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Mini-Tornadoes For Generating Electricity
cylonlover writes "Tornadoes generally evoke the destructive force of nature at its most awesome. However, what if all that power could be harnessed to produce cheaper and more efficient electricity? This is just what Canadian engineer Louis Michaud proposes to achieve, with an invention dubbed the 'Atmospheric Vortex Engine' (or AVE). It works by introducing warm air into a circular station, whereupon the difference in temperature between this heated air and the atmosphere above creates a vortex – or controlled tornado, which in turn drives multiple wind turbines in order to create electricity. The vortex could be shut down by simply turning off the source of warm air. Michaud's company, AVEtec Energy Corporation, reports that the system produces no carbon emissions, nor requires energy storage to function, and that further to this, the cost of energy generated could potentially be as low as US$0.03 per kilowatt hour."
And where does the power from heating the air come from?
So the generator has no carbon emissions, but without heat it doesn't work.
So where do they get the heat, and how much better is it to use the heat for this instead of any of the dozen other electrical generation methods? /off to RTFA.
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Three cents for a kilowatt hour, and that's *without* externalized costs like oil spills, oil wars, blown up mountains, and polluted air and water. You could even use concentrated solar thermal heat to drive this thing.
Anyone who says renewables aren't ready isn't paying attention.
ok, I assume that the cost of heating that air at bottom is already calculated in. This would mean that this AVE is pulling energy out of atmosphere (thin air, yeah), which means decreasing the air temperature. Because gas stores energy using kinetic energy of its molecules (temperature). This would mean that AVE will produce energy exploiting the global warming effect. Doubly cool solution. Even if I doubt global warming, I was always thinking, that the hotter it is, the more energy we have, the more power to us (skpping the floods of some coastal regions). I wasn't however sure how to exploit this energy. Well, perhaps AVE is the answer...
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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This sounds like an episode of Sliders to me...
This was in Slashdot several years ago. What's the progress since then?
Energy from nothing and chicks for free. That ain't workin'.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
how do I make one because it looks totally cool.
In areas where rainfall from convective thunderstorms is important for agriculture, I wonder if this could create a rain shadow (ie, an area with reduced rainfall downwind).
There could be some real pissed off farmers if it stops raining near the station. OTOH, it'd be nice if you could "fine tune" the convection in an area enough to allow thunderstorms but inhibit tornadoes. We're probably a long way off from that.
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... and with all the Senators, CEOs, VPs, middle managers, and lawyers working together we should be able to actually shift the planet away from the sun quite easily as well.
Wheeeeeeee!
Google "Tornado Turbine" and look for the January 1977 issue of Popular Science. This idea has been around for a long, long time. Back then, the idea was to take advantage of solar heating of the tower to drive the vortex. I've seen similar ideas that were supposed to take advantage of natural pressure / temperature differentials along cliffs and mountains, etc. None have ever been made to work in any practical way.
When someone fails to check the prior art and starts trumpeting about his or her re-invention of the wheel, then you can just about discount the claims from the start. Why should anyone trust the opinion of an engineer who can't even be bothered to do any background research?
Saw this in a magzine a year or two ago. Ever since I've been fantasizing about getting one for my backyard.
It generates electricty and makes baby tornados!! My neighbors will love it.
I assume it's obvious that it's going to be windy around the power station. How windy, and how far away will there still be strong winds?
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Popsci opened up their archives a while ago. http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=FgEAAAAAMBAJ&pg=78&query=1977%20Tornado%20Turbine
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Next we will be ionizing the air and letting it pass between some plates to generate electricity directly. (no moving parts)
Brilliant !
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
~100C temperature waste heat can be converted into electricity, with an efficiency of a few percent in an organic rankine turbine. Presumably, this will be significantly more efficient than a few percent.
However, such waste heat can be used for air conditioning with vapor absorption chillers. A DARPA-E project focuses on using custom materials to increase the efficiency of vapor absorption chillers.
This would be a good way to tap the remaining energy from a low quality(low delta) heat source such as a power plant cooling tower.
love is just extroverted narcissism
If you tap the energy of tornadoes to generate power, it will reduce their remaining energy. Tap enough energy and they might become nearly extinct. If this happens, mobile homes, with no remaining natural predators, will multiply out of control.
Have gnu, will travel.
Here in seattle that is what it costs per kilowatt.
Solar panels kill insects and even birds by fooling them into thinking they're landing on water.
Wind turbines kill birds and bats.
Hydroelectric dams kill fish and flood arable land.
What alternatives do you have in mind?
The company proposing this says the cost could potentially eventually be as low as $0.03 per kilowatt hour. Translation: it costs way more than that.
Meanwhile, the next province over from where the company is based in Sarnia, Ontario... HydroQuebec is charging $0.05 per kilowatt hour, today, for real-world use.
