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."

Comments

Re:Neato

[kfg]

. . .this would be a boon to developing countries, allowing people to get off the often-unrelieable power grids. . .

Small community sized, multifuel turbine based power generating plants are already perfectly available on the market. They used to make them just a few blocks from where I'm sitting right now. There is not and has never been (remember, once upon a time in the electrical age it did not yet exist) a need to be on a national grid just to get electricity. You can make your own if you want.

But the world bank does not finance local community projects in third world countries. They finance massive power dams with American equipment and labor, sucking said country dry of financial resources and reducing independence.

Why yes, it is a conspiracy; and a very effective one.

KFG

Re:Neato

[Hawthorne01]

There's a Congressional study out on just that (no link 'cause it's Saturday and I'm lazy :), but IIRC, I saw it on Defensetech.org).: How can the military use more alternative fules?

The Air Force *guzzles* fuel, the Abrams is a gashog, and the longer the supply line, the more vulnerable the army. Been that way since at least Napeleon.

Now, it's a Congressional study, so don't expect results within a half-century, but it's a start.

Lithium Bromide Absorption Chiller?

[anubi]

I will bet you good odds this is a gas turbine coupled to a Lithium Bromide absorption chiller.

This technology has been used on ships for years.

For those of you old as I am, remember the old Arkla-Servel Gas Refrigerators? They used a very similar absorption technique, with all gravitic pumps. No moving parts except the door. Beautiful design. Some camper refrigerators still use the technology. They use an ammonia-water-hydrogen mix in the absorber.

These things work very similar to those athletic "cold packs" that get cold when they are mixed, except in this case, the active ingredients are looped back to be separated by thermal processes then remixed in an endless cycle. This is an oversimplified explanation, but its roughly how they work. In the far more efficient absorption process, a hygroscopic absorbent is used in lieu of a compressor to effect the pressure differences required for the phase changes responsible for the heat transfers.

In a Lithium-Bromide system, the process runs at a vacuum so the boiling point of water is below room temperature. By doing this, the actual refrigerant is plain old simple WATER!

Very environmentally friendly. In the event of a rupture, you lose vacuum and the system stops working. No explosions or smelly spraying as an ammonia-based system will do.

Why do I know about this? For those of you who have read some of my previous posts, I used to work at the Chevron Pascagoula Oil Refinery. It was the first job I had. We had a absorber unit over there which we used to keep our LNG tanks cold, using nothing more than waste heat from the refinery. I was fascinated as hell by that box, which looked like nothing more than two large pipes sitting one atop the other, one was hot, the other cool, while the LNG tanks were cold.

This was in the early 70's, and it was "old technology" then, but fascinating as hell to me. Luckily, when I let the management at Chevron know I found the thing so interesting, they put me in charge of it and I could study it to my heart's content.

And why am I posting here? I am very frustrated.

Over 100 people have just died during this latest heat wave to hit Southern California. I want so bad to start work on building another absorber, much like the one at Chevron, but I want to put the Generator unit at the focal point of a linear parabolic reflector, oriented East-West so it will track the sun without having to move it, and get the Sun to power the whole thing. So the hotter it gets outside, the colder it will get inside. I want to use those brand new "Segmented Electro Magnetic Array" motors they are developing for washing machines to give me fine control over the refrigerant pumps so I can track out variances in insolation and loading so I can keep the fluids balanced in the system. There is a lot of work on programming AVR microcontrollers so the system becomes intelligent enough to make the most cold as the system parameters vary.

In short, I am old, have the stuff on how to do it in me, but don't have money to do it, and don't have the energy any more to commute and make pretty for the workplace. This is something that if I do it, I am going to have to do it on my own house so I don't have to spend all my energies making presentations, looking pretty for the management folks, and useless commuting.

Its frustrating to see how frivolously we - as a society - spend our existing resources. Here we are, burning through our fossil oil - which will never be replaced - at a rate of 85 million barrels per day. Investment bankers, IP lawyers, executives, etc are "earning" more money than I will see in a lifetime, yet my dreams - as an engineer/scientist - will never see the light of day due to my lack of "people skills" which are required by the executive corporate hiring manager... and I have no idea how to get one of those "grants".

