Water from wind OPINION Phillip Adams January 27, 2007
FOR all sorts of personal and political reasons, Max Whisson is one of my most valued friends. We first made contact at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when this most ethical of men was a principal guardian of our Red Cross blood supply. More recently he's been applying his considerable scientific skills to the flow of another precious fluid. Water. Does this country face a more urgent issue? Will the world have a greater problem? While we watch our dams dry, our rivers die, our lakes and groundwater disappear, while we worry about the financial and environmental costs of desalination and the melting of the glaciers and the icecaps, Max has come up with a brilliant and very simple idea.
It involves getting water out of the air. And he’s not talking about cloud-seeding for rain. Indeed, he just might have come up with a way of ending our ancient dependence on rain, that increasingly unreliable source.
And that’s not all. As well as the apparently empty air providing us with limitless supplies of water, Max has devised a way of making the same “empty” air provide the power for the process. I’ve been to his lab in Western Australia. I’ve seen how it works.
There’s a lot of water in the air. It rises from the surface of the oceans to a height of almost 100 kilometres. You feel it in high humidity, but there’s almost as much invisible moisture in the air above the Sahara or the Nullarbor as there is in the steamy tropics. The water that pools beneath an air-conditioned car, or in the tray under an old fridge, demonstrates the principle: cool the air and you get water. And no matter how much water we might take from the air, we’d never run out. Because the oceans would immediately replace it.
Trouble is, refrigerating air is a very costly business. Except when you do it Max’s way, with the Whisson windmill. Until his inventions are protected by international patents, I’m not going to give details. Max isn’t interested in profits – he just wants to save the world – but the technology remains “commercial in confidence” to protect his small band of investors and to encourage others.
In essence, windmills haven’t changed in many centuries. The great propellers producing electricity on modern wind farms are direct descendants of the rusty galvo blades that creak on our farm’s windmills – and the vanes that lifted Don Quixote from his saddle.
Usually a windmill has three blades facing into the wind. But Whisson’s design has many blades, each as aerodynamic as an aircraft wing, and each employing “lift” to get the device spinning. I’ve watched them whirr into action in Whisson’s wind tunnel at the most minimal settings. They start spinning long, long before a conventional windmill would begin to respond. I saw them come alive when a colleague opened an internal door.
And I forgot something. 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. Like many a great idea, it couldn’t be simpler – or more obvious. But nobody thought of it before.
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.
This is just one of Whisson’s ways to give the world clean water. Another, described in this column a few years back, would channel seawater to inland communities; a brilliant system of solar distillation and desalination would produce fresh water en route. All the way from the sea to the ultimate destination, fresh water would be produced by the sun. The large-scale investment for this hasn’t been forthcoming – but the “water from air” technology already exists. And works.
If you’re interested, email me at PhillipAdams1 at bigpond.com. After some filtering I’ll pass the messages on to Max, particularly if you have a few million to invest. Better still, you may be the Premier of Western Australia or the Prime Minister of a drought-afflicted country suddenly expressing concerns about climate change. In that case, I’ll give you Max’s phone number.
Australia needs a few Whissons at the moment – and the Whissons need some initial government funding to get their ideas off the ground. For the price of one of John Howard’s crappy nuclear reactors, Max might be able to solve a few problems. Ours and the world’s.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21123007-12272,00.html
He's also got a solar powered desal plant idea:
The core principle is to pump seawater inland in such a way that distillation occurs during movement of the water. As the seawater becomes concentrated it returns to the sea or to a mineral processing plant, flow rates being regulated to maintain salt concentration below 17 g % in the system to prevent the accumulation of precipitated minerals.
A fundamental difficulty of solar powered distillation systems is that a large surface area is required to trap sufficient solar energy. The primary answer to this is to arrange for distillation to occur during movement of seawater inland and back to the sea, thus using the large area of the distribution system itself to provide an adequate area for the absorption of solar energy. When a litre of water evaporates, 2.44 kJ of heat is absorbed from the water. This heat may be derived from a structure containing the water or immersed in it, such as black stones or a black bitumen floor in a channel. Whatever the immediate source the effect of evaporation is to cool the water. In a solar powered system the heat must be replaced by the sun's rays, which can provide around 4000 kJ/ m2 on an average day. By absorbing the heat in a black pipe, the energy can be used to increase water temperature without the energy cost of evaporation. The heat can then be retained and used for evaporation at a separate site. In this way evaporation can continue in the absence of sunlight at night. This consideration is an indication of the many alternatives to be considered in arriving at practical designs. Another is that the same amount of heat as is required for evaporation is liberated as water vapour condenses to liberate pure water. Some designs are recorded in the literature which aim to recover this heat to assist in evaporation. This may be possible, for example by preheating air as it flows over the walls of a condenser chamber, then directing that air through water to be evaporated. The focus here however must be practical and simple, since the aim is to provide concepts which can be applied to large geographical areas. Such systems must be simple and easy to construct. A selection of the very large number of design concepts which I have considered are described in this brochure.... full: http://www.maxwaterdesal.com/designs.htm
*********** Mike B)
An injury to one is an injury to all http://www.iww.org/
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