Bob Neal's Secret

click here to add sound effects

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This page is dedicated to the STANDING WAVE theory.  For the TRAVELING WAVE theory being developed by an engineer, click the link.

My standing wave animation is meant to show what we would see if the pipe were transparent and the air were not.  Higher pressure would be a darker color and lower pressure would be a lighter color.  This best shows the resultant standing wave, but if you save it and play it in Quicktime so you can make it go faster, you will be able to see the forward and backward waves that drive the process.

     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radial_engine

A radial airplane engine could be adapted to be used as a testbed for Bob Neal's compressor.  The animation above is from wikipedia and shows a five-cylinder engine, but the standing wave animation at the top of the page shows the results of a 14th harmonic which would be produced by a seven-cylinder double-acting compressor.  The crankshaft cycle or revolutions per second (rpm/60) is the fundamental or first harmonic so the frequency of the 7th harmonic would be 7 x the revs/sec.  The animation in the yellow box below includes a wavelength calculator so the pipe length and frequency can be matched up with each other. 

Different harmonics and different end effects such as "both ends closed", "both ends open", and "one end closed, one end open" produce typical wave forms.  These can be found in the yellow box below by clicking the controls to see what changes.  Assuming that the resonator in Neal's patent (part no. 49) is closed on both ends, my animation above would show half a wavelength of a 14th harmonic produced by 7 double-acting compression cylinders, thus 7 whole wave cycles end-to-end filling the pipe perfectly.  Waves that don't fill the pipe correctly miss resonance, they are out of tune.  This is adjusted by changing the length of the pipe, changing the rpm, or using tuning devices such as those discussed in Toribio Bellocq's third patent.

See the original on the University of New South Wales website, complete with controls: http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/strings.html

This graph of pressure changes best shows how the standing wave is created.  A forward or downstream disturbance is driven by pulsations entering at regular fractions of the crank cycle from the compressor; this shows three whole waves fitting in a pipe with both ends closed, thus the 6th harmonic since such a pipe would be the length of half a wavelength.  The  closed end of the pipe reflects the disturbance and another wave travels backward or upstream at the speed of sound, even with air flowing downstream through the pipe and out toward the tank.  When the compressor reaches an rpm that matches, with one of its harmonics, the resonant frequency of the pipe (resonator or part no. 49 in the patent), the forward and backward wave add to each other at set places in the pipe length called nodes and antinodes.  The two waves add up to double the pressure that is already in the pipe at the high part of the cycle.  At the low part of the cycle, the lack of pressure is also doubled.  Air then enters the pipe from the compressor during moments of missing pressure, and at the downstream end of the pipe it goes into the tank at the high part of the pressure wave.  The amplification of the downstream and upstream waves of each other at set places constitutes a standing wave, a result of resonance.  Resonance is attained at specific rpms of the driving waves so the compressor has to be stoutly made so it can compress air to 120 psi like a conventional single-stage compressor until it triggers the resonant frequency of the resonator part 49.

Tests of a 7 cylinder compressor have proven that at the delivery pipe's resonant frequency (generated by the compressor speed), the laboring of the compressor smooths out, and the compressor runs cool.  At the same time, more pressure builds up between the two check valves at the downstream end of the delivery pipe than is being generated in the compressor.  Of great significance, the pipe between the check valves becomes very hot to the touch.  So the work of compression is taking place in the pipe, in the tank, remotely from the compressor.

The standing waves animation below by Walter Fendt and Robert Hart shows the influence of end effects on wave reflection.  Closed ends and open ends reflect waves differently.  The 1st overtone is the 2nd harmonic, the 2nd overtone is the 3rd harmonic.  The animation goes up to the 6th harmonic or 5th overtone.  The original is at http://www.physics.smu.edu/~olness/www/05fall1320/applet/pipe-waves.html.  It uses an older Java device (StLWellen.class) so it might not work in every browser.

Standing Waves applet (by Robert Hart, Sep 18 2003)

This applet will help you understand the displacement and pressure graphs of sound waves in pipes. It shows a graph along with an animation of the air molecules in the pipe.

• To change the tube type, click on both sides open, one side open, or both sides closed.
• To change the graph type, click on displacement or pressure.
• To change the vibrational mode, click the Higher or Lower buttons.
     You can choose from the fundamental up to the 5th overtone.
• To recalculate wavelength and frequency, enter a new value for Length of tube from 0.1 m to 10.0 m.
     The values are calculated at 20 °C (speed of sound at 343.5 m/s) and neglecting influences of the tube's diameter.

