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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
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
*shakes fist*
. . .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
Ooh, Ooh, I hate republicans too.
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!
Well, I'm sure it'll be used for this, but its primary function is really going to be for ice packs and drugs and blood, oh my!
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.
Ok, now I'm with you.
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?
On the other hand. . . been nice knowin' ya. I'm outta here.
KFG
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 sorry about calling you K-dog. I'm getting in touch with my inner Food Court Gangsta.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
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"
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
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)
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.
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...
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]
I mean, other than the obvious reason that the government as a whole is in the pockets of the oil industry.
Yeah, ofcourse. That they could make 10 times as much money if they develop a viable alternative to oil is, ofcourse, not an incentive to them. They're only in the "pockets of the oil industry" because....what exactly? The oil company CEO's have the whole government brainwashed? Or maybe they just give the worlds best blow-jobs?
Whoever manages to be the first to bring a viable alternative to the market will be an overnight billionaire. The millitary contrat alone would be enough to quadruple Bush's family fortune. So what possible reason would any politician have to oppose (or refuse to support) research into alternative fuels? I just can't understand how some people can hold such simplistic world views. While there may be quite a few corrupt politicians, it takes a special kind of paranoid to beleive that they've all been bought off, and a special kind of ignorant to beleive that they're not intelligent enough to realize the profits (and political advantages) that could be made by developing alternate fuel sources.
In other news, Congress repeals the Laws of Thermodynamics ...
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Yeah, it's long, but it's worth reading the second page. I take time & care in writing my posts. If you're going to mod it, at least read the whole thing and breath in & out a couple of times before you hit the wrong number. We're prodded to Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs! before posting. Do the posters who carefully craft their posts like magazine articles. n.b. appropriate parties: it would be nice if the preview showed us where a page break is going to appear so we know whether to risk either an incomplete post or modded because people won't go to page two.
I'll throw away a karma point to get this in at the top - and dig for the precise information later -- as in a precise link. I've made allusions once or twice in the previous few months.
Ever hear of SBIR/STTR? (Small BInnovation Research Program) / Small Business Technology Transfer Program) ???
There are plenty of links and lots of portals which front end various aspects -- depending upon the purpose of that site, but here's the SBA (Small Business Administration's) take on it -- sort of a SBIR/STTR for Dummies. If you're looking to go out on your own and don't want to live on hot dogs for lunch and weenie broth for supper for if|until you get some traction, you might want to take a look what's going on.
Without digging any deeper than the SBA's first page and reading that article, do you see enough connections (e.g., specific numbers and wording) to be more than a coincidence? (oh, you own the patent but the gov't can use it royalty-free.
The hot thing these days is to create incubators, particularly at universities, where the right resources can be focused.
Re: Gates? $100M tossed around like a volleyball several times to innoculate a goodly portion of 3rd-world children against some of the scurges people deal with every day which we'd scream about if more than four kids in the same school district, not even school or class, came down with the same thing. He's now leaving what he dropped out of Harvard to do and spend [what will likely be] the rest of his life doing what he stated several years ago: giving away 95% of his accumulated worth.
$900 hammers? to toss out a cliche (trite cliche if you want the overkill people usually write), SBIR/STTR is supposed to be a multi-win situation: the military doesn't have black eyes for outrageous spending on these things; products are put together which have as much a civilian solution as military[1]; those interested in raising funding can do so without large risks; civilians are getting products on the market which might have an entry investment high enough only those who sniff at all of their food before they eat it or rely on Web 2.0 -- no grey areas. Do you know how that type of pricing comes about? Once the contract is established, the money is jostled about in spreadsheets until certain things balance. Every business does it. But when you're looking at billionz 'n billionz of dollars for a project, the detail load is so high they aren't going to be able to hide everything...some things ooze out the cracks.
People talk about $5/aspirin tablets at a hospital. The price is established the same way. An expectation is handed down as to how much revenue the pharmacy must bring in during the next year based upon a handful of factors. Sometimes you don't even have the final prices handed down by the vendor (or they may change them during the year if things don't work out). price + (markup * factor). (price * factor) + markup. (pRiceRange + markup) * factor. (priceRange + PriceRange[Market]) * factor. Sit back and imagine the possibilities. Everything is shifted around until things balance and things don't look too outrageous. Trust me. I don't work at a
"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
It's about time Congress did something useful.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I don't normaly reply to AC's, but for you I'll make an exception.
1) The politicians don't do the selling. Whereases if they funded a government program to develop new fuels, they'd have first access to new technology which could put the oil industry out of business. So they'd go from selling your hypothetical guy 0 gallons of fuel for 0 dollars, to selling him several gallons a day at $1.25 (by your prices). And they'd practicaly have a monopoly for the first few years at the very least.
2) As for the oil companies themselves, they're in a similar situation. SOMEONE is going to invent alternate fuels and alternate fuel vehicles. If an American company doesn't do it, a European or Japanese company will. What makes more sense: be the first and try to put your competition out of business, or sit on your hands and do nothing, praying that nobody will manage it in your lifetime?
It amazes me how people like you and the poster above you can hold such amazingly contradictory views at the same time. On the one hand you beleive the government and the corporations are evil, horrible men, who are motivated only by profits and are capable of suppressing any new research into whatever field they desire. At the same time, you think they'd turn down the possibility of putting their competition out of business and placing their own company ahead of the game, and are stupid enough not to see the opportunity that they're missing. Christ man, as much as I hate stereotypes, if you're going to beleive in them yourself the least you can do is pick one and stick to it.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.