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Power, Water and Refrigeration in One Box
Roland Piquepaille writes "Engineers at the University of Florida have developed and built a system that can provide power, water and refrigeration from a single unit. This project, funded by the U.S. Army, will lead to units small enough to fit inside a military jet or a large truck. The prototype system is already more efficient than conventional turbines. And it is also environmentally friendly because it can use traditional fossil fuels as well as biomass-produced fuels or hydrogen and releases only small amounts of pollutants. This kind of system could be used as a mobile unit in case of hurricanes or wars. But it might also be connected to the normal power grid in fixed locations."
Here is a link to a picture of the device and a professor who I assume worked on it (or at least took credit for it).
I think the idea here is medical supplies that need to be refrigerated -- blood, perishible medication, etc. There is more to keep cool in a rescue operation than just food. Besides, the cooling mechanism was included to increase the effeciency of the turbines. The ability to have refridgeration or to generate water were nice bonuses since the original idea was to save fuel when generating energy.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Trademark only applies to competing products. If i created a drink and called it Powerade that would be bad as it woudl confuse customers. a mobile unit that provides these things wont exactly be competing with an energy drink.
Dean Kamen's stirling generator is more interesting. It produces potable water, unlike the DoD monstrosity, and can also run on any fuel. Several of them could fit in a pickup truck, which strikes me as an advantage in disaster relief situations. The air-conditioning feature of the DoD turbines is interesting, but electricity = A/C, so it's not a big deal.
And it is also environmentally friendly because it can use traditional fossil fuels as well as biomass-produced fuels or hydrogen and releases only small amounts of pollutants.
People say that that's "friendly," but, really, it's friendlier. You have to get the hydrogen, which generally means investing energy into its production, so, hydrogen is only as friendly as the means of production. Biomass is probably biodiesel in this case, which also releases pollutants, but makes less CO2 when burned.
Even so, it sounds like a rather nice unit, and, yes, it is friendlier.
Been that way since at least Napeleon.
Perhaps the most perspicacious quartermaster until Sherman. His troops used to make black powder "on the go," as it were, by extracting nitrates from their own shit.
There is a legend that ole Nappy rejected Cugnot's steam tractor because he was frightened when it crashed into a stone wall. The stone wall story is fact, but the scaring Napoleon part of it is aprocryphal.
My guess is that Napoleon the quartermaster realized the amount of fuel that would go into this thing, the amount of labor that would be required to collect and transport the fuel, the scarcity of fuel that would be created and told the troops to go hitch up the grass foraging horses.
KFG
Why isn't DoD funding going to bio diesel research? I mean, other than the obvious reason that the government as a whole is in the pockets of the oil industry. Seems to me that less dependence on foreign oil is a major strategic advantage for the military (and by extension, the U.S.).
Note from TFA, "Lear said further research is required to make the plant more compact and otherwise enhance its performance. That's one of the goals of the Army's Small Business Innovation Research Grant to the Gainesville company, Triad Research."
The SBIR program really promotes innovation. While I can't find the original solicitation for this one, the SBIR program really allows companies to kind of go their own way to do something new and different. I would imagine that the original solicit didn't mention anything at all about biodiesel, but the company leading the charge included it as a way to set themselves apart. There's lots of stuff that comes out of the SBIR program that makes you go, "wow, that's fucking cool!" And it's something that a poster above you failed to realize when he took a potshot at Bill Gates. Big companies don't think about these kinds of things. Rooms of engineers and MBAs don't think of really novel solutions to problems.
But it's not just DoD that funds SBIR -- other federal departments also put out solicitations.
One very practical day-to-day use of such a device would be at sea, both for larger yachts and possibly smaller military vessels (especially on detached duty). Having lived on a private boat for several years (too small for this, but I know a few that weren't) I can tell you that the very things listed here - power, refridgeration, and water - are exactly what boats need. The kind of engineering they did with the airflow could also be used to improve efficiency using seawater, and refridgeration is a huge requirement. The energy to cool our tiny, well-insulated fridge is a huge portion of our energy budget, and our desalinator is another. Water production would go up very dramatically if it wasn't forced to collect it out of the air (even this would be more effective in hot, humid areas, such as tropical oceans).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...