Artificial Tornadoes

An anonymous reader writes "This inventor is working on a method of creating artificial tornadoes to generate electricity which he calls the "Atmospheric Vortex Engine". He is claiming that it is possible to create a man-made tornado and use wind turbines to capture the energy from the tornado. On the website there is some video footage of some experimental tornadoes that were generated in a prototype vortex tower in Utah. There seem to be several recent media references to his work including The Economist and The Guardian. Sounds like an interesting idea for a renewable energy source, but what happens if one of these tornadoes gets away?"

Re:Conservation of Energy

[TeacherOfHeroes]

At the risk of getting a "you must be new here" comment, RTFA

"Heating the air within the wall using a temporary heat source such as steam starts the vortex. The heat to sustain the vortex once established is provided in cooling tower bays located outside of the cylindrical wall and upstream of the deflectors. The continuous heat source for the peripheral heat exchanger can be waste industrial heat or warm seawater. "

It looks like they're trying to recycle energy that has bled off as heat and move it back into a usable form.

Vortexes

[azav]

What is most interesting is that vortexes are not really understood in common culture and just how inportant thy are in terms of power to many daily facts of life.

DaVinci studied cadavers and found out that it is the vortexes in blood flow through the years that close the heart valves as blood flows through.

Bumblebees can fly due to the uplifting forces of vortexes on their wind edges.

A pulverizer driven by vortex power was mentioned here on /. many years ago that was able to take mostly anything 'cept fat and turn it into dust.

One of the common effects in nature that has great potential and is right before our eyes is being ignored by most - possibly because they are poorly understood.

This article is an example of someone paying attention to the vortex and finding out what could be done with it for mankind.

Sure sounds like something REALLY interesting to learn about.

and then...
PROFIT!

Theory and reality, explanation.

[Alsee]

Ok, I Read TFA.

The theory behiond it was actually better than I expected. He's not trying to violate the second law of thermodynamics or anything. He's trying to use the tornado as dynamic heat chimney (an imaginary pipe carrying air up into the high cold atmosphere). Once he gets the tornado going he wants the warm air at the ground to naturally rise inside the chimney, then to harness this natural flow to extract energy.

I'd put the odds of him actually getting the functional vortex established at all at maybe 10%, getting it reasonably stable and self sustaining at maybe 1%, harnessing appreciable power out of it at maybe 0.1%, and harnessing useful cost effectie power at maybe 0.01%.

Of course I'm probably being way too generous and wildly overestimating those figures, chuckle.

In otherwords I would not advise buying stock in this crackpot scheme. It is an interesting concept and interesting physics though.

-

Energy source for vortex

[the_povinator]

The vortex can be sustained by either a specific heat source, like seawater or an area covered by greenhouses [as in the Australian solar tower/solar chimney], or if the atmosphere is sufficiently humid it can be sustained by the inherent instability of the atmosphere. However this instability is not generally always present. This instability is called the CAPE (convective atmospheric potential energy). It is the energy source that feeds thunderstorms. The reason the atmosphere can store energy is that the bottom layer of the atmosphere tends to be heated by the sun. If the air is damp but not at 100% humidity you can get a situation where the air column is stable, but as soon as it is perturbed enough for some of the air to start releasing moisture (when it reaches 100% humidity) the situtation becomes unstable. This is because the air that rises high enough to release moisture, starts getting warmed up when the moisture precipitates and then rises even higher. Theoretically, this could be exploited by a vortex. The vortex is performing the same function as a very tall tower, but hopefully more cheaply. It's like a siphon that siphons gasoline out of your tank. The vortex has lower pressure at the center, much like a siphon. However, it is far from clear whether this idea could be made practical. There are issues like how stable the vortex would be in wind, etc.

Here is someone who built one

[eww]

Some interesting photo's and video's
http://atmosphericvortextower.com/ [atmospheri...xtower.com]

This is not a new idea

[Anonymous Coward]

There is another company that is doing almost the same thing (VDS: Vortex Dehydration Systems, LLC).

There is not too much info on their website: http://vortexdehydration.com [vortexdehydration.com]

But the following two articles provide a good summary:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4723367/ [msn.com]
http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&file =article&sid=1312 [zpenergy.com]

Re:"What happens if..."

[iocat]

That link is from 1997. Check this out:

While most species on the reserve show no physiological indications of mutation, many, particularly lactating mammals and amphibians, have undergone astonishing genetic changes.

"In certain cases, chromosomal mutation of the animals has accelerated by a factor of 30," says Mikhail Pikulik, director of the Minsk Institute of Zoology. "The same species just 30km away remain practically unchanged. At the moment, these changes have been confined to the area of chromosomes and genes."

One particularly interesting example is that of voles, a kind of field mouse now thriving. While they look exactly the same as before, an analysis of their DNA has revealed a phenomenally high rate of mutation. Under normal circumstances, a gene found in the cell's mitochondria called cytochrome b changes at a rate of one mutation in every million letters of genetic code per generation. However, voles on the exclusion zone are producing one new mutation for every 10,000 letters of DNA code per generation. The genetic differences between these voles and others living outside the exclusion zone are greater than those normally found between mice and rats, species which diverged around 15m years ago. Evolution has been shunted into overdrive.

