Artificial Tornadoes

An anonymous reader writes "This inventor is working on a method of creating artificial tornadoes to generate electricity which he calls the "Atmospheric Vortex Engine". He is claiming that it is possible to create a man-made tornado and use wind turbines to capture the energy from the tornado. On the website there is some video footage of some experimental tornadoes that were generated in a prototype vortex tower in Utah. There seem to be several recent media references to his work including The Economist and The Guardian. Sounds like an interesting idea for a renewable energy source, but what happens if one of these tornadoes gets away?"

Comments

Conservation of Energy

[quanticle]

Where is the energy for these tornadoes coming from? To be more specific, how much energy is needed to start up one of these things?

Re:Conservation of Energy

[TeacherOfHeroes]

At the risk of getting a "you must be new here" comment, RTFA

"Heating the air within the wall using a temporary heat source such as steam starts the vortex. The heat to sustain the vortex once established is provided in cooling tower bays located outside of the cylindrical wall and upstream of the deflectors. The continuous heat source for the peripheral heat exchanger can be waste industrial heat or warm seawater. "

It looks like they're trying to recycle energy that has bled off as heat and move it back into a usable form.

Re:Conservation of Energy

[TubeSteak]

Why are they limited to waste heat from coal or gas burning plants?

You realize how limited your imagination is? A huge variety of industries generate massive quantities of waste heat. Shit, you could tap geothermal energy from deep mine shafts using this technology.

While ultimately, a large portion of the power which is being used to generate the waste heat comes from coal/oil, the idea is to get more efficient usage from whatever source it is you use. Think about it... even a 1% gain in efficiency (if cost effective) would save countless money.

As for it not being an alternative, consider a situation in which an industrial plant sets up one of these and sells power to other companies in its industrial park. For everyone else involved, this qualifies as an alternative energy source and no extra fossil fuels are burned.

Re:Conservation of Energy

[mesocyclone]

The more serious problem is how to get much energy out of it.

First, a couple of concepts - CAPE and "cap."

CAPE, Convective Available Potential Energy, is the amount of energy a parcel of atmosphere would release if lifted from a level near the ground to the tropopause. CAPE is a strong function of dew point and the temperature profile and moisture profile of the atmosphere (the dry and wet lines on a SKEW-T/LOG-P chart).

"cap" - this is a thermal inversion (or at least a reversed slope temperature profile area) in the middle atmosphere which serves to trap rising air before it can release enough energy (through condensation) to produce a thunderstorm. A "capped" atmosphere is often clear or contains small convective towers ("turkey towers") which are unable to maintain convection.

A parcel of air which cannot penetrate the cap will release little energy - only the kinetic energy it gains as it rises below the cap, and perhaps some condensation energy if it forms a cloud). A parcel that can pierce the cap will reach a region where the energy release is dramatically higher, and will typically accelerate up to near the tropopause, releasing energy the whole type.

  The conditions required for this device to produce much energy - high CAPE (Convective Available Potential Energy) - are not that common or reliable. Furthermore, high CAPE is often tied to enough wind to make the stability of the vortex very questionable. When it isn't (such as the US midwest during the summer "capped" time), the total time that adequate CAPE is present isn't that great, and the vortex would have to be tall enough to reach the convective cap (and contain enough lift to break through that cap) before it started to generate significant power.

Atmospheric dynamics can also produce significant lift, but those conditions almost always have wind associated with them.

Tornados are usually short vortices - perhaps a few hundred to a couple thousand meters high - coupled to larger, more stable, and much lower speed vortices (mesocyclones) that are quite a bit deeper. Even so, tornados are notoriously unstable and most last no more than a few minutes (in 11 years of serious, science based tornado chasing, I have seen *one* that lasted more than 15 minutes and it was a mile in diameter and weak - F1). (I won't bother to discuss landspouts or waterspouts here).

In contrast, this man-made vortex will have to reach high enough into the atmosphere to penetrate the cap, which is much harder to achieve (read: takes more energy) and hard to maintain. A tornado doesn't have this problem, as it has a very large area of rising air (hundreds to thousands of square kilometers) which can pierce the cap, and once it is pierced in just one spot, a very large thunderstorm (normally a supercell) then develops and puts a geographically large hole in the cap, and generates lots of energy, a tiny bit of which actually goes into the tornado. Most supercells, in spite of their high energy release and their rotation do not produce tornados, to the frustration of weather forecasters and storm chasers.

