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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."
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, the best would be more of a turbine like arrangement, but then the shit would really hit the fan.