Mark Goldes’ “NO FUEL PISTON ENGINE” swindle consists of soliciting and obtaining loans and donations in a blatantly fraudulent manner, making use in particular of the elaborate set of false pretenses, false statements, false claims and empty promises to be found in his “No Fuel Piston Engine” fraudcraft, which includes a worthless and ludicrous pretended “engine” concept shamelessly presented by Kenneth M. Rauen.
1. Introduction.
Mark Goldes claims that “Patent pending desktop piston engines that will run 24/7 on the thermal energy in atmospheric heat are being prototyped.”
In fact, the worthless ambient heat engine concept at the center of Goldes’ flimflam is a certain utterly ludicrous exercise in silliness, produced by Kenneth Rauen, that does not have any “patent pending” and never will. It consists of nothing more than several cylinders containing pistons connected to a crankshaft, with various open channels between some of the cylinders. There is nothing to make the pistons move or the crankshaft turn. Rauen has written many pages of tedious nonsense attempting to argue that the engine would work. It certainly will not work, and Rauen certainly knows that it will not work, and so does Goldes.
At any given time and place, the atmosphere only provides a single heat reservoir at a single temperature. In order for a cyclic heat engine to do any work, it must be provided not merely with a single heat reservoir, but with two heat reservoirs, at different temperatures. This is an inescapable consequence of one of the most well-established principles in all of physics: the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
To people who have never studied thermodynamics, it might seem that nothing more should be needed to power a heat engine than a reservoir of heat. However, that is not so. In order to do any work, a cyclic heat engine must utilize not just one, but two heat reservoirs, at different temperatures. This has been understood at least since 1824, when Sadi Carnot presented an equation relating the maximum possible efficiency of a heat engine to the temperatures of the two reservoirs. When the two reservoirs are both at the same temperature, the maximum possible efficiency is zero percent: the engine can do no work at all.
Goldes falsely claims that “Two decades of physics research indicate not only that this [single-reservoir atmospheric heat engine] may be possible, but that there exist exploitable exceptions to the current interpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”
This false and baseless flimflam comes from the very same person who has actually spent the last two decades claiming year after year that his make-believe “room temperature superconductors” would be validated “next year,” that his make-believe “Virtual Photon Flux” engine would be validated “next year,” that his make-believe energy-multiplying horn-powered-tuning-rod “POWERGENIE” engine would be validated “next year,” and that his make-believe “Collapsing Hydrogen Orbits” “fractional hydrogen” engine would be validated “next year” – not to mention various other make-believe marvels. In fact, after a forty-year career in flimflam, Goldes has presented and validated a grand total of zero fulfillments of his endless claims regarding his make-believe “revolutionary breakthroughs.”
There is no “new science” in any of Goldes’ “revolutionary breakthroughs.” There is only pseudoscience and pretense – and nothing new, at all.
Mark Goldes’ proofless claims regarding his make-believe strictly ambient heat engine do not represent any new technology, or even a new pretense – they merely represent a rather old pretense.
“Before the establishment of the Second Law, many people who were interested in inventing a perpetual motion machine had tried to circumvent the restrictions of First Law of Thermodynamics by extracting the massive internal energy of the environment as the power of the machine. Such a machine is called a “perpetual motion machine of the second kind”. The second law declared the impossibility of such machines.”
“A perpetual motion machine of the second kind is a machine which spontaneously converts thermal energy into mechanical work. When the thermal energy is equivalent to the work done, this does not violate the law of conservation of energy. However it does violate the more subtle second law of thermodynamics (see also entropy). The signature of a perpetual motion machine of the second kind is that there is only one heat reservoir involved… This conversion of heat into useful work, without any side effect, is impossible, according to the second law of thermodynamics.”
Goldes’ make-believe strictly ambient heat engine would be a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, as defined above. Goldes is not developing any such engine; he is merely developing a pretense – as usual.
The Kelvin-Planck formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics may be stated as follows:
“No cyclic process driven simply by heat can accomplish the absorption of the heat from a reservoir and the conversion of such heat into work – without any other result (such as a transfer of heat to a cooler reservoir).”
Now, as you will see, the Clausius formulation of the Second Law may be stated with fewer words:
“No process is possible whose sole result is the transfer of heat from a cooler to a hotter body.”
In fact, we can show that the Kelvin-Planck formulation may be deduced from that of Clausius. In the words of Enrico Fermi:
“Suppose that Kelvin’s postulate were not valid. Then we could perform a transformation whose only final result would be to transform completely into work a definite amount of heat taken from a single source at the temperature t1. By means of friction we could then transform this work into heat again and with this heat raise the temperature of a given body, regardless of what its initial temperature, t2, may have been. In particular, we could take t2 to be higher than t1. Thus, the only final result of this process would be the transfer of heat from one body (the source at temperature t1) to another body at a higher temperature, t2. This would be a violation of the Clausius postulate.”
Can anyone make a teapot that boils water by absorbing heat from blocks of ice?
Max Planck, in his “Treatise On Thermodynamics,” explains how the Second Law of Thermodynamics “may be deduced from a single simple law of experience about which there is no doubt.” Here is the “single simple law of experience” he proposes:
“It is impossible to construct an engine which will work in a complete cycle, and produce no effect except the raising of a weight and the cooling of a heat-reservoir.”
This “law of experience” is very similar to a principle suggested by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin):
“It is impossible, by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects.”
The “simple law of experience” offered by Planck is therefore commonly known as the “Kelvin-Planck statement” of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But we see from Planck’s “Treatise” that Planck himself did not quite regard it as a statement of the Second Law, but rather as a “starting point” or postulate from which the Second Law may be deduced.
Here is Planck’s rendition of the Second Law itself:
“The second law of thermodynamics states that there exists in nature for each system of bodies a quantity, which by all changes of the system either remains constant (in reversible processes) or increases in value (in irreversible processes). This quantity is called, following Clausius, the entropy of the system.”
The Second Law of Thermodynamics rules out strictly ambient heat engines.
Expecting an ambient heat engine to do any work, with only one heat reservoir, is exactly equivalent to expecting a teapot to boil water by absorbing heat from a block of ice.
Both processes are ruled out by the very same law – the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
“It is impossible for any device operating on a cycle to produce net work from a single temperature reservoir; the production of net work requires flow of heat from a higher temperature reservoir to a colder reservoir.”
In a strictly ambient heat engine there are not two heat reservoirs at different temperatures; no reservoir would be available at any temperature other than the ambient temperature. Therefore the engine would have to DECREASE the total entropy – and therefore we know for certain that the engine will disappoint us. It will never be able to do any work.
Flow of heat from a block of ice to lukewarm water would also result in a DECREASE of the total entropy.
Once again: Expecting an ambient heat engine to do any work, with only one heat reservoir, is exactly equivalent to expecting a teapot to boil water by absorbing heat from a block of ice. Anyone who claims to be developing a “prototype” of such an engine is only developing a pretense, and nothing more.
