Oy, the article is making my head hurt... Just a few gems:
Tornadoes and hurricanes form when sun-heated air near the surface rises and displaces cooler air above. As outside air rushes in to replace the rising air, the whole mass begins to rotate.
Sweet -- the Coriolis force is directly involved in the development of tornadoes. Oh yeah, and convective instability causes tornadoes? Interesting...
The
AVE structure is a 200-meter-wide arena with 100-meter-high walls. Warm humid air enters at the sides, directed to flow in a circular fashion. As the air whirls around at speeds up to 200 mph, a vacuum forms in the center, which holds the vortex together as it extends several miles into the sky.
A vacuum forms at the center of the vortex? I suppose a very imperfect vacuum, but that's a stretch. What about just calling it a "pressure deficit" -- no need to explain the non-linear term of the perturbation pressure equation, but something that's more accurate than "a vacuum".
The
AVE could generate energy from this waste heat because it connects the ground to the upper atmosphere where the temperature gets as low as negative 60 degrees Celsius (80 degrees below zero Fahrenheit). This cold reservoir draws the warm air up fast enough to turn turbines.
It talks about how the structure is 100m tall, then it talks about how it's going to connect "to the upper atmosphere" where it's -60 C?
Enough about the article, I suppose...
I'm not 100% clear how this works. He adds vorticity and convergence to a source of hot air (such as that from a power plant). This then forms a vortex from which he is able to extract a lot of energy? Vortices have some inherent stability, and, with, established vertical perturbation pressure gradients, you may be able to extract some energy from them. However, I just cannot believe that it'll be as much as 40% of the total output of the any given power plant. You'll still have to deal with turbulence, viscocity, very weak lapse rates, and other forces that would tend to provide a non-ideal situation for developing such vorticies... It sounds like he's taking the dust devil (which are driven largely by dry convection associated with extreme lapse rates near the ground) and trying to extract vast amounts of energy from it (in this case, instead of a hot surface/ground driving the convection, he's using heated air from a power plant, etc). Perhaps the math works out correctly, but it seems to me that the amount of energy that could be extracted is perhaps a little overstated.
In the end, it seems that this is about increasing the efficiency of power plants by trying to extract energy (in the form of heat) that is otherwise wasted (i.e. released into the atmosphere). This is a noble (and necessary, IMO) goal to strive for, but I have to think there are better ways to use the "wasted" heat than this one provides. But, I'll happily accept being wrong if it works!