Download

To download this applet, save pipe-waves.html and pipe-waves.jar into the same folder.
Then, open pipe-waves.html to use the applet.

References

Standing Longitudinal Waves

The original applet created by Walter Fendt. My version adds graph animation and the option of graphing either displacement or pressure.

terminology based on above animation and chart below (chart by Scott Robertson) 

• Fundamental: the lowest note played by a tone, the note the tone is named for such as “A 220” etc.
• Harmonic: all theoretical modes of vibration; first harmonic is the fundamental (A 220), 2^nd harmonic has the frequency twice that of the fundamental, etc: the 2^nd harm. of A 220 is 440 hertz or 440 cycles per second (cps); 3^rd harm of A 220 is 660 hz, etc.
• Overtone: only the modes of vibration actually present depending on end effects such as air column with closed/open ends, except fundamental which is by definition not an overtone but more like the undertone or underlying tone.
• Both ends same: both ends of the tube/resonator are closed or both ends are open.  All harmonics are present, both odd and even.
• Ends different: one end of the resonator is open and one is closed.  Only odd numbered harmonics are present (1, 3, 5, 7 etc.).
• Node: place of minimum change.  Pressure node is where pressure is static; displacement node is where the wave doesn't cause air to move.
• Antinode: 1/2 way between nodes, the antinode is the place of maximum change from peak to trough of wave.
• Standing wave: in a resonating object or air column, the nodes and antinodes occupy stationary positions within the wavelength.  So what you see is noded of unchanging quality and antinodes alternating between two extremes.  But the wave is created by forward and backward waves matching each other's size and speed because of tuned pipe length, and amplifying each others' pressure change intensity for example, amplifying the pressure obtained from the pistons' push in the compressor.
• Resonance: when the pipe is tuned or happens to be the right length for the frequency or vice versa--when the frequency, such as the rpm of the compressor matches the pipe length--the 1/4 and/or 1/2 wavelengths fit more-or-less precisely in the pipe and a standing wave is set up by reflection of waves and coincidence of forward wave meeting reflected wave.  Amplification of static pressure in a compressor discharge pipe can dramatically raise the pressure in the pipe due to resonance and even burst pipes under some conditions.  The way I understand it is that the establishment of resonance doubles the amplitude of the wave, or its pressure intensity.  But resonance is a non-dissipative process, so continuing to add disturbance energy to the resonant body without taking any energy out can drive the pressure even higher.  For example, the prolonged hammering of pipes in a house where there is water hammer is driven by only one pulse, usually the single flush of a toilet.  Imagine if the driving impulse were repeated over and over in quick succession and in phase with the wave.  That's how compressor discharge pipes can be destroyed by resonance, because the driving impulse keeps coming.  Another good illustration is pushing someone on a swing.  You don't push them all the way up and you don't usually push them on the reverse swing at all.  On each forward swing a timed impulse causes the swing to climb higher and higher.

Summary of chart: in “both ends same” tubes, the harmonic number is the number of half-wavelengths that fit in the tube.  In “ends different” tubes, the harmonic number is the number of quarter-wavelengths that fit in the tube.

 Example: The 7th harmonic is a frequency 7 times the frequency of the fundamental.  In an air column defined by a resonator or pipe or tube with both ends closed or both ends open, both odd and even harmonics are present.  The 7th harmonic is the 6th overtone above the fundamental.  Its wavelength fits into the air column length 7/2 or  3-1/2 times.  On the other hand, in the air column with one closed end and one open end, only odd-harmonics are present, so the 7th harmonic is the 3rd overtone above the fundamental, and it contains 7/4 or 1-3/4 wavelengths. 

 (Interesting coincidence: 7/2 is also the ratio 0.2375:0.0686, the ratio of the specific heat for work done compressing air adiabatically (0.2375) to the expansion work portion of adiabatic process, that is, the extra work done (0.0686) to compress air because of heat retention during the adiabatic process.  0.2375/0.0686 = 7/2.  This ratio also represents the maximum work of air compression compared to the work that can be recovered from the compressed air after final cooling.  The 7th harmonic is the bane of musical instrument designers who must find a way to damp it out since it’s the first harmonic in the series that sounds like noise, not music, in relation to the other harmonics.  I don’t know if Bob Neal used a ratio of 7 compressor cylinders per engine cylinder for a reason, but he did so both in the patent and in the real machine.)

