Getting amateur science researched and validated?

I have the videos on utube. Mine was a serious post about a problem in science.
Funds for research are directed by whom exactly?
Even environmental organizations do NOT do research on alterative energy. They think it all has been done before.
It hasn't!
Even now, with the world falling apart, nobody has the time to check this out.
Who works on alternative energy?
It is just big companys working on high tech stuff. And all the money gets funneled to them.
On an engineering forum a guy calculated that one of my cheap experimental solar cookers would pay for itself in 50 meals while a solar panel system would pay for itself in 70 years!
But people's eyes glaze over when they talk about solar electricity.
Why is this? When it is totally uneconomical?
Your post makes the same presumptions I made when I started putting my videos online. Over 100,000 views later, I do not see much progress.
There is a mental block in science research which prevents stuff like the pulser pump from being researched.

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Originally posted by TVParkdale:
[b]I thought of one more idea:

Have you considered making "how to" videos?

I'm sure some creative people would love to try out your ideas who may not be a scientifically/mechanically minded as yourself [img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img] [/b]

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Nope, I am saying that very basic low tech stuff and appropriate tech stuff is not being researched by anyone.
If you check the internet and librarys, there is nothing else as simple or as cheap material wise as the pulser pump to pump water anywhere. And now it is 20 years old already.
I invented the "mechanical mathematician" as a way to make low tech parabolic dishes in dirt poor countrys. It could never had happened if I thought everything has been done already, or if I had not identified the problem.
But there is no replication of my work.
I have made a new type of compound parabolic solar cooker in september but again the problem, no replication, no study to see if it is effective or not. If it does not get endorsed or tested by someone in "real" science or real engineering, it is dead in the water.
The NGO's will not even try stuff that has not been approved by the big boys! Engineers without borders are a case in point. You cannot argue with these people either.
These are supposed to be open minded solutions orientated people. Nope
They have a million excuses to sit on their hands. And these are the very people with cad experience and probably able to use software to test and improve the designs.
The very people who would be looking for a novel project for their exams. But they have not looked at the pulser pump in 20 years. The solar stuff is more recent but I see the same problem arising.
This is not just about me. This is a big problem in science research that needs to be fixed.

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Originally posted by TVParkdale:
[b]

Okay, let's "do over" [start again] because I think I misunderstood something here.

So, what you're trying to put across is that these big companies come up with impractical expensive inventions while sensible sorts of devices get left behind because they are not coming out of the big companys' favorite think tanks?

Therefore, the devices individual creators design don't get "built upon" because the funding to do so, is not forthcoming?

I understand a bit, because my father was ripped off for a couple of his designs and he had some other inventions in our house that saved a LOT of money/energy and were kind of brilliant, really.

Can you give me your YouTube site? I'd really love to look at them. The solar cooker sounds particularly interesting!

[I'm not bad mechanically but I'm scientifically clueless [img]frown.gif" border="0[/img] ][/b]

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Here is another one that has somehow fallen through the cracks. The guy is a swedish mathematician who discovered (about 30 years ago!)that you can get get a point focus by combining 2 reflective parabolic troughs.
Like making a parabolic dish except you can use easily obtainable sheet material to make it.
It is technically much more difficult to manifacture a parabolic dish than the 2 troughs.
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYzgYI9_h6s]http://www.youtube.com/watch?...
At very least his idea should be widely known.
I have had an active interest in solar cooking for several years now, Yet I only found this a couple of days ago by accident.
The man is understandably annoyed that the idea has been ignored for so long. Here is what he emailed to me
"Dear Gaiatechnician,
by clicking "more info", you can see that I have tried for 32 years to share this information with the world
What you are producing seems to be a "compound caustic." If you search YouTube for "caustic curve," you will find my videos on these curves."
Compound caustics is news to me. and he goes on to tell me there is still a lot to do in the solar engineering field and to keep up the good work. But I think you can see the problem. for some reason, his idea was too different, people recoiled and it got snuffed out.
You can see thousands of videos on the internet where people burn paper with parabolic dishes that they got from scrapheaps.
Just to show the power of parabolics.
But parabolic dishes can produce a freaky second order focus when the light shines on them sideways. They can cause unintended fires.
I bet the device that this man made does not suffer from that failing.
Brian