And where does the power from heating the air come from?
Congress! Where else? Studies have shown that multiple tornadoes worth of hot air can at times be generated by even a single congressperson, it's just a matter of finding the right one. Yeah, I lost the link to those studies, but hey, you know it's true.
This remind me of this comic by SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2781#comic
sounds like the syfy channel movie of the week
Why don't we tap all that hot air coming out of Washington? Should be good for a megawatt or two!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
This idea has been around for a couple of decades. In essence it is a black funnel. Solar energy causes an upsurge in the air coloum and the usual twisting occurs as the air rises. The problem is in whether or not the tornado would detach and an independent tornado would wander about.
One possible solution might be to cause the spiral to rotate opposite direction of rotation which should require very little energy input. That way if the tornado does detach nature would tend to make it lose rotation. I don't know if that idea has ever been tested. Th area and height of such devices would not be trivial. Several acres would be desired under the base of the funnel and great height is an asset as well. It translates into a rather large expense. Many of these ideas would be practical if they can produce income in more than one way. For example a fish farm under the base of the funnel might work. Or even covering some of the base of the funnel with solar cells some other modes of power production could make such systems viable. Safety remains the great hurdle.
FWIW, it also has appeared in Physics 101 texts that tornados have DC currents.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=electric+current+inside+a+tornado
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
an old idea from decades ago when all manner of weird and quirky ideas was bandied about from solar panels in orbit many miles square beaming microwave energy back to a receiver on earth (except any living thing in its path would be fried!),
Except that: ...). Intensity of the microwave heating would be about a tenth solar input - and birds in outdoor tests of such systems at realistic power levels mostly ignored them (except on cold nights when they huddled near the transmitting antennas)
- Things wouldn't be fried, microwave-oven style, because microwave oven makers picked a frequency that is strongly absorbed by water (to heat food) while space-solar people picked on that passes through water very well (to not waste power heating clouds, birds, cows,
- This might have been practical even back in the '70s when it was first proposed - except NASA shot it down with high priced lift-to-orbit systems and an analysis with a fundamental error (turbine size) that made a specialized lift system look far too expensive.
- Recent developments (privatization of space launches, improvements in the technology of photovoltaic collectors,power radio, and high-efficiency lasers for ground-based lift systems) have made the cost and price/performance equations better - by orders of magnitude. (See Keith Henson's recent papers on this.)
Which doesn't say squat about whether something similar may apply to the atmospheric vortex hack.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Begs the question: what happens when a plane flies through? Does it get shredded to pieces?
This was being investigated in Spain as soon as 1980, as I remember from reading an article in a spanish scientific journal in that year. Sadly, i cannot locate the reference. But I remember a photo of the PM of that time, Adolfo Suarez, visiting the facility, and complaints of the researchers of lacking funds.
It's over. Long over. Get over it. Sheesh.
Should I still be bitching about England's tea taxes? Hardly. I likes me a nice, smart English wench just fine. They have manners, and they still know how to wear suspenders and a dress without becoming all confused about who they are, unlike most American fems these days.
Anyway, you wanna indulge in angst, there are all kinds of contemporary reasons that actually call for it as they remain unresolved. Australia as a penal colony and England's goal of empire... isn't one of them.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
WtPHq ?
New or not, it has at least some potential. The article states the vortex could be maintained with industrial waste heat. This might improve efficiency for power generation plants that have waste heat effluent. The nice thing about that is the grid connection and switchgear is already local.
Slapping one of these generators on any other industrial heat source could help power the plant itself, but could prove challenging to connect to the grid.
I wonder what it sounds like.
Where does the heat from the warmed air go? Better yet, how about the heat from the compression of air,shouldn't this man have thought of his consequenses prior to release of the idea. Create a hot spot, allow the use of "a limited resourse" the money ideas, better yet, burn the money from their hand to mine.
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It's been done. Locally caused small tornadoes are quite common in connection with cooling towers and ponds: all you need is a source of warm air and the right horizontal wind flow without too much turbulence. There was a device called the Meteotron built in France to specifically test this. It was a whole field of burners and spawned lots of nice firewhirls/tornadoes. The purpose of the testing was to assess the impact of the heated air plume from the natural draft cooling towers favored by the French designers.
On a related note, the only recorded tornado fatality in California was as the result of a F2 tornado caused by a very large fire at an oil storage facility (in Paso Robles, I recall) about 100 years ago.\
I think the idea proposed is a bit bogus.. it's hard to make stable artificial tornadoes of substantial (or any) size.
... to call it new. There have been numerous posts covering articles about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_tower_(downdraft)
What a novel idea. I wonder if it will actually be practical?
Ferret
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