- #1
William Turley
- 3
- 0
Greetings from Costa Rica.
I have an M.A. in Physical Science and a B.S. in Physics from San Diego State University, California, USA.
For my master's thesis, I built and tested a prototype "Ocean Wave Driven Air Pump" in the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla, CA in 1970-1971. The test demonstrated the feasibility of the concept with a minimum amount of hardware and money..Total cost of the OWDAP was under $100. Basically it was a water piston inside an open cylinder submerged so that passing waves caused a column of water to rise and fall inside the cylinder. With a series of 4-check valves, the resulting air flow is rectified, passing through a chamber in the same direction so that energy could be extracted from both the upstroke and downstroke of the water column. With the potential energy of 1m3 of water rising and falling every second being 1Kw, so depending upon the wave conditions, a significant amount of energy can be extracted with improved design to capture more than the 2-3% efficiency that I obtained. But even at these low efficiencies, there are reasonable applications, such as ocean buoys recording weather conditions, wave amplitudes, etc.
I know live inland in Guanacaste, Costa Rica and with my wife, Angelica. We are developing a self sustainable 27-Ac farm. We have a 2.5 Kw PV array connected to the grid that reduces our power bill dramatically and my pet project consist of converting a 2.4 m parabolic satellite dish into a solar furnace with a second much smaller ceramic dish (on the order of 2-3 cm in dia.) located such that the two dishes face each other on the same axis with their focal points coinciding, the result being that the total energy from the large dish will be concentrated in parallel beam the size of the smaller dish and directed back to the larger dish, which should burn a hole through the larger dish at which point this killer beam can be directed with flat mirrors to a boiler or whatever other use you can think of...high temperature research. The main obstacle is constructing a tracking device so that the apparatus follows the sun. An old search light would be an easy way to get started. I have searched "Opposing parabolic mirrors" and found no results...What do you think?
I have an M.A. in Physical Science and a B.S. in Physics from San Diego State University, California, USA.
For my master's thesis, I built and tested a prototype "Ocean Wave Driven Air Pump" in the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla, CA in 1970-1971. The test demonstrated the feasibility of the concept with a minimum amount of hardware and money..Total cost of the OWDAP was under $100. Basically it was a water piston inside an open cylinder submerged so that passing waves caused a column of water to rise and fall inside the cylinder. With a series of 4-check valves, the resulting air flow is rectified, passing through a chamber in the same direction so that energy could be extracted from both the upstroke and downstroke of the water column. With the potential energy of 1m3 of water rising and falling every second being 1Kw, so depending upon the wave conditions, a significant amount of energy can be extracted with improved design to capture more than the 2-3% efficiency that I obtained. But even at these low efficiencies, there are reasonable applications, such as ocean buoys recording weather conditions, wave amplitudes, etc.
I know live inland in Guanacaste, Costa Rica and with my wife, Angelica. We are developing a self sustainable 27-Ac farm. We have a 2.5 Kw PV array connected to the grid that reduces our power bill dramatically and my pet project consist of converting a 2.4 m parabolic satellite dish into a solar furnace with a second much smaller ceramic dish (on the order of 2-3 cm in dia.) located such that the two dishes face each other on the same axis with their focal points coinciding, the result being that the total energy from the large dish will be concentrated in parallel beam the size of the smaller dish and directed back to the larger dish, which should burn a hole through the larger dish at which point this killer beam can be directed with flat mirrors to a boiler or whatever other use you can think of...high temperature research. The main obstacle is constructing a tracking device so that the apparatus follows the sun. An old search light would be an easy way to get started. I have searched "Opposing parabolic mirrors" and found no results...What do you think?