Slashdot Mirror
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."
Things I would like to know:
1. Does this design perform better than other windmill designs (for generation).
2. What will this do to the atmospheric conditions?
3. If everyone has one....will it no longer rain?
Layne
Wow. Reminds me of the Windtraps from Frank Herbert's Dune.
Next thing you know, we'll be harvesting spice.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Excellent, so now anyone living near, but not in a city can enjoy a barren landscape when the rain no longer falls.
Alright, sarcasm aside, surely there are bound to be some less-than-good effects on the surrounding enviroment if large amounts of water are 'sucked' out of the atmosphere prematurely?
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
We can now turn the Australian Outback into Tattooine. We now have vaporators!
Your vaporizers are no longer vaporware.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
[Max] Whisson's design has many blades, each as aerodynamic as an aircraft wing,
Yeah, but you know Schick is just going to add one more blade and totally steal his marketshare.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
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 enough of them and the humidity of the air will drop, reducing all of these miracle machines to a trickle. Probably not good for the local plant and wildlife, too. Rain is important.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
What I really need is a droid that understands its language.
Dear Will, the plums were poisoned. -- Cheese Club
So, condensing water from the air to water trees, from which some of the water will transpire back to the atmosphere, might improve local rainfall? Is that like the "lose money on every sale, but we make it up in volume" line? :)
No, it's more that this windmill does what trees in a rainforest are already doing. Israel noticed this some time ago, and spent most of the 1960s and 1970s on something similar, though theirs was based on water pumped out of salinated lakes and the Medditeranian, and placed in desalination tanks. The fresh water was used for tree farms, that created more rainfall by cooling the air.
Therefore, the windmill in this situation is just a placeholder for what the trees will do anyway once they're mature enough.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.'"
the article states that with these windmills, water will be replenished into the air from the oceans. how do we know this? how was this proven?
and if the water content of oceans diminishes, the salt content increases proportionately. that would threaten to bring dramatic change to the fragile balance of the environment for marine life.
when man plays with mother nature, we almost inevitably come out on the losing end.
* drain the swamps in new orleans, then lose 60% of the land's ability to absorb water.
* introduce pest-killing amphibians to the everglades, then they procreate without preditors and wipe out existing species.
* water the deserts of nevada to make lush golf courses, then people in colorado go thirsty and firemen can't put out historically large forest fires covering hundreds of thousands of acres.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Forgive me for being unaware of this impending catatrophe, but is there really an urgent issue? Is this mainly happening in Australia? I thought floods were going to be the next big problem, due to global warming.
What should I be bracing myself for? Floods or droughts? I need to know what I should panic about. Thanks.
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.
If you put the condensors where moist air usually flows out to sea or over a lake it will just suck up moisture from the body of water, resulting in no reduced rainfall over land. Places with high humidity might see no difference in rainfall, since it'd be hard to extract water faster than water gets added naturally.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Sounds like vaporware to me... just a lot of hot air...
Around here, we have a novel system for collecting moisture from the air in the dead of winter.
We have a widespread system of asphalt-covered concrete which collect the copious moisture, extracted from the nearby lake due to atmospheric pressure differentials, in the form of a thick residue. We then dissolve large amounts of highly soluble compounds into this residue to prevent it from freezing solid, and then the mixture is processed by repeatedly compressing it under several hundred pounds of weight.
We use the resulting product to support both the automobile and landscaping industries, by using it to rust out car underbodies and kill treelawn grass.
For some reason, the technology described just reminds me of a venturi nozzle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venturi
No pun intended?
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.
Understand that moisture content in the air is established by temperature and pressure. There is water in Australia, its just not dropping out of the sky. If you extract moisture from the air, then when that air is in the presence of liquid water it will induce some evaporation. That being said, this system could work either by using the reduced pressure from the airfoil surface or more likely by actually creating some compression and then having a decompression path for the air that goes through a condenser. All that being said, I was in Australia a couple of months ago and speaking as someone from California I'd say that if they put flow restrictors on their faucets it would do them a world of good. Sure taking a shower in a 6gpm shower is luxurious but really, do you really care about conserving water if you let your water run free like that? Low flow toilets? Nope. Granted I was mostly in the cities (Sydney, Canberra, etc) but still it seemed there wasn't a lot of "internalizing" what it means to live in a drought. --C
1920s? Israel didn't exist from 70 AD to 1948....Do you mean the British started this in the post-Ottoman period?