Part No. 49, US Patent 2030759, Bob Neal's "Compressor Unit"
drawing by Scott Robertson using emachineshop software

This Easy Experiment Demonstrates How to Predict and Test the Natural Frequency of a Tube

If you’ve made it this far, it’s time to put some of this knowledge into action.  For me, the whole idea of pipe resonance always seemed like it was somebody’s imagination.  That proves I’m a skeptic because I’m a piano tuner and I used to work in a pipe organ factory, so if pipe resonance is a hit or miss proposition then I’d like to know how I got a job in a 100 year old pipe organ factory!  Prepare yourself, because the next part is really cool.  This is where we are going to start burning our bridges back to the automatic assumption that doing experiments with sound waves and stuff is hard.  The only requirement is a tube, I suggest something shorter than 1 meter, and the ability to roughly discern musical tones.  Or a somewhat musical friend.  You’ll have to download a tone generator too, any simple free program will do.  And if you’re tone deaf, you’ll need a companion who isn’t.

 Using the chart above in the yellow block, input the length of the tube you have.  I have a piece of 1 inch diameter PVC water pipe about 1.1 meters long.  Click back and forth to get the frequency of the tube’s fundamental note with various end effects.  You’ll get two different numbers.  Write them down.  Open the tone generator, and input the numbers.  Check them both out.  Then tap the tube, blow over the end, anything you want to make the air in the tube vibrate at its natural frequency, its resonant frequency.  Do it with the tone generator off, then turn on the tone generator to see if it’s the same.  It is, if your tube is straight.  Block one end and the frequency will be half, that’s one octave lower.  A Coke bottle makes a nice tone but it’s not straight so you need a special formula to predict its frequency based on its length and shape.  (Available from the hyperphysics site.)

The point is that the experimentation needed to prove that Bob Neal was compressing air with sound waves is not imaginary, random, fickle, or particularly mysterious.  The results will be predictable, and if it doesn’t work the first time, the tweaking needed to tune it—to make the acoustic function work—will be finite.  For example, large compressor installations, while getting the compressor up to speed, will pass through several resonant frequencies on the way to the intended working speed.  So people who work with large loaded compressors that get up to speed slowly know about wave hammer in compressor discharge pipe from direct daily experience.  Obviously measures have to be taken to keep the hammering of the fluid in the pipe from destroying equipment, such as making sure that pipes are anchored well, since the weight and length of a violently vibrating pipe will constitute a powerful lever to loosen and crack pipe joints.  Bob Neal's patent shows the discharge pipe well anchored at its downstream end in the center of the tank.

Getting back to the experiment, my 1.1 meter tube has a resonant frequency of 156 hz with both ends open or half that, 78 hz, with one end blocked by the palm of a friend’s hand.  That’s about the lowest D# (~78 cps) and the second to the lowest D# (~156 cps) on the piano.  Here’s a chart of all the notes if you want to use your piano or electronic keyboard instead of a tone generator.  It’s just a matter of comparing the pitch of the sound you hear when you blow over the end of the tube and when you play the expected pitch on a tone generator or other tool.  The tone generator I downloaded didn’t go down to 78 cps but since I’m a piano tuner I could tell that with one end blocked, the tube did in fact make an exact octave lower than the 156 cps it made with both ends open.  For me it was a big thrill after all these years of thinking about Bob Neal’s machine to learn how to predict the frequency of a pipe by its length.  And remember that the tone you hear easily is just the fundamental or first harmonic.  The chart above tells which harmonics are going to naturally occur in both open and closed tubes. 

