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How is this different than gearing up the wheel to achieve the desired RPMs?

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Posted by: ehrichweiss on July 15, 2008 at 10:07 AM

I like the idea but I suspect you're only getting the slightest amount of work out of this setup.

If I'm seeing correctly, the water is only being collected once per revolution but if you used the same type of setup to get the water into the wheel as you used to get it out of it, you should be able to increase your efficiency by a few percent, at least. You would have to prime the system to get it started but after that it would perform as part siphon and part pump. A proper collector for the water could then conceivably increase efficiency by using even more of the stream's energy to push the water through the system.

I'm probably wrong about all this since I have no practical experience in this field but it seems like a good idea to test. I wonder if this could be made portable somehow. If it could be made to fit in a backpack it would be a great way to generate electricity for various uses while camping/hiking.

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I love people who don't get basic physics.

What the inventor has done is to replace a relatively efficient mechanical coupling with an inefficient fluid coupling that increases pressure at the expense of mass flow rate and friction losses. You don't get something for nothing.

You'll never gain more total energy than you have from the wheel lifting the fluid's total mass to the uppermost point of its rotation (maximum potential energy) and a simple dump-bucket system such as those that have been used for millenia in the East, or hydraulic water rams that have been in use in the west for centuries will do that better.

The author's statement that "To create fifty foot of head, you had to make a fifty foot wheel. " is incorrect, however. You can trade off mass flow rate for pressure (and vice versa) as is commonly done in hydraulic equipment design but the total energy of the system cannot exceed that available from the water flow.

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Posted by: mrmeval on July 16, 2008 at 2:25 AM

If you have some pressurized gas try this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube

Great gadgets if you can get pressurized air to them you can have cooling where a refrigeration system would cost much more. It's used quite a bit in industry even though it's less efficient than refrigeration because it's smaller and simpler and you can put them where electricity might be a bad idea.

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