livescience.com — Coiled up in a tornado is as much energy as an entire power plant. So a Canadian engineer has a plan to spin up his own twister and extract energy from its tethered tail."The source of the energy here is the natural movement of warm and cold air currents." These so-called convective air currents are only useful if they can be channeled in some way.
Jun 25, 2008 View in Crawl 4
1984ubutnot4meJun 26, 2008
to all the scifi comments:its in a sliders episode!!!! season 3 electric twister acid test. I think they used it for energy. anyway, the main plot was that the tornadoesdestroyed the planet, but a small town was protected by lodestone.
perdeiselJun 26, 2008
i can't wait till they f**k that up. can't have too much fun.
jerbakerJun 26, 2008
All manipulations of matter/energy require energy, therefor manipulating gases into a vortex will require energy. How does the inventor propose to get more energy out of the vortex than it took to create it? Will the people digging this up as a good idea please explain the physics of this invention - at least as they understand it? This is not a critique, only a question.
jonez176Jun 26, 2008
"generate the power directly"Tell me what device can accomplish this. Hint: It doesn't exist.That's the whole point of using a tornado - so we can turn heat into electricity on a large scale.
nowhereelseJun 26, 2008
"I'm constantly amazed...century after century"Good grief! How old are you, exactly?
Closed AccountJun 27, 2008
The vortex feeds of the potential energy stored in a mass of cold air sitting atop a mass of warm air.It's just like those soda-bottle water-vortex thingies; the denser fluid wants to move downward, but to do so it must displace the lighter fluid; the most stable way to do that is with a vortex. Clearly, when you place the denser fluid on top, it takes work; which is then released in kinetic energy in the form of a vortex; naturally it makes sense that you can drain that energy.If a natural tornado has enough energy to pick up and throw a several ton house, it doesn't violate thermodynamics. We're just artificially skipping a few steps and getting at the same end result.
Closed AccountJun 27, 2008
when you work at a tornado farm; what exactly do you consider bad weather?