To get the experience of hearing many harmonics within a single tone, check out the YouTube videos of someone striking a solid metal bar that suspended from the ceiling, and then moving the microphone from node to node, which is a striking direct experience of hearing many sounds within one sound.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYqk4AcMK-s

Another example is the beautiful throat whistling of Siberian goat herders and Tibetan monks.  You can learn how to make different harmonics by singing a steady tone and moving your mouth parts until you hear intense high pitched tones in addition to the fundamental that you are singing.  Listening to the Tuvan throat singers will make a believer out of you.  I've heard them live and it sends Top 40 back to the dark ages where it belongs.  Audio samples of the throat singers of Tuva

MEANDERING TOWARDS GETTING DOWN TO THE NITTY GRITTY

It’s time to get down to the nitty gritty and start trying to design a machine or at least some preliminary experiments.  Hours of staring at standing wave animations and Bob Neal’s patent drawing created the magical state called "sleep" we have heard so much about, despite my abiding interest in this device since 1988, or since 1981 if you count the night that George Heaton said, “There’s a way to put low pressure air into a high pressure tank…in pulses…”

 All this swimming through the mind brings back the good old days.  Somebody gives me $50 and tells me to prove that Neal’s device will work.  I study on it and reluctantly ask for $600 more.  A compressor arrives that gets me absolutely nowhere but a baby step along in my education regarding what not to do.  Louie and I are dumbfounded, despite the  assurances from his dad, the retired mechanical engineer, that this thing will work.  If it is tuned right.  Otherwise, expect nothing.

 And nothing is what we got, but our expectations were for instant results, so we quit too easy, didn’t understand the concept of resonance very well, and assumed that tuning the machine to make it work was gonna be a matter of trial and error.  I think that’s what stopped us: looking forward to cutting pipes of every conceivable size, rebuilding the plumbing setup dozens of time, and in the long run we were too unsure of the principle of resonance to do more than get our hands dirty a few times.  I went back to library research because it was easier and collected thousands of pages of technical articles about doing work with acoustic energy.  I gradually forgot or denied that I already knew how Neal’s machine would work because Irwin had already told me.

 There was that one time, though.  Louie and I had concocted some dumb scheme that ended up not doing anything, but while getting the compressor up to speed, the gauge suddenly went berserk!  The gauge needle bounced back and forth so fast and so far that it was a blur.  We stared at it, hearts pounding…it stopped and we had a conversation something like this:  It worked!  That was it, what we were hoping to see!  Yeah but it was the wrong time, we were trying to do something else.  Well let’s get back to it later.  We have to do what we set out to do today.

Later never came, and it wasn’t until 23 years later that I got back on track and once again tried to learn how resonance could possibly make a compressor run smooth and cool.  This time with the encouragement of a lone machinist who had already made it work, already proved the concept, and then given up because the 7-cylinder compressor he made wasn’t strong enough to get to the magic speed consistently without breaking down.

 Speaking of giving up, what is it, as determined as I am, that stops me from simply proceeding with this description?  I have developed the fear that if I don't include the human element, someone will make the mistake that this is all about machinery.  It's not.  It's about getting to work each day without having to watch a horse's ass the whole way.  Not that the horse would mind if we all slowed down the pace with which we are destroying every culture on earth by providing a corporate empire as role model for everybody everywhere.  Just imagine: "Hey stop tailgating me you odious bastard, or I shall be forced to swat thy steed upon its nose!"  Wouldn't you rather be driving an air car?

 OK, so if you look at part 49 in Bob Neal’s patent, the fourteen pairs of intake pipes leading from the compressor cylinder outlets enter "resonator 49" at what appears to be the pressure nodes, not the antinodes as I think would be correct.  Assuming that the drawing is accurate, why would this be?  What about all the turns taken by the pipes—how does that work into it?

 Finally I had an idea: do more research.  Temporarily disgruntled with internet research, I asked myself where I might learn in more detail about how a real acoustic power compressor would be arranged to get the best results, in terms compatible with what Neal presented in his patent.  Oh yeah, how about those thousands of pages of articles I’d once copied from library research on acoustic power devices?  Hey, how about George Constantinesco’s textbook?

 To demonstrate the potency of senility, I almost went to archive.org to download the book, but finally settled for either downloading a copy from my own site or else what the heck, why not read the copy that’s already on my computer?  Duh.

 From the viewpoint of Gogu Constantinescu, a seasoned expert in the field of doing work with waves, a new approach for initial experimentation quickly suggested itself: start with a simple, straight, long tube with one piston moving back and forth in one end of it.  As a thought experiment.  Maybe in the other end you could mentally install a check valve, then a piece of pipe, and a cap.  And a gauge.  Duh again.  Instead of trying to reverse-engineer a machine I’ve never seen, why not start with the simplest possible incarnation of the standing wave theory, and add one experiment at a time till along comes the secret of success in an easily testable format.  That’s my new plan: one pipe, one piston, and maybe several gauges.  A hand cranked piston.  What I should have tried in 1988 when I actually had a shop to work in, with free rent.

