Water From Wind 411
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."
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
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?
Wow. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interested.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Layne
Bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
sum zero gain (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:Interested.... (Score:4, Interesting)
-matthew
Venturi Effect (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Interested.... (Score:2, Interesting)
That idea stinks....but it's crazy enough that it just might work. There is always water flowing in the sewars, hook up a few thousand paddle wheels attached to a generator and you could probably power a few streetlights. Or, maybe a heating coil under the street surface to melt snow and ice.
So no one understands climates? (Score:2, Interesting)
Many side effects (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sounds familiar. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Free Dry Land! (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's why: Assume for the sake of argument that you can remove 20% of the water vapor over the 2-1/2 or so Meters above your house in a given day. And that all the houses in the big city do the same thing. Most of the water will go where? down the toilet or sink eventually, or perhaps be put into a garden, etc. where much of the moisture will re-evaporate. Now then, a reasonable assumption is that what goes down the toilet or sink gets put through the local sewage treatment plant or into a local septic field -- where, guess what -- it re-evaporates.
Secondarily, that 2-1-/2 meters of 20% more-dehumidified air is only maybe 1/100th of what is available under the weather, but even so, as the moisture re-distributes from the other 99%, assume it generates a little wind. Ultimately pulls say 1% more moist air in from the sea, soaks up some heat in the atmosphere, but if there is a constant drain that moisture will keep coming toward your city. Providing more wind energy to produce power and rain, etc. Not dry areas.
Let me know what you think.
Re:Interested.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you thinking of Crimea? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interested.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately we never got around to putting any form of electricity generation equipment or water/warmpumps rotor concept onto them as we planned (maelstroems/turbolence in the water to extract the potential energy)
- We have for years been putting off finishing the half built full size mill parked in the basement, maybe it's time to find the right bearings that can take the correct angle of pressure etc. and slam that hunk of junk together and start generating some $$$ from the savings as well as doing something right for the environment.
And the neat thing is that we have independent witnesses from several countries who can back us up regarding what we built and the principles involved so there will be no patent BS to stop us from doing whatever we'd like with our concept.
So No - I do not for one second believe this might be a scam, but I hope the guy simply decides to share his idea freely as his earnings will be far higher than mere money when the chips fall. Heck he could surely make quite some cash if he spoke to the right people - no need for patents - just get production started - If the concept is as revulutionizing as the article mentions then the need will far exceed production capabilities anyway - plenty to take from.
He could in life as well as later be remembered as a pioneer - And if the concept is realized as a stroke of genious - people might just listen to the next thing he might hatch.
Just my two cents...
Re:Interested.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Easy to check for yourself. Unfortunately that does not give info on air-water systems, and there is no info in searching the Patent Applications yet.
If you want to get water out of air, you need to cool a surface to condense out water or reduce the air pressure to cause RH to go to 100% to condense out @ ambient temperature, or you can use hygroscopic materials to absorb water directly out of the air, but then you have to extract the water from that material.
I think it was the Chilean military that figured out how to set up a "spiderweb" at night in the Atacama desert & water would condense out on the fibers and drain into a can, to support military in the field.
We will have to wait on Max's details it sounds like.
Re:sum zero gain (Score:3, Interesting)
water will be replenished into the air from the oceans. how do we know this? how was this proven?
Air can only hold a certain amount of water, known as the saturation point. Saturation is the reason water stops evaporating, not the speed of the evaporation process. That is to say, if the air is drier, evaporation will easily keep up to bring it back to the saturation point. The humidity will be replenished, unless the sun stops shining.
if the water content of oceans diminishes, the salt content increases proportionately.
Ok, this might be a topic best saved for a more advanced lesson, but water does not disappear once you drink it and/or bathe with it. All water eventually flows back to the sea. This was covered in such educational films as "Finding Nemo."
Re:Where's the need come from? (Score:3, Interesting)
Depends on the desert. Some exist where mankind imported goats, which ate all of the vegetation down to nothing. The first usually has drought-resistant plants still around, like cactus and the like, and shouldn't be messed with. The second, like what exists in Australia, Northern Africa, and the Middle East, usually has no vegetation to speak of and high humidity. These deserts can be rehabilitated with planting and air moisture extraction (though this is the first large scale version I've seen- earlier ones I've been aware of use desalinated sea water pumped many miles to kick off the vegetation first). The second type is usually very rocky and sandy as well, the soil having been eroded away by the wind once the vegetation was gone. For this reason, many environmentalists in those areas consider goats to be weapons of mass destruction.
Re:Interested.... (Score:3, Interesting)
The energy efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells is roughly 50%. That means that if you put 100W into splitting the output water into hydrogen and oxygen, the resulting fuel cell would produce 50W. Seeing as generator efficiency can be as low as 80% due to heat losses, that means you would get about 40% of the wind energy in the form of electricity when you go to use the fuel cell.
Now, if you're talking about using it as a charger for your fuel cells (like a Niven's CARM), you could probably buffet it with solar paint (low efficiency, but no engineering cost) and have a working charger in light or wind, and it would be kinda useful. Still, you'd do better to save the water for something else and pump the electricity directly into an ultracapacitor or other type of high-power battery.
"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."
First off, I'm going to guess that a 'portable' version would be problematic; make a windmill too small, and it doesn't generate enough power to run a vibrator. Second, there are many, less cumbersome ways to power a portable distiller, including an old-school type evaporative distiller.