One could perhaps put one of these vortex-based power systems in an area prone to dust devils, which use a different mechanism to generate lift - solar heating in the presence of a super-adiabatic lapse rate. But dust devils are much weaker, because they do not rely on the energy released by condensing moisture, and use energy from a much smaller layer of atmosphere.

Ultimately, this scheme seems to be an over-complex, inefficient and unreliable solar power machine. Other forms of harvesting solar power are probably much better in those areas, and yet only windmills seem to be close to cost efficient.

As a harvester of excess industrial heat... forget it. There are MUCH simpler and more efficient ways of doing that, and they are already in use in cogeneration facilities.

Natural disasters on demand!

[martinultima]

Maybe we should sell this to FEMA and put them in charge of creating all natural disasters in the United States. (You know, they could change their name to the Federal Emergency Making Agency...) That way we'd have hurricanes that could destroy the world, but it would take six to eight weeks before anything actually happened, giving us plenty of time to actually prepare for the disaster when it finally did arrive.

Re:Natural disasters on demand!

[SilverspurG]

it would be a major violation of Federal laws, including The Constitution

Funny how that pesky Constitution gets in the way when we want to help victims of a massive disaster but it's never much of a problem when we want to suck the money out of their wallets from behind closed doors.

Great for Electricity but...

[PlayfullyClever]

Wind, Hydro, Nuclear... great for electricity but does nothing about Gas and Oil.

Until electric cars become efficient enough to run all day on a single charge with half a day of stored energy still available, petrol is the energy source we need to replace.

I'm betting on Biodiesel. It's still more expensive to refine than crude oil but that gap is closing fast. With current subsidies you can actually buy biodiesel for cheaper than Gasoline...

Re:Great for Electricity but...

[maswan]

And every time someone comes up with the idea of electric cars, I usually see here the argument that there is no point, because "electricty is made by burning oil anyway"...

The fact that fossil fuels are being burnt to generate electricity should give you a hint that better ways to generate electricity is really needed.

Well, that or people getting happy about having a nuclear power plant in their back yard.

Re:Great for Electricity but...

[FLEB]

Well, that or people getting happy about having a nuclear power plant in their back yard.

If better safety controls and protocols were applied, I would be. Maybe I just don't know enough about it, but I think a lot of the problem with nuclear power is the same sort of mistaken impression as flying-vs-driving, or microwaves-vs-stovetop. With nuclear, the damage in the case of a failure can be much more catastrophic, and the risk factors are strange and scary, but the net ecological damage versus something like coal or fossil fuels is actually less, provided nothing goes Chernobyl or TMI. Of course there is the risk of a Chernobyl or TMI, but if people could actually work on the problem, solutions could be found. Me? I'd rather have nuclear now than wind, water, or solar that's always just over the horizon.

Re:Great for Electricity but...

[mesocyclone]

TMI did almost zero environmental damage. The only real damage was to the stockholders and ratepayers, because a very expensive plant had to be shut down.

Chernobyl likewise did very little environmental damage, in spite of its release of a huge amount of radiation. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl is full of healthy wildlife (and not 6 foot tall mice or anything), and in spite of all the hype, the total number of deaths attributable to Chernobyl is under 50, including the firefighters (the number of excess cases of childhood thyroid cancer is over 1000, but that disease is very rarely fatal). However, I wouldn't want a Chernobyl style power plant in my backyard, especially run by a soviet style bureacracy (or for that matter, the typical power plant bureaucracy, although I guess they have gotten better at running reactors in the US after a few widely publicized mistakes).

Since TMI, even though the US stopped building new reactors at that time (due to the ridiculous hype from the main stream media and envirowackos), the amount of nuclear electricity produced in the US has grown significantly.

At the same time, many other countries produce vast amounts of electricity from nukes (I think it is around 70% in France, but I'm too lazy to Google it).

Furthermore, "inherently safe" reactor designs exist (in reality, NOTHING is completely safe), and the biggest danger of nuclear reactors is action by terrorists (and we could, if we were serious about it, mitigate that danger dramatically).

Nukes aren't the solution to the entire energy "problem" (but they work a lot better than Kyoto, a total non-solution to the speculative anthropogenic global warming hypothesis). If one could make good enough batteries (and people have been trying very hard for 100 years), they could supplant hydrocarbons through the use of electric cars (at a significant energy loss), but today the battery of an electric car is still nowhere close to adequate for most needs.

Re:Great for Electricity but...

[mesocyclone]

Actually, you must get your information only from the mainstream media, without looking at little things like numbers and scientific papers.