 Constantinesco’s first few chapters also got me onto other facts I had not learned from the usual sources on standing waves.  This is because, unlike many who write scientific articles about resonance, his experience went beyond the two most typical applications of acoustic resonance to date: (1) teaching it in physics class and (2) making it stop.  Constantinesco had vast experience with generating standing waves on purpose in order to do work with resonance, and his description therefore includes details not mentioned elsewhere, which would be important mainly to someone wanting to do work with acoustic power:

—At the displacement nodes, there is literally no movement of the air. 

—Until something taps into the thing to take power off or do work, the pressure builds and builds “without limit” till the pipe bursts.  "Without limit".  So Gogu agrees with Irwin, the engineer who drew the chart of wave reflection in tubes with one closed end.

  —And when something does tap in to take out power, the standing wave is destroyed.  But that’s OK, because the standing wave limits you to taking power out only in one place, the stationary pressure antinode.  But with traveling waves still traveling, you can take power out anywhere.  That has something to do with the way standing waves are easily interfered with.

—The good news is that I don’t understand this yet, but I know it will open up to me in time, now that I have started with a simple device and plans to move forward, instead of starting with a patent drawing and trying to retrofit reality to fit a machine I don’t understand.

In answer to the automatic response of the pre-programmed kneejerk skeptic, here are some pre-planned responses of my own:

—Constantinesco was (as far as I know) not interested in free energy or anything that people so often summarily judge to be “perpetual motion”.  The fact that his machines worked does not prove that Bob Neal’s machine worked.  The difference between a wave compressor, if Constantinesco made one, and Neal’s compressor, is that the piston on Neal’s compressor serves the double duty of driving the wave AND moving the air that is to enter a tank.  In short, Neal used the kind of technology perfected by Constantinesco and took it a step farther to put fresh energy into the system that had been generated by solar heat.

—Was Constantinesco some kind of crank?  I mean, in spite of not being interested in perpetual motion, could he still be labeled some other kind of crank?  Nope.  For one thing, he is the inventor of the device that got bullets to fire between the moving propellers of an aircraft during World War I.  Reliably, of course.  Wave logic thus kinda helped win the war for us, I guess, at least in part.  Imagine the result if his invention hadn't worked.  Of course the military officer who championed his work lost his job for it but still continued to secretly keep Constantinesco going till he could prove that real working machinery could be built using wave technology.  The reason the military wouldn't look at his work was that they saw him calling water "compressible" and closed the book on him at that point without a glance at his evidence.

 To download the first two chapters of Constantinesco’s textbook A Treatise of Wave Transmission of Power, CLICK.

To see pictures and read an account of Constantinesco's life and work written by a descendant, CLICK.

SPREADSHEET FINISHED

In order to hopefully soon be able to visualize what a 7-cylinder double-acting compressor looks like while it's running so I can make an animation of it so that other people don't have to try to figure out how to visualize this, which they are not going to bother to do unless they already know how, here is a spreadsheet I made toward that eventual goal.  I am aware that no one looks at someone else's spreadsheets but assuming there are exceptions I will post it anyway in case anyone is interested.

Neal Crank Angles--what happens in a 7-cylinder double-acting compressor.  Spreadsheet July 17, 2011 by Scott Robertson

MAXWELL’S DEMON NEVER WENT AWAY

In the process of trying to google my way to total enlightenment, instead I am confronted with questions like: what kind of scientific climate is our society caught up in where you can get 80 results googling “compression of a cold atomic cloud by on-resonance laser light”, but if you google “air compression by resonance” you get zero.  What is “compression of a cold atomic cloud by on-resonance laser light” used for, anyway?  Helping the Chinese fill the shelves of Wal-Mart faster with worse junk?  By golly, if it’s good for Wal-Mart, it’s good for America.  Let’s hear it for “compression of a cold atomic cloud by on-resonance laser light”.