Thanks for your input, you make very good points.
I spread the stuff over the internet and I hope that some chineese manefacturer perhaps, will grab the ideas and start stamping out compound parabolic dishes by the hundred thousand. Like they do thin aluminium cooking sheets and cake dishes. Sell for $30 and a tidy profit and the user recoups the cost in a month in fuel savings!
Or sell for $150 incl the pot and cooking thermometer and make a tidier profit.
I am trying to spark something and if nothing else change the direction of much amateur science.
(Parabolic powerful but not good for cooking, compound parabolic way better for cooking!
Years ago I worked as a lower down in funded research and it is mind blowingly boring!
You CANNOT deviate off the set course even if preliminary results show that your research will not have economic value!
A lot of software is free, blender for animation, and pov-ray for ray tracing but I do not know how to use them. And I believe lots of people can be brought on board this open source devellopment thing. They already devellop this software for free. Why not use it for free to solve real world problems for the poorest people on earth?
I have succeeded in getting someone to do animation software of solar on the web.(a guy in france)
I am a member of an amateur science collobaration site called instructables. (Their founder just got a big award for conceving the idea). But even there, there was initial strong resistance to the "mechanical mathematician" and nobody has yet independently made one and put it on the web.
People only will be led by known proven stuff even there!
It is as if the science they thought us in schools was everything, set in stone and some new discovery or different design (that obeys the rules of physics)(like the mathematician) is somehow wrong because it is not in the textbooks. I got that with the pulser pump years ago too. They would cry that it is not in the holy science texts so it cannot be true!
Even now with ecovillages in most countrys, and intentional environmentalist communitys all over the world, you do not find their science matches up to what it could be.
Seriously, I have made more discoverys in my back yard than the world famous [url=http://www.cat.org.uk/]www.cat.org.uk/[/url] center has. They just take hand me down science from elsewhere and distribute it to the masses. They are not willing to try anything novel. Same with sazukki foundation. They do NOT do research. They collect money and then they just distribute what boffins release to them.
I think this is a wrong headed approach that limits people severely. Some seriously smart people work for these organisations but it is as if their hands are tied as they work.
Brian

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Originally posted by Noise:
[b]Brian:
Software costs money and so does the engineers time (Especially if the engineer spends most of their time reading rabble)... Unless there is a way of recouping the cash invested, I can't see anyone readily doing so.

So what I think you need to do here Brian is figure out your intent with any of this information you're presenting. Free information showing people how to obtain material and build for themselves... Or introductory science that can be expanded upon... Or something to be patented and one day produced and sold... And so on. Once you've got this intent figured out, you can start to hash out how you want to get there. If it's easy enough to create, have you considered creating and selling a few?

[ 07 November 2008: Message edited by: Noise ][/b]

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Just a note that my instructable about the compound parabolic solar cooker won a prize in the instructables hungry scientist competition.  Hurah!

It is great to get prizes to raise the profile of the idea  but it would be preferable if winning meant that some students somewhere would test the thing and publish the results. It is still in scientific limbo because I am not one of the insiders in the scientific masonic lodge.

Sorry thats how it  is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH01GeW6QQ0 is a vidio on youtube that I made to draw attention to the problem in science.  I include the swedish guy's combined trough point focus solar concentrator, and the pulser pump as proof that science does not do proper peer review of important concepts and alternative ways of doing things.  It is particularly poor at develloping low tech solutions even though it has huge resources (many of which are devoted to repeating experiments that have been done millions of times with the same results). A tiny fraction could be released to help us expand our knowelege with no pain and a lot of gain.

Brian

Thank you, bubbles.  The pulser pump is a combined trompe to compress the air and airlift pump to use the compressed air to pump water. I only ever made 5 or 6 of them as demos to show that they work. the big difference between them and what went before is that they use low pressure air to power the airlift.  I do not think scientists ever researched doing it that way.  Now imagine how they researched airlift. They used electric or gas driven airpumps to compress the air. (this was back in the 30's 40's and 50's.

 So they never even saw a situation like the low flow low pressure air that i used.  Modern airlift pumps pump a "champaigne" like mixture of air and water.  Mine uses "slug flow" and "plug flow" which is more akin to waves in the pipes than fizzy water. There IS plug and slug flow research going on at the moment in various countries but it was not well understood and was seen as a problem back then.

