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Water From Wind
ghostcorps recommends a writeup in The Australian by columnist Phillip Adams about a new windmill design that extracts water from air. The article gives few details of how it works, because patent protection is not yet in place, but what is revealed sounds promising. "[Max] Whisson's design has many blades, each as aerodynamic as an aircraft wing, and each employing 'lift' to get the device spinning... They don't face into the wind like a conventional windmill; they're arranged vertically, within an elegant column, and take the wind from any direction... The secret of Max's design is how his windmills, whirring away in the merest hint of a wind, cool the air as it passes by... With three or four of Max's magical machines on hills at our farm we could fill the tanks and troughs, and weather the drought. One small Whisson windmill on the roof of a suburban house could keep your taps flowing. Biggies on office buildings, whoppers on skyscrapers, could give independence from the city's water supply. And plonk a few hundred in marginal outback land — specifically to water tree-lots — and you could start to improve local rainfall."
Anything that creates lift creates a lower pressure, which in turn refrigerates, and eventually induces condensation.
A Mere Matter of Programming to model an aerodynamic shape that maximizes condensation and captures the resulting droplets.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Trees improve local rainfall, because they affect weather (slow it down, for one thing.)
Deforestation has had horrendous effects on global weather. You might have noticed that the Amazon is drying up...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Compare the volume of air that any good-sized unit can draw moisture from (and assuming 100% efficiency which is BS) to the total volume of air passing across the area. That's like saying too many windmills will stop the wind blowing. Stop smoking crack.
Things I would like to know:
Phillip Adams, this guy Max Whisson is your longtime friend. You give no details about how his device works, yet you ask for people to invest money with him. Is this a scam? You say you already have investors, yet you haven't managed to get a patent on this device yet, and so you need to keep the details secret. Why should we think this is anythign but a scam?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
How do we know this? Because anyone with an elementary background in physics knows that drier air absorbs moisture more readily. So when these mills dry out the air, the dried air is intrinsically better suited to absorbing moisture. Given that the ocean covers a proportionately larger area of the globe, a reasonable assumption is that most of the moisture absorbed into the air would come from the ocean.
/.
As for the FUD about salt content increasing, there are two *huge* flaws in that line of reasoning:
1. The ocean is huge. Astronomically huge. And the water is coming from everywhere. If the ocean were to evaporate for the next 5 years without a single drop of water reaching it, via rain, river or whatever, the difference in the salt content would be negligible.
2. What do you think happens to the collected water? Do we shoot it into space? Condensing water doesn't mean it never reenters the ecosystem. By your logic we ought to stop collecting water in lakes when it rains. The water collected on these devices reenters the system the same way water that falls as rain reenters the ecosystem, either by evaporation or by drainage (rivers or sewers).
I swear, Chicken Little's got nothing on
-ShadowRanger
If you live on the edge of a desert (as some Australians do) you need to worry about drought. If you live near the seashore (as the rest of the Australians do) you need to worry about flooding. That's the funny thing about global warming- it affects different climate regions differently. The only constant is it will change *all* climate areas in some way.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I think there is a misconception in the way I have seen many people think of "using" water. We use it but we don't "use it up." There is with small exceptions almost the same amount of water on the planet as there was thousands or ten thousands of years ago. The problem is that in some areas not enough of it is in a form we can use (water vapor, salt water, ice, etc.) This device simply converts it from a form we can't use to one we can.
We then can use it and it flows down the drain/comes off our skin as sweat/is pissed out behind the bushes where it can evaporate and then re-enter the water cycle. I don't see this "drying out" the areas around it.
Here's my theory: this tech is as relevant as the "tree power" concept posted last year. Way too much hype for a device with way too few details from an inventor with no credits to his name generally means there's nothing there of substance.
Prove my speculation wrong, Adams and Whisson. Please, prove me wrong.
I once listened to a Philip Glass record for an hour and a half before I realized it was skipping.
Wow... being a bit anal there. Wind is air in motion... and air has water vapor. And, technically, since the device can only work when the wind is blowing it is pretty much extracting water from wind. Quit being so anal.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Because you slow down the flow and the solids will settle out making for an absolutely awesome episode of Dirty Jobs.
END OF LINE.
IANAEE (I am not an electrical engineer) but if this thing can generate water, AND wind power...wouldn't it be a self-powered fuel cell? The process of separating the hydrogen could be powered by the wind-generated electricity it would seem. I'd love for someone with much more understanding of the physics behind this to tear apart my idea but this thing sounds damned useful. Not sure how small it could be made and still maintain its effectiveness but imagine giving a portable version of this to sailors. If you could create drinking water and electricity from this while floating on the ocean that would be a real life saver.
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For climate change, one of these things wouldn't do much, but hundreds or thousands spread all over a desert? You could reclaim a lot of desert over time by keeping six or seven tree's roots wet repeated several hundred times. The big problem with desert reclamation is restoring stable green vegetation in an area. Stable green vegetation needs a steady water supply. This could be that supply. The small size isn't a bad thing. It means that you can pick it up and put it down anywhere, you don't need to worry about power, you don't need to worry about a lot of details.
Ross
Problem is, your primary concern with a sewer is not having it back up. Putting in a bunch of obstacles to the flow sort of defeats that purpose.