With energy generation becoming the need of the hour – it may be time to do away with the wind farms and their discontinuous maneuvers, as the future of energy generation could take tornado’s refuge.
It’s perhaps a weird thought – and one would fathom this only as a basis for a perfect script, but researchers in Canada are backing their instincts to mess around with nature – with the idea of creating man-made tornadoes to generate clean energy.
The man and the idea
Louis Michaud the mind behind the notion, has spent last 40 odd years studying tornadoes and hurricanes, and he is convinced with the fact that the swirling winds can be controlled and engineered to produce emission-free-electricity.
The principle that brainwaves this thought is utterly simple – it follows the undemanding phenomenon of the atmosphere, the physics of convention – how the air heated by the sun, rises, behaves like a spinning top, then cools and comes back down again.
Implementation of physics for a mock tornado to produce power
Waste heat from a power plant to ignite a tornado that runs turbines to produce energy, this is what the entire concept’s all about.
To create an artificial tornado a ‘vortex building’ needs to be constructed – heated water from the power plant would be diverted to the vortex building to produce hot air, as the air will heat, it’ll simultaneously rise, gathering energy forming a vortex as the air begins to swirl.
The hot air keeps rising in the atmosphere, then at a certain point the fans that are used to push the air into the vortex building are put out. The vortex gasps for additional hot air, getting none, it soaks in the air on its own in the procedure turning the fans into turbines that now begin to spin on their own.
Fans or rather turbines are attached to generators – which continue producing clean energy as long as the vortex receives a constant and an uninterrupted waste heat to run on the turbines.
Merits if the initiative materializes
An estimated cost of about $60 million would be required to produce such a power plant, and if all works as presumed with utmost safety, this sort of a power station would produce about 200 megawatts of clean energy that’ll be done at less than half the cost of a coal plant, and will be enough to power 200,000 homes.
[Image Credit: Vortexengine]
[Source: Treehugger]
