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Water From Wind
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jan 30, 2007 02:42 PM
from the and-power-too dept.
from the and-power-too dept.
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."
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Interested.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Interested.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Layne
Parent
Re:Interested.... (Score:4, Interesting)
-matthew
Parent
Re:Interested.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:But why not? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Interested.... (Score:5, Informative)
1. Does this design perform better than other windmill designs (for generation).
No; conventional windmills have long been designed to extract the maximum amount of mechanical work from the air. This new windmill is not designed to do that, and works the same in any wind direction.
2. What will this do to the atmospheric conditions?
Small decrease in humidity.
3. If everyone has one....will it no longer rain?
It will still rain. The windmills couldn't possibly collect all evaporating air in a short radius. Even if they did, clouds call still blow in from over oceans and lakes.
Parent
Re:Interested.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Parent
Re:Interested.... (Score:5, Funny)
So, what you're trying to say is:
[Morbo]
"Windmills do not work that way!"
[/Morbo]
Chris Mattern
Parent
Re:Interested.... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Interested.... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Interested.... (Score:4, Informative)
TFA doesn't say, but there's a couple of ways it could be done. Just dropping air pressure would tend to cool the air somewhat, and that will happen on the leeward side of any airfoil moving through the atmosphere. When aircraft fly into icing conditions, the ice tends to collect on the upper surfaces of the wings where the air pressure is lower.
One other possibility is using a windmill to drive a Sterling-cycle engine. That will pump heat from one cylinder to the other, and water will condense on the cool side.
-jcr
Parent
Re:Interested.... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airfoil [wikipedia.org]
when air moves over something like an airfoil, a low pressure area is created.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law [wikipedia.org]
Generally, when you drop the pressure, the temperature will also drop. A drop in temperature will likely lead to condensation, which this device puports to gather.
Parent
Dune (Score:5, Funny)
Next thing you know, we'll be harvesting spice.
Re:Dune (Score:4, Funny)
yeah, then we'll knock it up another notch, and give it a big blast from our spice weasel [geocities.com]! BAM!
Parent
Free Dry Land! (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Free Dry Land! (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't see how a few hundred of these things, placed strategically would have any more of a negative impact than these factors. In fact, they could potentially be a sort of a civilization mitigator in a way. Someone please correct me if my thinking is wrong here.
Parent
Hmmn, implied refrigeration (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Calling Uncle Owen and Luke Skywalker (Score:4, Funny)
it's a competition (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but you know Schick is just going to add one more blade and totally steal his marketshare.
Where's the need come from? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Stop smoking crack naysayers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Something doesn't add up... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Something doesn't add up... (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Parent
Re:Hand out the Moisturizer (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re:sum zero gain (Score:4, Informative)
Umm, any water collected by these things would end up either: (a) re-evaporating locally or (b) running into a river. In the first case, there's no net change in water distribution. In the second case, the fresh water ultimately ends up in an ocean, restoring the salinity levels.
At any rate, we've been mining huge amounts of water out of ancient aquifers for decades without worrying about ocean salinity. But that is still an insignificant drop in the bucket compared to the real impact on salinity: the massive influx of fresh water that is currently coming from from melting polar ice.
Parent