higher than wheels on ground can ever be.

bear in mind the blackbird has some funky drivetrain losses and also propeller losses which a boat doesn't have.

 

[hotponyshoes]

care to elaborate on that rather misleading statement? I know what you mean though, the drag through water is generally way higher than wheels on ground can ever be.

bear in mind the blackbird has some funky drivetrain losses and also propeller losses which a boat doesn't have.

My Boat has a 90hp engine.
My van has a 180hp engine.
The boat is a bit bigger than the van but it's also a bit lighter.

3 of us can get into the van and drive down to the harbour and back again
We can take the boat out for the day and it only does 1/10 of the milage that the van does but it uses twice the amount of fuel.

My maths may not be great.
Although the boat is only doing (at best) half the speed of the van so it's probably more like 40x better mpg from the van!!

 

[hotponyshoes]

Or, to put it another way,
The dash on my van currently shows a 36.2mpg average.
The worst I have seen on the boat is 0.4mpg.

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

Sailing boats can go faster than the wind...

As can kite buggies. I've prooved that many times

 

[Munkul]

My Boat has a 90hp engine.
My van has a 180hp engine.
The boat is a bit bigger than the van but it's also a bit lighter.

3 of us can get into the van and drive down to the harbour and back again
We can take the boat out for the day and it only does 1/10 of the milage that the van does but it uses twice the amount of fuel.

My maths may not be great.
Although the boat is only doing (at best) half the speed of the van so it's probably more like 40x better mpg from the van!!

My point is that the hp is irrelevant as you are barely ever using that 180hp whereas in a boat you'll spend most of the time with the engine close to full load.
Either way we both come out with the same conclusion, that drag losses are massive in a boat

 

[Munkul]

As can kite buggies. I've prooved that many times

Not in the same direction as true wind, though.

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

Not in the same direction as true wind, though.

Na. But definitely on a downwind run 40degrees off maybe

Missed the downwind. Haven't read the article but remember reading it a while back

 

[frank horton]

Avi 8
the word Sturgeon is a bit like Brexit...best not mention it.....lol.....
Oh and who was the woman that dressed as a boy that gets compared to Sturgon.....I forget....