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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).
This kind of system could be used as a mobile unit in case of hurricanes or wars.
Good thing we have plenty of both to field test the units!
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
This will be perfectly functional in keeping beer cold in your car.
Funnypics
to grow WEED, man!
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
Now all they need is a handle to make it portable. :P
Depending on the cost/unit of these (and let's face it, given previous military "innovations" like the $900 hammer...), this would be a boon to developing countries, allowing people to get off the often-unrelieable power grids, and providing valuable food storage and clean water, too. Are you listening, Mr Gates? Here's where your billions might earn you a little bit of karma.
Heck, *I'd* like one. Be darn nice for a cottage retreat.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
So my next car will be more efficient, produce drinkable water ( never have to refill the windhield wiper reservoir again ), and have a built-in fridge?
This solutions sounds pretty obvious, so it is partly brilliant. The hurray press release thoug appears to be a bit myopic. In case some disaster destroyed my town i'd be more concerned at staying warm than about my meat going off. :)
But I think this unit could supply heating too, after all te rest product after all conversions have been done is carbon dioxide and hot air/heat. Just combine the radiators from the absorbtive cooling with the inlett fan of a inflatable sports hall and there you have your warm shelter. (if you don't like the refugees you could use the exaust from the generator too to put everybody to sleep
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
But what about Powerator?
*shakes fist*
"If you're in a forward base in Iraq, it costs you the same per gallon of water as it does per gallon of fuel," said William Lear, a UF associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. "It would be better to just have to send fuel out there, especially if you could get refrigeration and water out of it - which is what our system achieves."
And that's exactly what this unit does. It consumes ridiculous amounts of fuel to cool off the milkshakes and hamburgers for the troops that are there to 'obtain' more of it. This is brilliant! And it'll make sure that fuel will remain cheaper than water (at least until Peak Oil). And the efficiency - the unit manages to condense one gallon of "unpotable" water for every gallon of fuel.
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.
It's basically an oridinary gas-turbine with some clevel thermodynamic engineering of the airflow to gain compression that will give "5 to 8 percent more efficiency than a traditional turbine". That's as far as the 'environmentally friendlyness' goes. And any gas-turbine can be made to use "biomass-produced fuels or hydrogen" which doesn't necessarely have anything to do with 'environmental friendlyness'.
And finally they dare to suggest that these could be used in a hurricane disaster! Like for example refrigerate the bodies of the african americans and the poor? Stop exploiting the suffering of those left to die in New Orleans. The federal government didn't respond to Katrina and is are not interested in helping the people. It was basically a huge land grab for the rich, just like Iraq is...
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Fire, Water, Burn?
Interesting. The full article from the University of Florida only mentions a $175,000 grant from the DOE. It seems the Army picked up a huge chunk of the tab with the $750,000 grant.
Hmmmmm....
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.
Oh, and one more thing:
If you had bothered to RTFA, you might have read this part:
So how do you like that, Mr. Smarty-Pants-College-Professor-Communist-Treehugg
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
So you install a intercooler on an engine to improve efficiency, and suggest seperately that you drink the water that comes out of the tailpipe.
:A diesel engine is 200% as efficient as a gas turbine.
Avoid specifics as much as possible, and wrap it up on in miltary and engineering terms, and call it technology news.
Also: Frome the article "A few percentage points (improved efficiency) might not seem like much, but it makes a big difference when fuel is scarce or expensive"
So get a diesel engine instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine
"Fix it"
Powerade? UF invented Gatorade, although I guess that one's taken too...
Now there's an irony for you. So that when they destroy the planet, at least it's being done in a way that won't cause unnecessary harm.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
As long as I'm paying the US military to destroy civilization as we know it, I'm glad that some of the investment is producing gear I can use to survive when their job is done.
--
make install -not war
When I first looked at the title I thought it was about Watercooled machines (or xboxes)
Didn't he just say that 1% of military spending and operations are evil? I think you read the post backwards.
Er... right. See, that's just the sort of evil we're dealing with here! It boggles the mind. Woops!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Mmmm why oh why when i read your comment
do i get the sudden urge to slurp on my bong
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...
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
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
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.
Maybe because the majority of the people killed being sent into space agreed knowing full well what would happen. Most casualties in war are civilians.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
"Here, you carry this."
"It weighs EIGHTY POUNDS!"
"But it has shoulder straps, see?"
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
[...] 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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Funny how we never get mentioned though.
What did you expect? You're a slav^H^H^H grad student.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
Running an absorption chiller off a turbine "waste" heat is much more efficient than running a reciprocating or centrifugal chiller. This isn't that novel, aside possibly from the fact that it is a single unit. Pre-cooling coils are fairly common on co-gen turbines, and are often run off an absorption "pony" chiller.
The military is in dire need of a good APU source; they try everything. The existing turbines they use are a mess, so anything better is an improvement. This is why they have poured so much money into fuel cells over the past half-century.
Personally, I'm more impressed by Active Power's new UPS that runs off compressed air and also provides cooling.
Wuss. When I was in the army we had to hump 150 pound rucks in the snow, uphill, both ways and we were lucky to get shoulder straps!
It's about time Congress did something useful.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Yeah, my bad, forgot I was posting on /. ;).
Man, we could have used something like this two weeks ago when that big storm came through and messed up the power AND water systems AND spoiled all the food in my house.
Alternatively, this could also be used to fend off any energy monsters and black holes in our city. (Since when did we have a particle accellerator?)
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
A diesel engine roaring during war might not be a good idea!!
hilarious
Intercoolers have been used for well over 50 years on all kinds of engines.
And every jet plane has some "air packs", which take some hot compressed bleeed air from the engines and thru intercooling and expansion provide heat and cooling for the cabin. Again been done for 50+ years.
And condensing water out of the exhaust is EXTREMELY inefficient--You've got really hot gases, 1000 degrees Celcius and up, which you have to cool down to below 100C, and whose humidity is at best 8%. You'd be many times more efficient taking ambient air, if the ambient humidity is about 3% or so.
And there's darn little need for very small quantities of non-potable water gatrhered at very high cost.
From my POV this might have another, more important use: undeveloped regions of the world. Some friends of mine working for the UNHCR would greatly appreciate such a device. That and the 100$ laptop would be enough to connect a small village to the internet. Of course, having cheap power might have some more benefits ;)
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
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. Most crews have a designated person to do this job who does nothing else. Shoulder straps would be a blessing for shingle-boy. So would rough, rocky or muddy, non-ladder terrain, and a gun (with which to shoot the boss and therefore stop carrying bundles up ladders).
Some modern crews have a mechanical lift to do the hardest part, the vertical portion, for them.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
But, as we all know, we don't do all that much science here in the USA anymore. If anyone does this, my hope is Haier in China will do it, as that several million dollars should be used here in the USA to buy another executive jet or yacht so the guy at the top whose time is worth several million dollars a year isn't wasted in line at an airport or is inadequately entertained.
What a stupid comment. US companies do a lot more research than Haier does.
Chinese companies do a good job of producing existing technologies more cheaply. But don't look to Haier for new technologies. The key to making commodity products cheaply is not to not spend a lot of money on R&D. Instead they work on minimizing expenditures.
And if you think the execs at Haier don't make a lot of money and live well on it, you're not paying attention to the nouveau riche in coastal China. They're not afraid to spend money on themselves.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I didn't actually believe that grunts had it easier. It was just the implication that an 80 pound load was an insurmountably big problem even with shoulder straps. Thanks for posting appropriate detail.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.