Richard Casady brought forth on stone tablets:
On Sat, 22 Sep 2007 17:51:56 -0400, "Wilbur Hubbard"
wrote:


When it gets full you haul it up and empty in
into your tanks. Reverse osmosis without any energy used to get it.
Ain't Wilbur brilliant?

You haul it up without using any energy to do it? Absolutely not/ It
will take a foot pound for each pound for each foot you haul it.
No your basis for perpetual motion will not work. And is the opposite
of brilliant.

Casady

Well, not quite. The harvested fresh water is actually buoyant in the
sea water. Hauling up the water is energy free. Hauling up the
container and the rope is not, however.

With suitable flotation, the container could be made neutral-buoyant,
and so hauling it up could be free also, Finally, if the rope were HD
polyethylene or something else with about 1.0 density, the rope could be
free to hoist too. It would be necessary to attach a weight greater
than the weight of water to be harvested to the container in order to
get it to sink. This weight would then be disconnected/abandoned before
hoisting the recovered water. From an energy standpoint, the investment
would be that necessary to cover the friction in the hauling apparatus,
and the the invested energy content of the abandoned weight (steel:
high, concrete: medium, rock: free).

Venting the container to the surface would be impractical. Evacuate it
instead.

With Wilbur, one must be careful to not discard the wheat with the chaff...

bob
s/v Eolian
Seattle