Now about “air compression with resonance”.  In spite of the apparent lack of interest in such a profoundly and universally relevant topic as a substantially cheaper way to compress air, science just ain’t interested in anything as medieval as an air compressor.  Been there, done that, perfected that rusty heap a hundred years ago, gotta keep up with Professor Jones, publish or perish, must push on into the rarefied gloom of the perfectly irrelevant, aka “pure” science. 

Now about “air compression with resonance”.

Several attempts to test the waters of Constantinesco’s wave power textbook beyond chapter 2 have always turned sour for the same reason, and it’s not the math.  The math is sort of advanced but I could learn it.  Problem is, Constantinesco mentioned air only briefly from time to time, asserting that the same principles hold in all fluids, but always went back to using terms like “liquid” and “hydro” and “completely filled pipe” and never really gave us the exact theory for doing wave work with gasses.  His math could probably be adapted to describe Neal’s compression unit, but not by someone who doesn’t know how!

Nevertheless, it remains to try to apply what we have learned from Constantinesco, Bellocq, and others so that holes in a Theory of Neal can be found and filled with something solid, before equipment is bought or test apparatus is erected.  With this aim, I’ll tackle a reading of Albert G Bodine’s spherical resonant compressor patent, which might turn out to be a sort of self-filling air tank without the free energy.  It’s been years since I looked at the patent, but I used to think it would hold some useful information for anyone concerned enough to study it carefully.

First I want to try and outline the tasks that a Neal Unit is supposed to simultaneously accomplish, and wonder out loud again, how best to test each task separately and together, for later inclusion in an all-encompassing Unified Power Band.  (PS: there are also no google results, not one, for “cheaper way to compress air”.  Not one!  Well I’m about to put a stop to that inexcusable omission.)

What a Neal Compressor has to do, all at the same time:

—move air from the environment into the system

—generate a pulsation

—cause the pulsation to reflect

—generate resonance

—prevent the compressor from having to resist more than 15 psig

—get the compressor to run smooth and cool

—get the air to go into 200 psi tank

—do the compressing in the pipe, in the tank, and not in the compressor

US Patent 2581902 “Resonant Gas Compressor and Method” by Albert G Bodine Jr

US Patent 2480626 “Resonant Wave Pulse Engine & Process” by Albert G Bodine Jr

Without going through the Bodine material in detail, here are some initial impressions I got by scanning very briefly through selected portions of these fairly long & wordy patents.

If Bodine’s compressor could have invoked any kind of free energy phenomena, he missed his chance for discovering this by accident when he used combustion to generate the pulsations.  As Bill Truitt said, “You can run the compressor on gas or electricity, but we changed to electric because a car can’t make gas!”  What an opportunist.

Bodine mentions that the combustion phenomena should take place, in phase with a period of maximum pressure (peak of the pressure antinode).  At first I thought, Well maybe Neal’s patent drawing is wrong and my initial impression was right…that the compressor input pulses should take place at the pressure antinode as NOT pictured in Neal’s patent.  Neal shows them going in at the pressure nodes when there is no pressure change.

This is going to force me to learn what all this mumbo-jumbo jive squawking about nodes and antinodes is all about.  Remember what Constantinesco said: at the displacement node, which most sources say is a spot where there is “minimum variation of displacement”, Constantinesco said there is virtually NO MOTION.  Bodine adds something like “no motion in regards to the to-and-from movement of the wave action”.

Then I spotted Bodine saying something like, at the pressure node, where physics texts say there is “minimum pressure variation”, Bodine said there is virtually NO PRESSURE ENERGY.

I think I’m spotting a pattern here.  While the textbook writers rehash each others’ publications, the down-and-dirty experts who use standing waves to do real work are giving practical versions of incomprehensible physics book conventions or habitual ways of saying things that don’t give a fair idea as to what’s happening in the real world.

When I try to imagine the wild innards of a tube quivering in the throes of resonance, my understanding is on shaky ground.  My medicine for this condition is to tap the brains of as many describors of reality as possible, in hopes that something will eventually click.

The pressure node, where textbooks habitually say there is minimum variation in pressure, is the same spot as the displacement antinode, where the books say there is maximum variation in displacement.  Older books used to call this a “velocity node” or was that Bellocq who used such terminology for the displacement node.  In my world, when two things happen in the same place at the same time over and over till hell freezes over, there is a reason.  Coincidence becomes meaningful, pointing to a common cause of the two simultaneous events in the same place.  In fact, the two events become one event, variously described.