And yes, it will probably take several million dollars to make the first one, as I will have t

Re:Lithium Bromide Absorption Chiller?

[njh]

There are plenty of LiBr absorbtion airconditioners out there, you don't really need a tracking dish, those evacuated tube collectors would be quite adequate, able to get to at least 140C even in freezing conditions. They are cheap too - I bought some for about $30au each. And they are mass produced in china.

The real problem is that there is little practical reason to make such a system, as in 99% of the places where people live a simple two-stage indirect evaporative cooler provides a cheaper, simpler and well tested way to keep houses cool. Very little plumbing, no vacuums to maintain, no 'unsightly' solar collectors. They waste some water, but most of the waste water could actually be collected and reused as greywater (the rest is 'turned into cooling energy').

I have partially built a solar absorbtion cooler as you suggest, but after analysing the problem more closely I found that there really isn't any good reason to use that technology for air conditioning. For cooling fridges and freezers in hot, sunny places with unreliable power, there you might have a market. But the rest of us can use simpler technology.

Re:Picture

[Anonymous Coward]

Dr. Lear did work on this project however there were also many graduate students, such as myself, who also worked on it. The main goal right now is to make it smaller with fewer components. Funny how we never get mentioned though.

Iffy numbers...

[evilviper]

[...] with all the cooling devoted to the turbine, it will be 5 percent to 8 percent more efficient than traditional turbines. With some cooling siphoned for other purposes, it was still 3 percent to 5 percent more efficient than the turbines.
Gee, I'm just going to hazard a guess that, in that second senario, they've "siphoned" off 2 percent to 3 percent of that energy.

They're trying to make it sound like you get water and cooling for free with this design. Really, it's just BS marketing. Water/cooling is convenient, since recent wars have been primarily in hot, arid countries.

5-8% improvement in effeciency is a very good thing, but you might as well say "You can siphon off some of that for powering iPods, and 'it was still 3 percent to 5 percent more efficient.'"

Also, the "cooling" aspect of it sounds like this might only be an efficiency improvement in hot areas, during the summer months. It is entirely possible the limited efficiency improvement may be outstripped by the added purchase and maintenance costs.

Re:Dean Kamen's Stirling Generator

[evilviper]

Dean Kamen's stirling generator is more interesting.

No mention of efficiency in that article at all. That's the very reason why stirling engines failed to catch-on against the dangerous steam boilers it was meant to replace.

It produces potable water, unlike the DoD monstrosity,

The water-filtering feature of the Kamen stirling generator is interesting, but electricity = water filtering, so it's not a big deal.

Re:In Kentucky...

[eheldreth]

While mass produced rice cut beers (bud, miller, etc) may be fairly uninteresting there are plenty of great regional beers. There is a beer in P.A. called Yuengling which is incredibly great, they have a black and tan to die for and pretty good porters and lagers to. I will admit I've not tried their ail / verity's, I'm more of a dark beer guy. There are also all kinds of brewpub type micros making for a good drink. You just have to step outside the norm. To be honest though I don't mind Sam Adam's but they seem to still have a microbrewery feel to them. For a slight bit of trivia Yuengling claims to be americas oldest brewery founded in 1829. http://www.yuengling.com

Re:Picture

[Dun Malg]

Eighty pounds? Roofers carry 80 to 100 pound bundles of shingles up ladders all day in all weather conditions the whole year round. There are no shoulder straps.

This (80mm mortar base + 3 mortar rounds) is 80lbs in addition to your normal combat load of 25lb pack, 7.5lb rifle, 4lb helmet, 12lb body armor vest, and 5lbs rifle ammo and miscellaneous gear. This is for several miles over the kind of terrain where you WISH for a ladder, also in all kinds of weather, with nothing to look forward to at the end of the day but a cold MRE and a wet sleeping bag. Seriously, there isn't a tradesman in this country who can legitimately claim to have to work harder than an infantry grunt. You hear plenty of them talking big, but no one who's ever done both says the life of a grunt is easier. My first job out of the Army was hauling 60lb bundles of electrical conduit up ladders in the Las Vegas summer. It's a walk in the park compared to a training exercise at Ft Irwin.