Horace Heffner > Note that the above refers to the liquid as the *medium* in which the negative Casimir force can occur, i.e. in which the bodies that mutually exert a negative Casimir force are immersed.
This also could relate to a variation of the "cold water engine", which we have speculated on before. >From my POV there are many better energy concepts and schemes on the immediate horizon, so I will not waste much time with this one, but here is a quickie update of an old idea (thanks to cut and paste) modified to include a "Casimir connection." As water cools toward its freezing point, where ice becomes less dense, the liquid water first becomes more dense at ~4 degree C. It is true that cycling within a narrow range is not practical today, but with nanotechnology and a few other breakthroughs in thin films, who knows? H2O Density rho = mass / Volume. Water has a nominal density of 1,000 kg/m3 = 1.000 kg/L but this is at the precise temperature of 3.98 degrees Celsius. Purity and gas content change this. Some actual numbers of the density @ temperatures near the maximum Degree C kg/m3 1 ................. 999.90 2 ................. 999.94 3 ................. 999.96 4 ................. 999.97 5 ................. 999.96 6 ................. 999.94 7 ................. 999.90 The highest density is slightly below 4 degrees Celsius, but between 1 and 3 degrees or between 5 and 7, there is a substantial variation of .06 kg/m3 which could conceivably be recycled and used. Actually between 3.98 and 4.00 degrees the variation is .03 kg (on paper) and this would likely be the ideal cycling range of ~ 1.5 kg/degree/m^3. Possibly this is of more interest to those in Alaska than elsewhere, but even in the tropics, if you go deep enough in the ocean, you can get to a steady low temperature differential in this range, and in that regard it would need to compete with OTEC, which has similar requirements of massive required scale and low hot-cold differential, but with the Casimir - we are trying to make it "less of a real heat engine" if that is theoretically possible. The result is that there could be enough net movement with a gigantic piston or acoustic drum head, which itself just barely stabilizes (neither floats nor sinks) at the depth where it is being used (made of reinforced plastic film perhaps) to be usable for energy extraction ... i.e. if can provide more energy out than the heat transfer mechanism would use. TEC can be thin film but we would be looking for something easier to effect temp change perhaps like a Casimir stimulation based on some kind of resonant surface effect. The physical reason normally given for H2O with this volume differential on temperature change (from standard physics) is related to the hexagonal crystal structure and locking of hydrogen bonds. Generally, water expands when it freezes because of its molecular structure and the elasticity of the hydrogen bond. I have not researched this recently, but I do NOT remember the Casimir, or the "RCF" ever being mentioned as partially causative. RCF = repulsive Casimir force. If RCF could be partially involved changing in water density around 3.98 degrees, and if it can be either accentuated or "focused" with a lens, then it makes the prospects slightly more interesting. A massive "piston" of 1000 m^2 made of some super plastic would only experience a 60 kg "swing" with a one meter stroke - and therefore it sounds at first like there is zero hope for success. But in principle there could be a few hundred "drum head" layers operating in an acoustic mode with the sound waves being focused into some kind of conversion device. Imagine a number of submerged "sound tubes" 100 meters long, ~10 dia and with many acoustic resonators that incorporate the necessary temperature cycling and phasing to produce sound waves in the deep ocean, which then feedback into promoting the temp swing. That setup, with phasing and acoustics is sounding slightly more practical - but only if nothing else materialize in alternative energy. IOW - it is on the farthest of the far edges of scientific practicality - even for vortex - and most of us will prefer to put effort into less extreme and more robust phenomena - like fractional ground states, LENR, or magnetics... which might also use the Casimir or RCF in a different way. Jones
