From: Fran Roarty “The Mystery and Legacy of Joseph Papp's Noble Gas Engine” by Eugene F. Mallove
http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue51/papp.html is a similar ZPE reaction to the one I am proposing. Since you mention this, Fran, let me add another thought - in which the role of xenon oxide should be mentioned along with the Casimir repulsive force. Gene’s fine article was a classic, yet it did not revive interest in this engine among top level researchers - other than the four different groups of people who had been associated with Papp, and who had seen the engine working. Millions were spent by them but with no reliable proof that the effect has been replicated. No theoretician seems to have been able to find any conceivable way that it could have worked. All of the experts were probably hindered by one primary expectation. Since it was based on a converted piston engine, it had to be a heat engine. Probably wrong! If today’s speculation is correct, then Papp’s crazy design is not and never was a heat-engine, and in fact he may have inadvertently found that ZPE can operate best as a heat sink. Admittedly several other explanations for Papp have seemed partly accurate in past analyses, but they assume that hydrogen was present, and there is no indication of that. Oxygen would be easier to imagine as a contaminant, if it were not intentionally added. It is possible that today’s proposed mechanism can operate best when physical nano-cavities are present, but a gas plasma is also functional - since so called “Casimir cooling” occurs in a medium via a Casimir repulsive force, operating on curved surfaces where an inert molecule like xenon might qualify as the active sphere for the cooling effect. We know for sure that xenon was one of Papp’s active gases, and that xenon is known to have both chemical and nuclear metastability. I am assuming, as Mallove did (and as the record shows), that Papp’s engine was demonstrated successfully on several occasions. I think we can even identify the molecule that caused the Feynman-instigated explosion at the infamous demo – the one that cost Caltech a handsome sum and cost one bystander his life… did we need to add a little extra drama to this story? Specifically, xenon tetroxide is a chemical compound of xenon and oxygen: XeO4. It is remarkable for being a stable compound below −36 °C; but above that temperature it becomes violently explosive. This combination of properties is what you want for use as a ZPE or ZPED “cold pump” since you can possibly get anomalous shock waves by capitalizing on the “cold side”, and at low effective temperature (due to Boyles law). You can call it “reusable TNT” but it is another version of the “entropic explosion” (shock wave without heat) which has been referred to here before. It would be an ideal way to “pump” ZPE. http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg15977.html How to cycle between temperature extremes then becomes the overriding issue with a piston engine. Fortunately every piston engine is also a vacuum pump in disguise. You may need extra cooling of the cylinder head to keep it at ambient or below and the engine will run cold naturally. There is a partial vacuum fill of gases, and a high compression ratio to invoked the heat-pump effect and then Joule-Thomson takes care of the rest. At bottom dead center of the stroke you have a cold plasma from a shock wave which has dissipated without a heat signature. The electron configuration of xenon in its metastable chemical state consists of tightly bound core electrons with a missing electron in the 5P shell, and a loosely bound valence electron in the 6S shell. Thus it will lase under proper conditions. It is tempting to attempt to connect orbital photon pumping (lasing) with ZPE pumping – and in a few elements this could happen, but I can find no authoritative source for that proposition. Additionally it can be noted that the “xenon excimer laser” typically uses a combination of a noble gases with a reactive oxidant like fluorine. Under the appropriate conditions, a “pseudo-molecule” called an “excimer” is created, which can only exist in an energized state and produces coherent light in the ultraviolet range on collapse. Normally this is conservative and lossy but this is only a metaphor for an inverse process. In the Papp engine, even if xenon does not oxidize all the way to the tetroxide, it could easily form an excimer when rapidly cooled from a previous shock wave. The employment of oxygen instead of fluorine can make something happen under extremely cold transitory conditions, as with Joule-Thomson expansion (throttling) in a cold plasma. A design which provides mechanical torque can depend on a shock wave in the absence of temperature differential, due to this little known property (little known, unless you design automotive air-bags or read vortex). This mechanism is known as the “entropic explosion” – or heatless shock wave. Essentially, this converts “coldness” into torque, and then into usable energy, in a proper design. :-) With a high compression ratio, it could be possible to cycle a low pressure gas fill between ambient and minus 36 °C, on every single revolution of the engine - so long as an adiabatic process is avoided. But by permitting Boyle’s Law to operate using a mix of gases with one of them being helium, thermodynamic expectations become altered, and so my suggestion today is that this is the way Papp avoided the adiabatic process. These thermodynamics, if this speculation is accurate, would have been completely unknown to Papp, and maybe to Feynman, but the engine worked (at least it worked on occasion when curious onlookers from Caltech were not tempted to unplug the temperature control unit). Aside from that, relevant details are still unknown and that probably goes back to the fact that Papp, like Andrea Rossi, could have gotten lucky in the lab and not had a clue about what they had found, due to paranoia at having the invention stolen. BTW I’m referring to the strange “inversion temperature” of helium once again in the above scenario, since of all exploitable physical properties, it seems to be the one which can be tied directly to the zero point field. Think about an ‘alternative universe’ in which the great Feynman really was great (instead of above-average) and in which there was no OPEC, no Gulf Wars and no trillion dollar deficits, due to the discovery 40 years ago - of a brand new energy source. IOW a real genius was present at this demo who was able to override natural skepticism and figure this one out from the start. Ironically, the rights to the Papp engine could probably have been purchased by Caltech for less than had to pay for the fatality. Jones
