Sep 112011
I’m at a bit of a loss to figure this one out. No data on it. My two best hypotheses:
1) It’s a wind turbine of some kind
2) It’s a cooling tower
However, there are much less complex ways to achieve either of these goals. So I’m unclear on exactly what’s going on, and what the advantages would be.
10 Responses to “Grumman turbine-tower art”
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Hmmm. A guess.
It’s like Shimmer! It’s a cooling tower _and_ a wind turbine! Waste heat transfer media is pumped through the tower. Heated air rises, causing an inflow of cooler air (cooled by the waters of the Hudson, I think). Additional air is drawn passively through the fan which drives a generator (probably though some step-down gearing). This sort of practical, forward thinking is why Grumman successfully transitioned from a second-run defense contractor to the global energy giant that it is today, and helped America achieve energy independence.
What? Really?
Oh.
A TWECS turbine? Don’t know much about it, just found this from some Googling…
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/mragheb/www/NPRE%20475%20Wind%20Power%20Systems/Wind%20Energy%20Converters%20Concepts.pdf
http://www.twecs.org/
From the above site: “Dr. Yen realized that the pressure drop inside the vortex of strong atmospheric tornados is as much as 100 millibars; far greater than the pressure drop behind a DAWT. So he designed a wind turbine that generates a tornado-like vortex to create a much greater pressure drop across the turbine.”
It looks like you open the doors on the side of the tower that the wind is hitting to get the vortex started, then you end up with an internal tornado going inside the tower to generate power.
It also looks like something that sounds great on paper, but won’t work as well as you think it will once it’s built
that is the atmospheric vortex proposal. http://vortexengine.ca/index.shtml
Its use wind capture in big cylinder, true those flaps on cylinder wall
Inside the air start to twirling and forms a mini tornado inside the cylinder
That sucks more air from below true tornado vortex,
What powers a high speed turbine with power-generator.
In Germany and France they proposed also vortex wind turbine.
but not so compact as the Grumman, in fact some German design goes up to 4 Km (2.48 mile) High !
and use big collectors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower#cite_note-42
while some French design use water injection to boost the turbine http://www.econologie.com/photo/TA_6_version_optimisee_coupe_legendes.gif
by the way
some of the vortex wind turbine are proposed also as cooling towers
for nuclear power plants or to cool big City like New York (urban airco).
Maybe it’s a fun carnival ride?
I think it’s meant to be an updraft based variation of the energy tower concept, one which could be used close to metropolitan areas, unlike the more traditional downdraft and solar energy updraft energy tower concepts. Maybe utilizing waste heat collected and pumped from the city? The art looks late ’70’s-early 80’s to me although I could be wrong. On a related note there was a revival of interest in solar updraft towers a few years back.
Here’s a couple of quick overviews of downdraft and solar updraft energy towers from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_tower_(downdraft)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower
Or maybe instead of using waste heat from the city, it’s using the (artifical?) lake/lakebed as a giant solar heat collector?
I could almost swear that was a cover of an issue of Popular Science. Can’t cite the number, sorry.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it emphasized “pretty” over “engineering.”
Windy cities (by lakes etc) maybe can employ this system. Think of it as one of those cylindrical fans with reverse powering (the wind would spin the the louvres turning a shaft connected to a vertically placed generator). To eliminate the vortex or up draft effect, one could design the louvres to have a slight funnelling / conning upwards. This may produce a down ward thrust rather than an upward one and help in keeping the structure down and stable (like a prop pointing down rather than up, the force expelled would be up ward pushing the prop down ward.
I think its a great idea but has a lot of work left to be done.
A “swipe” of this painting was indeed a cover for the January 1977 Popular Science. See http://books.google.com/books?id=FgEAAAAAMBA for details.