Even more incidentally, one reason there were so few trees in the first place is that the Ottomans imposed a tax on having a tree on one's property at some point.
Monarchies have the silliest taxes....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
From what I see there will be many side effects of such a system. First, as many have mentioned, it will pull moisture out of the air. This means that there will be less moisture downwind and with enough of these windmills, a dry region. That said, though, taking moisture out of the air increase the amount of room in the air for more moisture and thereby would allow evaporation downwind to be more efficient. On the other hand, if there is no rain replenishing the water, it would eventually all dry out. Second, since it has a cooling effect, this also means the air temperature would drop downwind. In fact, with enough of them, you may cause a significant drop in temperature. Not only is it dry at that point, but its also cold. Since colder air cannot hold moisture as well as warmer air, this cancels out any increased efficiency in evaporation. Third, if you drop the temperature enough, you might hit your dewpoint. You also might not considering you are removing moisture from the air and thereby lowering the dewpoint. Lets say for now you do hit your dewpoint because the removal of moisture isn't as effective as the decrease in temperature. Anyone who knows anything about weather knows if the temperature reaches the dewpoint, it start to rain. This means there is more moisture in the air than the air can hold. Now its raining removing even more of the moisture from the air, though putting it on our dry cold region we were talking about. At that point, its just a cold region though dropping water out of the air may cause a region further away to now become our dry cold region. Last, as people have also noted, there will be a low pressure area in our cold region. Storms tend to develop between high and low pressure regions under some circumstances and at the very least, high winds. If our cold region isn't a stormy cold region and that point, its a windy cold region. But then again, the air of the high pressure area will probably be warmer than our windy cold region which then makes it warmer. So now we just have a windy region. If the windmills slow down the air at all, then everything may just equal out in the end. I think it would take a meteorologist of some experience and perhaps someone of the more physical science persuasion to work out all the effects and if it will have any overall effect.
I hope the parent comment was a joke, but if not, please take a look at this site:
m l
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/waterdistribution.ht
The oceans contain 96.5% of the water on the Earth. The soil moisture, which is what we would like to increase, contains 0.001% of the water. Even if you doubled the soil moisture with this technique, the the oceans would still contain 96.5% of the water. The change is simply too small to register on the same scale. So don't worry about the salt balance of the oceans.
Almost all the moisture taken from the atmosphere would btw end right back in the atmosphere again, as evapotranspiration. But in the process, it would allow plants to grow.
If you have enough room you can use solar distillers to purify the water. The water goes through a bend with a pinhole in the top and VOCs are removed, and everything else is left behind.
If not, you can use a particulate filter, a carbon filter, and then a reverse osmosis filter, but this requires using a pump to develop at least 40 psi, at least in models I've seen (and the one I own.) Then again, you could use another windmill to drive the pump.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Because you slow down the flow and the solids will settle out making for an absolutely awesome episode of Dirty Jobs.
END OF LINE.
There are some ancient dew collectors. Check this one.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Someone, quick, alert microsoft. There is still time to get that patent application in!!!111!
[an error occurred while processing this sig]
A simple PCT patent search reveals more details..... PCT Publication Number WO2007009184 see: http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/fetch.jsp?DISP=25&IDB =0&SORT=1175823-KEY&LANG=ENG&LANGUAGE=ENG&SERVER_T YPE=19&FORM=SEP-0%2FHITNUM%2CB-ENG%2CDP%2CMC%2CPA% 2CABSUM-ENG&IA=AU2006001023&TOTAL=1&C=0&SEARCH_IA= AU2006001023&START=1&QUERY=WO%2F2007%2F009184&DBSE LECT=PCT&TYPE_FIELD=256&RESULT=1&IDOC=1238263&DISP LAY=DOCS
Peter Treloar
There is at least one international patent (WO2006/017888-A1) lodged by Max Whisson on this invention. On a quick look, the turbine drives a refrigeration compressor and the blades are refrigerated. Then there are some collection baffles over a drip tray to extract the water droplets. The examiner appears to have identified some similar patents and one in particular looks to be problematic to some claims. I guess he will try to modify the invention/patent to avoid the prior art and that is why he doesn't want the revised invention published at the moment.
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
Well, the best would be more of a turbine like arrangement, but then the shit would really hit the fan.
"Sit perfectly still at zero Kelvin" - not much of a process. You had better patent it.
XML causes global warming.