Questionable patents

trevor borocz johnson

trevor borocz johnson

Registered Senior Member
James R will probably get a fuzzled at me but here's one of my few inventions that actually works, has been tested with experiments, and been through the patent office and granted. The idea if you don't understand patent lawyer terminology, is to use a cannon buried several hundred feet deep that shoots a cannonball up a conduit to the surface. When it reaches the surface it should theoretically be going slow enough to catch it but a loop could be attached for the ball to circulate in if too much speed, and also protection if the ball doesn't reach the surface. Next you take the cannonball out of the loop and place it in a bucket that is lowered back to where you shot it from, simultaneously spinning a generator. The efficiency of a cannon is about 40% to weight displacement I've read. Increases in efficiency by gaining back some of the energy lost through heat could make it higher. Using weight displacement also decreases the heat put into the enviroment because the energy is converted to momentum of the cannonball instead of steam like in a traditional power plant.

https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2013172884
 
trevor borocz johnson said:
JThe idea if you don't understand patent lawyer terminology, is to use a cannon buried several hundred feet deep that shoots a cannonball up a conduit to the surface. When it reaches the surface it should theoretically be going slow enough to catch it but a loop could be attached for the ball to circulate in if too much speed, and also protection if the ball doesn't reach the surface. Next you take the cannonball out of the loop and place it in a bucket that is lowered back to where you shot it from, simultaneously spinning a generator.
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Brilliant!

Of course the long distance the cannonball travels through air results in most of the energy being lost to air friction. So instead let's have it move just as fast but a shorter distance. We can, for example, attach the cannonball to a mechanical thing so it can spin a shaft quickly (but with almost zero air resistance) then be automatically returned to the cannon for the next shot.

And with a cannon you have to load all that powder; who wants to spend their days underground loading a cannon thousands of times a day? So instead we can use say natural gas mixed with air; we can do that with a simple pipe and a spark plug. Perhaps we could even use a petroleum product, although you'd have to atomize it somehow. That needs a little more work.

But even then you are going to lose a lot of the energy from the shot as the hot gases escape around the cannonball and back up the hole. You could narrow the hole so that almost none of the hot gases escape, and almost all of them go to pushing the cannonball.
Hmm. But then you'd have to get rid of all those gases when you were done. Perhaps a valve you could open after those gases have done their work? That could get all those used gases out of there.

You might also need another valve to let in more air, but once you have that exhaust valve, the intake valve should be a piece of cake - just a duplicate.

But then you'd have an engine that only produced power every once in a while. You could get several of these engines and attach them to the same shaft, but arrange them so they all spin the shaft at different times! That would smooth out the power considerably.
I wonder if you could ever shrink it down to fit in a car?
 
Out of interest, trevor, how much did it cost you to get that patent? Money well spent, do you think?
 
Previous attempts at generating power from explosives have all been failures dating back to Huygens. I'd like to see anyone of you find or come up with a more efficient way to create energy from a fast reaction like those of the fusion lasers.
 
sideshowbob said:
A lot of crazy things have been patented: https://www.freepatentsonline.com/crazy.html

One example: "Eyeglasses that don't need a frame because they attach to body piercings on the face."
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OK, since James has decided to become complicit in the hijacking of this thread, I might as well join in.........

My personal favourite stupid patent is this one:


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Assuming the hat was sufficiently firmly strapped on, the recoil would at the very least give you instant whiplash, and could possibly even break your neck.

But there are lots. My first job after university was as a trainee patent agent. I used to get sent off to do patent searches in the patent office library (no internet in1976 - you had to look things up in indices and then get them out and read them individually.) When I was bored I used to look up obscure patents. Many of them have never seen the light of day, due to being quite impractical. The Patent Office examiner could reject applications on grounds of "inutility", but this categorisation was quite narrowly drawn so if the applicant appealed, the easy thing was to just grant the patent, however ridiculous and let it lie on the books, gathering dust until it expired 20 years later.
 
So lets say you convert 40-50% of the energy into explosive energy which is divided into 3: sound, seismic, weight displacement. The other half of the energy would be heat energy in the cannon and like billvon sort of said the hot gasses, most of that fifty percent of the heat energy is going to stay on the earth and not hurt the atmosphere, but as for the hot gasses the whole system could be contained so they don't escape with a loop at the the top on the surface.

I wonder if they have tried chilling the lens's of the fusion laser or at least how fast can they cool them off using water or something between use of the system back to its original temperature, so if you blast as soon as you reload the cannon the laser would be chilled enough not to get hot.
 
So that's 100% of the energy not hurting the atmosphere. There certainly are enough guns, why not use it as fuel? and the cannon would be deep in the earth as well which would bury the energy from even reaching the surface or hurting the atmosphere.
 
trevor borocz johnson said:
So lets say you convert 40-50% of the energy into explosive energy which is divided into 3: sound, seismic, weight displacement. The other half of the energy would be heat energy in the cannon and like billvon sort of said the hot gasses, most of that fifty percent of the heat energy is going to stay on the earth and not hurt the atmosphere, but as for the hot gasses the whole system could be contained so they don't escape with a loop at the the top on the surface.
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In your patent all the gases escape into the atmosphere, increasing both temperature and greenhouse gases.
 
trevor borocz johnson said:
... a cannon buried several hundred feet deep that shoots a cannonball...
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Everything but the gunpowder is simply a Rube Goldberg-esque way of losing power to waste heat and friction loss.

Throw away the cannon and everything else.
Keep only the gunpowder. It's the only useful component.
Throw the gunpowder into the fuel chamber of a steam boiler.
Use the output from the boiler to drive your engine.

Trevor is a troll.
 
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