Yes, as I said, there were a lot of cases of childhood thyroid cancer, the ONLY human effects that have been measured, and that (last time I checked) had caused exactly one death.

The 1000 square miles (or whatever the exclusion zone size is) is, if you care to check, so nice a place that it has been suggested as a wildlife park. Yes, it has more than normal background radiation (as do a number of places in the world where man had nothing to do with it), but there is no evidence that it is dangerous - only an unproven theory.

Much of the fear that people have about radioactivity is based on the linear dose no threshold theory - one which is the consensus for safety reasons, but is really a "precautionary principle" sort of idea. The evidence for it is basically non-existent - it is derived from extreme extrapolation. Humans have poor intuition about toxicology (and radiation behaves as a toxin), finding it difficult to deal with the many orders of magnitude involved. Hence, people are terrified of tiny levels of radiation while large numbers of people from Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still alive 60 years after being dosed with hundreds of REM (far more than you would get if you lived right next to Chernobyl). The linear dose hypothesis leads to the dramatic high estimates of radiation deaths - estimates which have not been proven out.

Prior to 9-11 (you wouldn't want to do it today) I took a small digital geiger counter up on an airliner. At 10,000 feet MSL it was singing - off scale in its counts-per-minute mode. Scary, eh? Not to me.

When there are popular phobias, especially those that match someones' agenda (and you did mention agendas, didn't you - no, I'm not a libertarian), looking at the underlying evidence can be an edifying experience. You might want to try it sometime.

Re:Great for Electricity but...

[Cyberax]

The main reason Chernobyl still has such a big exclusion area is that nobody wants to live there. There are still some radiation "hot spots" but generaly exclusion area is safe enough to live. There are estimates that it will be fully habitable in 50 years (except for some areas near the power plant).

Besides, there are some "bureaucratic" reasons: regions near the exclusion zone receive large government subsidies. So usually radiation checks are "magically" performed in the most "hottest" places.

Radionucleotide levels are increased but there are some places (Três Corações for example) on Earth where _natural_ radiation is much stronger.

PS: I live in Russia and have relatives in Ukraine in area very close to the exclusion zone.

Cereal Box?

[Blakey Rat]

Yeah, I got one of these out of a Frosted Flakes box when I was a kid. It's a little plastic widget and you screw it in-between two 2-liter soda bottles, and when you flip them over, instant tornado! I don't know how you get power from it...

Re:Ummm, so about that second law of thermodynamic

[KDR_11k]

Yeah, you know, like how burning coal never returns more energy than you used to ignite it...

Vortexes

[azav]

What is most interesting is that vortexes are not really understood in common culture and just how inportant thy are in terms of power to many daily facts of life.

DaVinci studied cadavers and found out that it is the vortexes in blood flow through the years that close the heart valves as blood flows through.

Bumblebees can fly due to the uplifting forces of vortexes on their wind edges.

A pulverizer driven by vortex power was mentioned here on /. many years ago that was able to take mostly anything 'cept fat and turn it into dust.

One of the common effects in nature that has great potential and is right before our eyes is being ignored by most - possibly because they are poorly understood.

This article is an example of someone paying attention to the vortex and finding out what could be done with it for mankind.

Sure sounds like something REALLY interesting to learn about.

and then...
PROFIT!

Re:Vortexes

[Council]

As a physics major, this is one of my favorite passages in any book:

There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, at least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who going to be responsible for making bridges that won't fall down or airplanes that won't suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don't want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits ground. That's all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.

-- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

This begs for the...

[KDR_11k]

... obligatory demanding of ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

Seriously, what evil overlord would miss such an opportunity?

"What happens if..."

[heatdeath]

"What happens if one of these tornados gets away?"

This question is about as ignorant as "what happens if a nuclear reactor blows up?" A vortex created and sustained by the energy from the tower wouldn't be able to escape - if it did, it would have no energy source to sustain itself.

Re:"What happens if..."

[modecx]

Oh sure, you can say that all naively--until the tornados from various towers, fed up with their oppression, form a union and combine into one giant-ass tornado that's hell-bent on giving you the Judy Garland treatment!

Fear the artificial vortices!

Similar to Australia 1km tower.

[Bananatree3]

This sounds somewhat similar to the 1km high Solar Tower in Australia Both use convection to power turbines. This one though uses man-made vorteces while the Austrailian Solar Tower uses hot rising air.

If they escape...

[wisdom_brewing]

Simple, you film a new reality show about the runaways, the sequels write themselves...

ask hollywood

[Main Gauche]

"what happens if one of these tornadoes gets away?"