You could even say that the existence of resonance in an invisible substance (air) in a place you can’t look into (a pipe) is sort of an antinode of understanding: the place where there is the maximum possible variation between what is actually happening and what is sloughed off as an acceptable level of understanding.

Now don’t go fetch your supercomputers.  This is not the time to hydroplane through the facts on a whoopee cushion of pure science as the audience begins to yawn and fidget.  This is the time to get resonance in an air pipe reduced to what the hell it actually is so real people can understand it and describe it to each other.

I just said that the pressure node and the displacement antinode are the same damn thing.  They’re in the same place, they’re at the same time, they’re in the same body of air, they’re the: Same.  Damn.  Thing.  (This sentence is dedicated to Terry Miller.)

OK now Bodine says put your pulse-producing combustion at the pressure antinode, but Neal’s drawing shows his pulse-producing piston products entering at the displacement antinode/pressure node.  Why do they have the opposite approach to doing the same thing?

Well it’s not the same thing.  They’re both producing pulsations at a frequency that produces resonance, but Bodine is PRODUCING PRESSURE so it’s correct to put pressure in where pressure is: the pressure antinode.  Neal’s whole point in regards to the compressor piston is that it MUST NOT produce pressure, and a big part of this whole design is to take actual steps that really prevent it from doing so, in order that the pressure can be produced only in the tank.  Neal’s piston PRODUCES MOTION and therefore it is starting to make sense that he would dump his pulsating air into the motion node aka velocity node aka displacement node.

The question about that is, and always has been, if the pressure at the motion antinode is static pressure or 100 psi, then the air isn’t gonna go in at that point and the whole idea is bogus.  This is where it becomes important that the pressure node and the motion antinode are the same thing.  Two sides of the same phenomenon, like politics and corruption.  Can’t have one without the other, they make each other, they come from the same womb, they ARE each other.

Recall once again Constantinesco’s statement that at the motion node there is essentially no motion, and Bodine’s equal but opposite statement that at the pressure node there is essentially no pressure energy.  No pressure energy?  Static pressure—the pressure in the pipe if there were no wave—is 100 psi.  No pressure energy and 100 psi are not the same thing, so what gives!  Pressure node, per textbooks, is “minimum pressure variation”.  And yet we can’t think there is anything like a vacuum at the pressure node, so where does Bodine come up with this “no pressure energy” assertion?  I mean I’m not arguing with him, or with anyone, I’m just trying to figure out what all these geniuses are talking about!

MAXWELL’S DEMON STRIKES AGAIN

As I said many years ago, Bernoulli’s whatchamacallit is the answer to the Maxwell’s Demon riddle.  The little demon in the tank who sorts air into zones of unequal energy concentration so that an air engine can run off the difference, thus providing compressed air so much more cheaply than a conventional air compressor that—because of the inpouring of solar heat to keep the molecules re-activated—the whole thing has the misfortune of running itself, thus making itself the enemy of the civilized industrial world, which runs off of profiteering, and capitalism is the real “perpetual motion machine of the 2nd kind.”   What a genius Maxwell must have been, to say all that in such a way that no one got the joke for 118 years.

While deeply re-educated physicists argue about whether Maxwell’s Demon is blind, computer illiterate, or just plain autistic, Bernoulli’s thingamajig explains to us that static pressure is normally maximum pressure, and this pressure goes down when the air stops being static, that is, when it starts to move.  The faster the air moves, the more its pressure, thus temperature, goes down.  If it stops moving, its pressure and temperature go back up to static.  There are no losses, because the air isn’t going anywhere but in circles like a fluid flywheel, but that’s not the main point.  The point is that when unmoving pressurized fluids start moving, they convert some of their potential energy (pressure) into kinetic energy (velocity).  This Bernoulli’s thing is used to drive such processes as injectors, ejectors, eductors, thermal compressors, injection compressors, inspirators, and all the other names that venturi-oid devices get called.

At the famed conjunction of pressure node and motion antinode, the static pressure can’t possibly be 100 psi because it is the POINT OF MAXIMUM MOTION and the static pressure—when the air is perfectly still—is only 100 psi!  That is the point I’ve been trying to get around to as backwardly as possible, and now for the wondrous repercussions.

The Bellocq analogy becomes useful again, a happy event since it confonted us with the seeming contradiction that started all this trouble to begin with.

