Saturday, May 22, 2010

High Volume Compressed Air From the Farm

I've been reading lately about vortex technology, inspired of course by Victor Schauberger, the Austrian forest ranger famous for his work with the flow behavior of water and how he managed it to float lumber out to mills from seemingly unreachable forest interiors. Victor's studies on the vortex have become the foundation of a whole branch of technology that seems to have gone unnoticed until recently.
My entry today gathers its inspiration from 3 sources. Of course I have to begin with my hero Nicola Tesla and his Tesla Turbine, but I am also employing a principle in use by Dyson's new air multiplier super fan that hit the markets late last year. The other muse of mine for today's entry is the Windhexe, a tornado in a can invented by a farmer named Frank Polifka, that can be used to seemingly disintegrate any material into micron sized powder. I suppose I should also mention the new design for wind turbines here as they also had a hand at inspiring my direction today,
but I must say the the idea simply started with them and I tend to think their principles are slightly more sophisticated than what I'm employing. I think Dyson's bladeless fan is a better example of the venturi principle I capture with today's idea.
So what is today's idea? I decided that I want to figure out a way to compress extremely high volumes of air. Oh, I almost forgot... part of the device will also employ Veljko Milkovic's two stage mechanical oscillator to help finalize the last stage of compression.

In a written summary, here's what I propose. First we start with a Tesla turbine to start moving the air. Around the outside lip of the turbine, we fit a flange that feeds the air leaving the turbine, outward and down in a way that also draws surrounding air with it. In order to guide the flow of the surrounding air, the Tesla turbine and it's fitted flange are placed inside a larger ring and this whole collection is then fed into a duct the same size as the surrounding guide ring.
That forms the first stage, but I want to set up 4 of these because we want to draw large volumes of air. So picture 4 of these turbine fans all connected to duct work feeding to a central point. We'll call that whole system the first stage input.

We then have an intermediate stage which will involve nothing more than some cam driven valves that direct the collection of ducts into either of 2 identical collector drums. That's all there is to the intermediate stage. For half a cycle the air flows into one drum, and for the other half of the cycle it feeds into the other.

The drums are what make up the 3rd stage. These drums are designed to be fed in a way that produces a cyclone inside them. There is no great purpose to the cyclone other than to help distract the energy of the compressed air away from the top and bottom of the drum, and onto its sides instead. The entire drum becomes a piston chamber then and during the fill portion of the cycle the bottom of the drum is closed. During the second phase, the feeding ducts close and the bottom opens. The top of the drum is composed entirely of a large piston which then slides down the drum, pushing the cyclone of air into a common storage tank. The other drum of course is exactly half a cycle out of phase with this one and works in reverse. When one drum is emptying, the other closes the bottom of its drum and opens the feeding ducts while lifting the piston back up to the top.
Driving the two large pistons is a large 2 stage mechanical oscillator which provides the power to raise and lower the extremely large weight of each piston.
Due to it's large size, the whole device will operate at a reasonably low rpm but with the drums made larger and the pistons weighing significantly on the air, the large air flow produced can be very significant. Remember, the drums are actually compressing air that is already slightly compressed.
If the drums are constructed from 45 gallon drums and the Tesla Turbines are feeding ducts that are roughly 1 foot in diameter, and with the oscillator working at 2 cycles per second, my initial guesstimate would be that this arrangement could produce roughly 1600 cubic feet of air per minute.
For the calculation, I figure 4 feeding ducts will effectively double the air pressure inside a drum, and with each drum containing 7 cubic feet uncompressed, that makes 14 ft3 per drum per cycle which is 28 ft3 per second. 28 ft3 X 60 seconds is 1680 ft3

That's a lot of air! What can you do with that much air? Well for one, although it is apparently highly inefficient, you could employ vortex tubes to provide your home with Air Conditioning in the summer, or Heat in the winter. You could also power your own personal Windhexe garbage disposal system

or even use vortex tubes to create a large temperature difference to power a Stirling motor and then use that to create your own electricity.

As Frank Polifka intended with his harnessed tornado, you could grind grain into flour and fix yourself a loaf of bread... it's kind of like Martha Stewart meets Albert Einstein.

So... what would you use that much compressed air for?