| Subject: RE: COP vs Efficiency
(and MEG replication) Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 19:25:49 -0500
Dear Jim,
Glad you are having some
success; please keep at it.
Efficiency is defined as the
total useful output (energy or work) divided by the total energy input.
COP is defined as the total
useful output (energy or work) divided by only that energy input that
the operator furnishes. It specifically does not consider any extra
energy the active environment may input.
The solar cell takes all its
energy from its active external environment, the solar radiation. For a
typical cell, it wastes about 83% of the input energy, and only outputs
17% as much electrical energy into the circuit as was input to it in the
sunlight. Hence its efficiency is rigorously 17%.
However, the operator inputs
ZERO. Well, to calculate the COP, you place the output (some finite
number W, for a real cell) in the numerator and the ZERO input by the
operator in the denominator. COP = W/0 = infinity. It is perfectly
normal to have a system taking all its energy from its external
environment, having an efficiency below 50%, and still having COP =
infinity. The windmill is one, the sailboat is another, and the
waterwheel is another. All have efficiencies at about 50% or less, but
also have COPs of infinity. You need to change your thinking so you
clearly understand that no system has more than 100% efficiency, but it
can jolly well have COP>1.0 or even COP = infinity, and that DOES NOT
violate thermodynamics.
I brought this out because
90% of the electrical engineers do not understand it. Even a few
physicists do not understand it.
We also try to give a little
more science background, and point out that technically the solar cell
thermodynamically is a nonequilibrium steady state (NESS) system. There
is a fairly well-developed thermodynamics of such systems already known
and utilized; Prigogine received the Nobel Prize in 1977, e.g., because
of his contributions to the thermodynamics of systems far from
equilibrium.
And yes, such systems are
permitted to do several marvelous things. They can (i) self-order, (ii)
self-oscillate or self-rotate, (iii) output more energy than the
operator inputs (the excess is freely received from the external
environment), (iv) output real energy that does real work freely,
without any operator input (all the energy is freely input from the
environment), and (v) exhibit negative entropy.
Item (iv) is that COP =
infinity area. Item (iii) is that 1.0<COP<infinity case. Items (i) and
(v) have to do with free energy and production of negative energy
(changing the form of some lost or uncontrolled energy so that control
iand usage s regained). Every charge in the universe, e.g., consumes
positive entropy from the virtual photon gas of the vacuum, coherently
integrates the virtual energy into observable size, and re-emits the
energy as real, observable photons radiated in all directions at light
speed, establishing and continuously replenishing its associated EM
fields and potentials and their energy.
The common electrical
engineering and classical electrodynamics implicitly assume that every
EM field, EM potential, and joule of EM energy in the universe has been
and is freely created out of nothing at all, by the associated source
charges. It assumes that because it assumes NO ENERGY INPUT to the
source charge at all. It assumes an inert vacuum -- falsified for
decades in particle physics -- and a flat spacetime -- falsified since
1916 by general relativity. In quantum field theory, the charge is
actually a dipolarity, since the bare infinite charge in the middle
is surrounded by an infinite charge of virtual particles (of opposite
charge) by the well known polarization of the vacuum by the observable
charge. The external observes "sees" the difference, which is finite and
the common textbook value of that "observable charge".
Rigorously that dipolarity
of the source charge must obey the broken symmetry of opposite charges.
That rigorously means that the special QFT dipolarity of the source
charge continuously absorbs virtual energy from the vacuum, converts it
to observable energy, and re-emits that energy. Again, Lee and Yang
received a Nobel Prize in 1957 for their strong prediction in 56 and 57
of broken symmetry. Wu and her colleagues experimentally proved it in
1957, and so profound was that revolution in physics that the Nobel
Committee awarded the Nobel Prize to Lee and Yang the very same year, in
Dec. 1957.
So there is a great deal
more in physics than has made it into that more than a century old
electrical engineering model! It would be nice if broken symmetry in
the nearly half century since that Nobel Prize to Lee and Yang,
had migrated across the university campus from the physics department to
the electrical engineering department, and gotten them to change their
model and their textbooks to include the extraction of EM energy from
the vacuum by the source charge, so that they could quit erroneously
assuming that all EM fields and potentials are freely created from
nothing at all.
Best wishes,
Tom Bearden
Subject: COP vs Efficiency |