Wave Power, Baby, Can't be Beat.
CD in Play: John Parish and Polly Jean Harvey, Dance Hall at Louse Point.
My Dad sent this to me, it is from The Engineer Online. I am interested in alternative energy sources and wave power is one that excites me quite a bit. No use to my more land locked friends in Saskatchewan or in Prince George and Tumbler Ridge, but coastal British Columbia and the Maritimes would be foolish not to consider this. I don't know of any wave power testing taking place in Canada at all. There has been some testing done in Scotland's north, but nothing done on a grand scale in the UK as of yet. The UK should be throwing itself whole hog into wave power, considering it is surrounded by water. Anyhow, thought I'd post this up here.
Renewable Tidal Energy Can be Used to Drive Turbine (3/14)
A renewable tidal energy technology that eliminates the need for moving parts and could prove more competitive than fossil fuel power has been developed at Imperial College London spin-out HydroVenturi.
A submarine venturi — a funnel- shaped tube originally used to measure flow rate — is placed in a primary flow (tidal or non-tidal) to accelerate the water and create a subsequent pressure drop, which can be used to drive a turbine.
Relying on Bernoulli’s theory, which stipulates that an increase in fluid rate produces a reduction in pressure, the device generates a reduction at the point where the flow is most constricted. This pressure drop is used to suck air from another location into the primary flow.
It is this suction — which can be moved through a pipe to the shore up to 50m away — that drives an air turbine. These are significantly smaller than water turbines and can be driven at a very high speed.
Removing the need for complex mechanical and electrical parts not only avoids expensive maintenance issues through corrosion of engineering materials and replacement of parts, but also enables the system to be located in differing bodies of water and depth than conventional technology. This allows electricity to be generated at costs competitive with fossil fuels, with low recurring maintenance or fuel costs, its developer claims.
HydroVenturi chairman Dr John Hassard explained that the versatility of the technology gives it a number of advantages over conventional methods. “Our approach is much more widely applicable. We can operate in far slower waters than conventional systems and at different depths. The system can go from two to 30m easily, whereas conventional systems are constrained to depths of between 30m and 50m in locations such as in tidal inlets.”
The technology also benefits from water being denser than air. Water weighs 1,000kg/m3 while air is 1kg/m3, explained Hassard, so water has a thousand times more mass density — and it is this greater kinetic energy potential that underpins the technology.
“What we realised was, water can be induced to create power without moving parts,” he said. The technology has so far attracted a £2.5m development grant from Porton Capital and £200,000 from the Carbon Trust. Imperial Innovations — the commercialisation arm of Imperial College — has the right to invest a further £900,000.
Despite this, Hassard is frustrated over the UK’s tardy approach to research development. Consequently, the next installation will be in New Zealand, where he claims: “We will be undercutting gas turbines very shortly.
“We have talked to many UK groups, but because of the legislation you have to go through it is easier to make progress outside the country. The UK probably has the best resource and leads the way in tidal development but this approach is killing it,” he said.
My Dad sent this to me, it is from The Engineer Online. I am interested in alternative energy sources and wave power is one that excites me quite a bit. No use to my more land locked friends in Saskatchewan or in Prince George and Tumbler Ridge, but coastal British Columbia and the Maritimes would be foolish not to consider this. I don't know of any wave power testing taking place in Canada at all. There has been some testing done in Scotland's north, but nothing done on a grand scale in the UK as of yet. The UK should be throwing itself whole hog into wave power, considering it is surrounded by water. Anyhow, thought I'd post this up here.
Renewable Tidal Energy Can be Used to Drive Turbine (3/14)
A renewable tidal energy technology that eliminates the need for moving parts and could prove more competitive than fossil fuel power has been developed at Imperial College London spin-out HydroVenturi.
A submarine venturi — a funnel- shaped tube originally used to measure flow rate — is placed in a primary flow (tidal or non-tidal) to accelerate the water and create a subsequent pressure drop, which can be used to drive a turbine.
Relying on Bernoulli’s theory, which stipulates that an increase in fluid rate produces a reduction in pressure, the device generates a reduction at the point where the flow is most constricted. This pressure drop is used to suck air from another location into the primary flow.
It is this suction — which can be moved through a pipe to the shore up to 50m away — that drives an air turbine. These are significantly smaller than water turbines and can be driven at a very high speed.
Removing the need for complex mechanical and electrical parts not only avoids expensive maintenance issues through corrosion of engineering materials and replacement of parts, but also enables the system to be located in differing bodies of water and depth than conventional technology. This allows electricity to be generated at costs competitive with fossil fuels, with low recurring maintenance or fuel costs, its developer claims.
HydroVenturi chairman Dr John Hassard explained that the versatility of the technology gives it a number of advantages over conventional methods. “Our approach is much more widely applicable. We can operate in far slower waters than conventional systems and at different depths. The system can go from two to 30m easily, whereas conventional systems are constrained to depths of between 30m and 50m in locations such as in tidal inlets.”