Why these changes haven't resulted in abnormalities and sickness on a massive scale may be an indication that nature is far more adaptable than previously imagined. It might also signify that the limits of its resilience have yet to be fully tested, though scientists on the reserve readily admit that even they don't know what is really happening deep in the forests: "If an animal dies of cancer in the wild," says Mikhail Pikulik, "it is simply eaten by wolves. The deaths of two or three animals of the population is not a grave matter. The health of an animal population is reflected in overall numbers."

Source is here [guardian.co.uk]

Re:Conservation of Energy

[mesocyclone]

The more serious problem is how to get much energy out of it.

First, a couple of concepts - CAPE and "cap."

CAPE, Convective Available Potential Energy, is the amount of energy a parcel of atmosphere would release if lifted from a level near the ground to the tropopause. CAPE is a strong function of dew point and the temperature profile and moisture profile of the atmosphere (the dry and wet lines on a SKEW-T/LOG-P chart).

"cap" - this is a thermal inversion (or at least a reversed slope temperature profile area) in the middle atmosphere which serves to trap rising air before it can release enough energy (through condensation) to produce a thunderstorm. A "capped" atmosphere is often clear or contains small convective towers ("turkey towers") which are unable to maintain convection.

A parcel of air which cannot penetrate the cap will release little energy - only the kinetic energy it gains as it rises below the cap, and perhaps some condensation energy if it forms a cloud). A parcel that can pierce the cap will reach a region where the energy release is dramatically higher, and will typically accelerate up to near the tropopause, releasing energy the whole type.

  The conditions required for this device to produce much energy - high CAPE (Convective Available Potential Energy) - are not that common or reliable. Furthermore, high CAPE is often tied to enough wind to make the stability of the vortex very questionable. When it isn't (such as the US midwest during the summer "capped" time), the total time that adequate CAPE is present isn't that great, and the vortex would have to be tall enough to reach the convective cap (and contain enough lift to break through that cap) before it started to generate significant power.

Atmospheric dynamics can also produce significant lift, but those conditions almost always have wind associated with them.

Tornados are usually short vortices - perhaps a few hundred to a couple thousand meters high - coupled to larger, more stable, and much lower speed vortices (mesocyclones) that are quite a bit deeper. Even so, tornados are notoriously unstable and most last no more than a few minutes (in 11 years of serious, science based tornado chasing, I have seen *one* that lasted more than 15 minutes and it was a mile in diameter and weak - F1). (I won't bother to discuss landspouts or waterspouts here).

In contrast, this man-made vortex will have to reach high enough into the atmosphere to penetrate the cap, which is much harder to achieve (read: takes more energy) and hard to maintain. A tornado doesn't have this problem, as it has a very large area of rising air (hundreds to thousands of square kilometers) which can pierce the cap, and once it is pierced in just one spot, a very large thunderstorm (normally a supercell) then develops and puts a geographically large hole in the cap, and generates lots of energy, a tiny bit of which actually goes into the tornado. Most supercells, in spite of their high energy release and their rotation do not produce tornados, to the frustration of weather forecasters and storm chasers.

One could perhaps put one of these vortex-based power systems in an area prone to dust devils, which use a different mechanism to generate lift - solar heating in the presence of a super-adiabatic lapse rate. But dust devils are much weaker, because they do not rely on the energy released by condensing moisture, and use energy from a much smaller layer of atmosphere.

Ultimately, this scheme seems to be an over-complex, inefficient and unreliable solar power machine. Other forms of harvesting solar power are probably much better in those areas, and yet only windmills seem to be close to cost efficient.

As a harvester of excess industrial heat... forget it. There are MUCH simpler and more efficient ways of doing that, and they are already in use in cogeneration facilities.

Re:Great for Electricity but...

[lionheart1327]

Stick one right in my back yard, really. Better than a coal or oil one.

As for Chernobyl, those idiots not only fucked up their own land, but the reputations of all nuclear plants.

Chernobyl exploded because they turned off all the safety systems and were messing with it for an experiment. If you leave the safetys on, it will be fine.

That, and that was an old design, modern designs won't even blow if you do turn the safetys off.

Re:Great for Electricity but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Chernobyl likewise did very little environmental damage, in spite of its release of a huge amount of radiation.

You are either incredibily stupid and actually believe this (making you a libertarian), or you are a liar and know it's bullshit (making you a Republican). There are still over a thousand square miles that are closed to human habitation almost twenty years after Chernobyl you moron. The rate of thyroid cancer increased ten-fold. They had to build dams on rivers to keep the radioactive water from travelling downstream. Radionucleotides in groundwater have increased anywhere from 10-100 times their pre-accident levels. More than a thousand square miles of farms are no longer farmable because of the radiation levels in the soil. The list goes on. Do some research instead of lying to people to further your own agenda.

Pebble-Bed Reactors

[TubeSteak]

I was going to agree with you that pebble-bed reactors are "inherently safe" but I did a little googling and I think more research is in order.

Wikipedia's entry [wikipedia.org] leaves out a lot of information.

This site [tmia.com] (called "Three Mile Island Alert") provides 6 numbered points and then goes on to explain in detail how each point is a safety issue.

1. It has no containment building.
   
2. It uses flammable graphite as a moderator.
   
3. It produces more high level nuclear wastes than current nuclear reactor designs.
   
4. It relies heavily on nearly perfect fuel pebbles.
   
5. It relies heavily upon fuel handling as the pebbles are cycled through the reactor.
   
6. There's already been an accident at a pebble bed reactor in Germany due to fuel handling problems.

It's short, direct and informative. I recommend you give it a look. Wired's article on this reactor design mentioned almost no risks :o\