I don't know, but I'm sure Jerry Bruckheimer will tell us, one of these years.

Re:Ummm, so about that second law of thermodynamic

[0xC0FFEE]

You're missing the idea. The idea is that a tornado is a natural mechanism for evacuating large quantities of energy contained in warm water. Since warm water contains a lot of energy, it could be possible to invest just a little more energy to provoke a tornado and harness the wind power. Also, warm water is heated up by the sun and not by other non-renouvelable energies. It might actually be more efficient than heating water to boiling point (as is done in nuclear/thermal plants) since water is such a good heat capacitor that the difference between warming a little and boiling is huge.

So, hopefully the laws of the universe are respected. But what you missed is the 2nd law of business: A good deal is when you reap the benefits of other's investments.

It is already a weapon.

[Talinom]

I mean really people. The proof is right here!!!

If a weatherman from Pocatello, ID can figure it out surely you can too! Now we know the technology exists to have a tornado take out anyone, anywhere at anytime.

Theory and reality, explanation.

[Alsee]

Ok, I Read TFA.

The theory behiond it was actually better than I expected. He's not trying to violate the second law of thermodynamics or anything. He's trying to use the tornado as dynamic heat chimney (an imaginary pipe carrying air up into the high cold atmosphere). Once he gets the tornado going he wants the warm air at the ground to naturally rise inside the chimney, then to harness this natural flow to extract energy.

I'd put the odds of him actually getting the functional vortex established at all at maybe 10%, getting it reasonably stable and self sustaining at maybe 1%, harnessing appreciable power out of it at maybe 0.1%, and harnessing useful cost effectie power at maybe 0.01%.

Of course I'm probably being way too generous and wildly overestimating those figures, chuckle.

In otherwords I would not advise buying stock in this crackpot scheme. It is an interesting concept and interesting physics though.

-

Tornado Hot Poney

[FerretFrottage]

Just create a mobile home park within about a mile and you'll know exactly where a runaway tornado will go. Set up a net there, catch it and return it to its turbine cage. Maybe give the tornade a three strikes rule and after its third runaway, just turn it back to slow moving air, or threaten to send it to the jet stream in Canada because we know how much tornados hate the cold.

Energy source for vortex

[the_povinator]

The vortex can be sustained by either a specific heat source, like seawater or an area covered by greenhouses [as in the Australian solar tower/solar chimney], or if the atmosphere is sufficiently humid it can be sustained by the inherent instability of the atmosphere. However this instability is not generally always present. This instability is called the CAPE (convective atmospheric potential energy). It is the energy source that feeds thunderstorms. The reason the atmosphere can store energy is that the bottom layer of the atmosphere tends to be heated by the sun. If the air is damp but not at 100% humidity you can get a situation where the air column is stable, but as soon as it is perturbed enough for some of the air to start releasing moisture (when it reaches 100% humidity) the situtation becomes unstable. This is because the air that rises high enough to release moisture, starts getting warmed up when the moisture precipitates and then rises even higher. Theoretically, this could be exploited by a vortex. The vortex is performing the same function as a very tall tower, but hopefully more cheaply. It's like a siphon that siphons gasoline out of your tank. The vortex has lower pressure at the center, much like a siphon. However, it is far from clear whether this idea could be made practical. There are issues like how stable the vortex would be in wind, etc.

Re:That idea just blows me away

[madaxe42]

Nah, this sucks. What kind of total airhead comes up with this kind of thing? I think he's full of hot air. Anyhow, his entire paper is just twisted facts. Wait until the media frenzy blows over, and you'll see that this is just another investment siphon.

Energy from placement of trailer parks..

[DiGG3r]

The proper placement of tin can single and double wides should act as a catalyst for the formation of tornandos.

Pebble-Bed Reactors

[TubeSteak]

I was going to agree with you that pebble-bed reactors are "inherently safe" but I did a little googling and I think more research is in order.

Wikipedia's entry leaves out a lot of information.

This site (called "Three Mile Island Alert") provides 6 numbered points and then goes on to explain in detail how each point is a safety issue.

1. It has no containment building.
   
2. It uses flammable graphite as a moderator.
   
3. It produces more high level nuclear wastes than current nuclear reactor designs.
   
4. It relies heavily on nearly perfect fuel pebbles.
   
5. It relies heavily upon fuel handling as the pebbles are cycled through the reactor.
   
6. There's already been an accident at a pebble bed reactor in Germany due to fuel handling problems.

It's short, direct and informative. I recommend you give it a look. Wired's article on this reactor design mentioned almost no risks :o\