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

Picture

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Wars?

[Servo]

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!

Re:Wars?

[chris_eineke]

Hell, combine the two and call it the War on Hurricanes! :)

In Kentucky...

[crazyjeremy]

This will be perfectly functional in keeping beer cold in your car.

Re:In Kentucky...

[Rix]

And you could reasonably call the water "American beer".

Dude, that's all you need...

[Stephen Tennant]

to grow WEED, man!

Re:Picture

[DivineOmega]

Now all they need is a handle to make it portable. :P

refridgeration?

[nietsch]

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 :)

Re:refridgeration?

[Khomar]

In case some disaster destroyed my town i'd be more concerned at staying warm than about my meat going off.

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.

Roland Piquepaille!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

*shakes fist*

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:Stupidity, Madness and Hype in One Box

[kfg]

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

Re:It's too bad that...

[lcohiomatty86]

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

[Darth Cider]

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.

Re:Dean Kamen's Stirling Generator

[popsicle67]

Just imagine how much farther allong he would be in this project if he had abandoned the exercise in mental masturbation we call the segway. Dean really screwed the pooch on that one, let's hope this turns out better.

Friendly(er)

[NitsujTPU]

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.

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.

What is is about the "news" from Roland Piquepaill

[viking2000]

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.

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 :A diesel engine is 200% as efficient as a gas turbine.

Mad Max

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Title

[bruno.fatia]

When I first looked at the title I thought it was about Watercooled machines (or xboxes)

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?

[eric2hill]

Sounds like a good idea. Seriously. As somewhat of an inventor myself, here's a few starting points...

• Investors don't like plunking down money without a very solid concept of what it is they are paying for.
• Start with a drawing (any flavour of CAD will do) of the design down to the nuts and bolts that hold it together. That will give you a good idea of the raw materials that will be needed to build the contraption.
• Spec the code that will need to be written for your microcontrollers. Don't write the code. Just write the high level logic that would be used to write the code. This will be good for estimates on time to flesh out the code. You need good coding estimates to plan when you can deliver the first prototype.
• Read one of the most mocked quotes of Donald Rumsfeld a few times. You are going to have to write down the things that do do not know. Things that might go wrong, things that you'll have to "figure out", things that you will need help with, etc. You (obviously) cannot write down the things you do not know, but a little risk management goes a long way towards getting funding. People with money like to know the "known unknowns".
• Profit is a Good Thing(TM). Explain in one paragraph (should be REALLY easy considering what you're talking about) how this investment will make money. Yes, it should be shared with everyone. But your initial investor will need to make his money back over a limited period of time. Selling a few of these to make your investor some money will be a necessity.
• Outside help is always good. Someone else to talk over the guts of the thing. You can't do everything by yourself, and you might get to spend a few nights with your family instead of slaving away at a life-long project... :) Fire me an email if you'd like.

Good luck.

Re:Neato

[c6gunner]

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.

Re:Stupidity, Madness and Hype in One Box

[Bush Pig]

In other news, Congress repeals the Laws of Thermodynamics ...

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.