  I totally agree with you that it is a niche device. You must have at least half a meter of fall to make one worthwhile.  I was using 0.5 meters of water head and up to 350 liters per minute of water flow to power my device.  That pretty much makes low efficiency a certainty.  Now, if it had 1 meter head, it would probably be far more efficient.  But I did not have access to 1 meter head.   Basically in the modern world, almost everything in low and high water flow up to 2 meters head is up for grabs. (2 meters head and pretty large flow is where electriicity generation starts to be economic.   Basically even if it doesn't get more efficient at 1 meter head, that is ok.  It is economic efficiciency and payback times that are supposed to count.  If you need to pump water to plants beside a river (the original reason I made one was that I was too lazy to water my garden), and you have no money, you cannot afford to build a power plant but you might be able to afford a couple of 4 inch or 6 inch pipes.    My little prototype used to pump 4 liters per minute to 10 ft high. People poked fun at it. But over the course of a 24 hour day, it is a hell of a lot of water. We also had it pumping to 5.5 meters.  Even slower. But sometimes in heavy frost, the water in the pipes going away from it froze. That was when people really appreciated it.  Because we had to transport buckets and buckets and buckets of water to sheep 50 meters up a hill in the shed.  I see the pulser pump as an option for people in niche situations.  They do not have enough money for another type of pump (even a hydram pump is miles more expensive) and they need some water pumped.  Round the world, there are millions of similat situations but the people do not know about this option..

I think the swedish guy is amazing. I have communicated with him about 6 months ago when I first saw his videos.  He has being trying to get this out into the world for over 3 decades!  I would have made one this summer if work had not gone insanely busy.  Over on instructables and on solarcooking.org, and elsewhere I have been pestering people to make one just to prove that it works.   But people get pissy with me.

Like really pissy.  They say that peer review is where you write to a peer reviewed science mag, they publish, and other scientists check your findings.

I say, that is too long winded and too many roadblocks.  How about this, I publish, you try it out and then say, "yeah, brian is not a bullshitting jerkoff, this thing really does work!"  But so far, they have said, "uck off, don't tell me what to do. You ARE a bullshitter and a jerkoff". One guy said that I should do it the way this other guy did (a link to a guy selling solar cooker designs). So I go and look and one of the designs he is selling is one that I made. (Which is fine by me, I am glad that the info is getting out)

 So it is kinda tough.  Really I see it as charity research.

Attacking me for it is the same as punching  the guy collecting money for poor kids in Africa in the face.  I do get some moral support but a lot of people are nasty selfish uckers. They have the capability to copy and  check compare and maybe improve what I did but they refuse to participate. (God knows, my videos are crappy, so I say, instead of complaining, make better ones on the subject!)

Crappy or not, my video where I use a lazer level to demonstrate how light gets reflected in a parabolic trough (as it goes out of alligment with the sun) is part of a little movie that they  show on trams in Zurich.  I asked them to do a voiceover but they said that they left mine on it. (They came to me asking permission to use my video about 3 months ago and asking for the master from my camcorder). Even willing to pay shipping for the tape!  I ended up converting it to mpeg1 and using a file transfer service to send it for free.

Anyways, 

Bubbles wrote:

Brian,

A few months ago my computer got connected to a higher speed internet service. It gave me the chanche to look at your pulser pump. I was hoping that I could use it to pump water here on the farm. But have a hard time figuring out how I could apply it here. It is not suitable for getting water out of a well, We have a creek meandering across a corner of the farm , but it probably has less then a halve inch drop in that space.

Your pump seems to consist of two components. First you have a very basic version of a waterjet aircompressor that supplies compressed air to the second component, an airlift pump. If you look in the literature you will find that both these components are well researched and often used. Many years ago I once looked into the posibility of using a water jet vacuum pump to suck up the water from a paper making machine. It seemed like a simple solution since the paper mill was located beside a waterfall, but in the end generating electricity from the falling water turned out to be more efficient and offer more operational flexibility.

Looking over the pulser pump, I suspect that you might be able to increase the pumping efficiency if you could entrane (?) more air in your down pipe. I have seen simple water jet aircompressors that were used to put air into domestic waterpressure tanks. Something like that but for lower pressures might be worth looking into.

I like the two parabolic  troughs aproach that those Swedes came up with, a clever idea.