While Neal’s fluid is moving into the system in strong pulsations (or is it?!), Bellocq’s fluid is moving in through the check valve at the bottom of the pipe in a fairly steady flow, with the check valve usually held open by flow, against the pressure of the water column above it. 

Now it’s time to get down to business with what Neal’s pistons must do and must not do.  If they are not to build up pressure, than by definition, they have to be putting air out all the time.  That’s part of the reason why double-acting cylinders might be a necessary part of the equation.  If you try to put the air in at the pressure antinode—at the low part only—then during most of the piston’s stroke, its exhaust check valve has to stay closed, so what is it doing?  Compressing air!  In the cylinder!  That’s a no-no!

Bellocq’s arrangement is to have the intake (check valve where water enters the system continuously) and the exhaust (timed valve where water leaves the system in pulses) are a number of odd-quarter-wavelengths apart.  With the intake located at a motion antinode, so the maximum volume can be taken in, because that’s what that part of the world is all about: flow!  And the other end of the tuned pipe is opened and closed at the resonant frequency or a harmonic of it, at a motion node/pressure antinode.  Because that is where the pumping is being done, at the top of the well.

I used to assume that Bellocq’s check valve was an analogy for Neal’s equalizer, but now I don’t think this is the case.  I think the compressor outlet check valve is Bellocq’s check valve.  I don’t want to get too carried away trying to get the two processes lined up as if they were perfect analogs of each other, but I think the process in Neal’s device that mirrors the timed outflow valve at the top of the pipe is the pulse of air leaving the tank for the engine.

BELLOCQ/NEAL ANALOGY

As a final analogy, look at the “static pressure” where Bellocq’s water entered the resonant system continuously: at the bottom of the pipe.  That’s the highest pressure in the system, static pressure, if the wave doesn’t exist.  With the standing wave set up, pressure there alternates not at all, but the swings of motion change alternate so violently that what pressure that would exist there if the air were still is converted to kinetic energy and the fluid enters continuously because there’s no pressure to hold it back.  So the 100 psi that is already in Neal’s delivery pipe when it hits the sweet spot is not having any effect on holding back against fresh air from entering the pipe; it’s moving too fast.

The next step is to prove that much mathematically.

COMPARISON OF CONSTANTINESCO, BELLOCQ AND NEAL COMPRESSORS

The three animations below show the difference between what these three inventors accomplished with waves in fluids.  There has been no attempt in these three animations to show anything to scale, in tune, at the right frequency, the right length, etc.  The focus here is on the moving parts, so just assume that the most important moving part—the air—is in a resonant state, inflow and outflow are in the right place in relation to nodes, etc.

CONSTANTINESCO usually used liquid in his vibrating circuit, and if he used his system to compress air he would have had a prime mover (not shown) generating a resonant condition with a short-stroke piston in a fluid circuit.  Then a wave motor, depicted here as a second piston, would have powered a conventional air compressor (not shown).  His work was transmission of energy from one place to another.  The animation shows two driven pistons: one is driven by a prime mover and the other is driven by the wave and in turn drives an air compressor.  There is no free energy involved.

BELLOCQ, if he had designed Neal’s compression unit as an analogy of his own acoustically driven water pump, would have done it like this.  A vibrating piston generates resonance in a tuned fluid circuit, and correct positioning of the hardware causes the fluid to be pumped to a higher pressure.  All the work in this kind of hypothetical compressor would be done by acoustic energy.  Again there is probably no free energy involved, but Bellocq’s water pump did overcome a limitation of pumping water from above since it was a machine to which Torricelli’s limitation did not apply.

NEAL went a step further by using acoustic power only to pressurize the pumped fluid.  The work of getting the air moving was done mechanically by a prime-mover-driven conventional compressor.  The compressor had an unconventionally large number of pistons (not shown) and was capable of compressing air to 120 psi like any single-stage compressor, but once the machine’s output reached the resonant frequency of the circuit it was delivering air to, its only work was to keep the air moving.  This work, therefore, did not have to be done by acoustic power.  The advantage of moving the air mechanically was so great that having the big part of the job—compression—done by acoustic power, yielded free energy.

This page is dedicated to the STANDING WAVE theory.  For the TRAVELING WAVE theory being developed by an engineer, click the link.

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