The technology also benefits from water being denser than air. Water weighs 1,000kg/m3 while air is 1kg/m3, explained Hassard, so water has a thousand times more mass density — and it is this greater kinetic energy potential that underpins the technology.
“What we realised was, water can be induced to create power without moving parts,” he said. The technology has so far attracted a £2.5m development grant from Porton Capital and £200,000 from the Carbon Trust. Imperial Innovations — the commercialisation arm of Imperial College — has the right to invest a further £900,000.
Despite this, Hassard is frustrated over the UK’s tardy approach to research development. Consequently, the next installation will be in New Zealand, where he claims: “We will be undercutting gas turbines very shortly.
“We have talked to many UK groups, but because of the legislation you have to go through it is easier to make progress outside the country. The UK probably has the best resource and leads the way in tidal development but this approach is killing it,” he said.
posted by Magnus at 19:06
6 Comments:
Magnus,
Just tried opening my blog, your blog, etc. with my pop-up blocker turned off. I even erased my cookies, so that the sites would think that I'm a new user. Well, no pop-ups. The problem, my friend, is not my site, nor your site, nor anybody's site, nor even the sitemeters or counters. You have more security on your computer than I do (and I won't say what pitiable security I have or whatever on my computer for fear that some mean hacker out there wants to hurt me - after all, it's not even my computer, it's one that has been lent me for my time here). So please, do some more research into this. Because, my blog and my computer are not at fault. And your computer might need a little cleaning up. Do you have Spybot? That is excellent for getting rid of most adware, which you might have on your computer and that norton can never seem to detect (I, unfortunately, find norton a bit crappy). Adaware is good, as is SpywareDoctor. All of these you can get for free. Two of them you can get on download.com (the latter site also has some excellent free music downloads, as well!).
I see you complaining about popups on my site as an unconscious cry for help on this level, so do clean up your computer so more!
Magnus, I just recalled from something you wrote earlier that you said you have Spy Doctor. It is best to have 3 antispyware programs and performs checks and eliminations on a 2-3 times a week basis. I do that. There is always something there. Even when I had my precious long-lost (cursed forever be the thief), I had a lot of spyware. So use those three programs. Download Ad-Aware (from Sweden in your favourite area of the world!), and Spybot. The latter programme I really find does the best job. It gives me the longest list of stuff and tells me the level of danger, etc. and info about the different adwares.
Have Adaware, been using that for a while now. Also using Spyware Doctor and have Trend Micro for everything else. I am also firewalled.
Anyhow, the pop up only occurs on your site and I think it has been occuring since you added the sitemeter. Clustrmaps isn't doing it since mine and G's blogs aren't causing pop-ups to appear. A little fishy, no?
Hey Magnus,
Tsk, tsk. You don't have have SV (Service Pack) 2. I know your technology. I know your domain is with Telus. I see all.
Well, I guess Peter does too. He has Sitemeter as well. But he seems not to have the free version, because when I click on his, I can't see the statistics. So, he can see our statistics, but we can't see what he see. You can see your stats and mine and everyone elses. Not big brother more like we are all big brother, eh?
Oh, it's really really fun. even mroe so than clustr maps because it is even more specific.wow. I can even enlarge the map, see how long you were on, see if you are on now, how you got there, where you went after (that's all, no really!). And I can see what browser people have. Really something. It's free! And if you install it, don't let Sitemeter do it automatically. That's partly what really screwed up my site. It put html language at the bottom of my site (with something like "body>" at the bottom.
I ended up having to spend hours and hours. I accidentally added or subtracted a few divs and really messed up.
So I redid the template and cut and pasted all the info I had and wanted to keep and not loss into a notepad document and did the html by hand, putting the html code from sitemeter in by hand, so I could have all the meters and stuff where I wanted it. I even put the site into a new swanky format. It even loads much faster than before!
I might add we should continue this sort of thing via email. Now if you have something to say about wave power...
Quite right!
I know precious little about engineering or electricity. I will say this: Taiwan seems to be very much, at present, jumping onto the windpower bandwagon. I have seen many of those wind turbines when I am on the train and it passes the things. Many of them are near the ocean, and just having watched enough weather reports, I guess wind is often most prevalent near the ocean.
I don't know where most of the electricity in Taiwan comes from. The rivers and streams are too small, from what I've seen. All the rivers look like small streams, sometimes pretty pathetic ones, at that. There are many many mountains, but the water is distributed in too many places to be strong. Are we powered by nuclear energy here (I was wondering the same thing about Hong Kong).
And by the way, from what I heard, there is no ozone layer above Hong Kong or Taiwan, and I suspect Japan's ozone layer is pretty tenuous, since they love their air conditioning. When you walk on a street here or in Hong Kong in the summer, most of the stores have their door open or half-open, and you can feel a blast of cold air. Really insane. It feels good but I sense something terrible. It is strangely exotic in a kind of world-ending science-fiction kind of way (like the end of Total Recall - remember, in that film, the ruler of Mars charges the residents for the oxygen they breathe?).
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