Low Tech steam pressure capacitator and heater ?

[MaxT]

No moving parts, no moving parts friction. ok... generator has moving parts (who says that generator has to rotate on bearings though.... windbelt wobble comes to mind.... ).

Can use for heating simultaneously: Biogas. Pyrolysis gasses. Biomass (booo... biomass needs charcoaling and pyrolysis gasses for burning then... but it can be done).

Heat from burning chamber should be simultanously usable for burning ceramics and/or bricks, not to mention drying of plants and mushrooms for storing and transport.

Also: If adding passive solar heating to uppermost tank, that heat can be used as water heats that much easier then in the steam chamber... and no reason why not to add wind S-turbine to pump water from "adminstration tank" to top tank... for extra electricity.

Someone might consider adding heat reserver to heat up incoming air and cool the outgoing CO2 for extra boost... and then in such system Solar Parabolic heated salt could be used to heat the pipes through which the air enters the "fire and hotness" chamber, so that it is few hundred celsius before it even enters the flame... or does not even need the flame if much sunlight is available.

Friction of water in the pipes might be a problem ? but at least maintaining and repairing industrial pistons and bearings and such is not ?

Here is it's basic nucleus:

( In case there is problems with viewing this sketchy image here, it can also be found in this link:

http://koti.mbnet.fi/maxt/oddsnends/Pump002.gif )

[electrondady1]

it's a bit too complex for me,

 but if you have a fire and can make steam

you have a hope of getting something going.

[MaxT]

In a nutshell: It uses Steam pressure (directly without pumps) to push water from a tank to a high up water tank. When electricity is wanted to happen... water is let down from the high tank, through a generator. Idea is to have efficiency and minimum amount of industrial and irreplacable parts.

As steam is in direct contact with "pumped" water, water also is heated up, and that is used in central heating of the household.

About this looking complex... Darn. Everyone who has commented on it in any context, has said the same. And I thought this was the vastly simplified version showing only the nucleus of this system. Seems like I will just have to do it illustrated clearer. To the Drawing Mobile ! (= laptop with popular image processing program).

Not so related to comment: History and Reason of this project thus far:

Motivation to plan such an arrangement came from one local Organic Farm that was looking for generators that could utilize the pyrolysis gasses (mainly carbon monoxide) from forestry by-product biomass, and also the biogas from farm's plant materials. Looking for the ready, purchaseable aggregates and generators, it started to look very expensive, having many heavy moving parts of industrial precision and industrial materials, each different gas even possibly needing different aggregates... so a system that uses any source of heat and/or flame and has no such moving parts that could not be self replaced at time of need, seemed more purposeful.

Using wind to pump water to the high water tank, and using the same generator thus also for wind generated energy (nicely waiting there in high water tank as water mass, even for non windy days... though in rather limited amounts) seemed like a thing to incorporate into design as optional possibility, as that Farm is also building a nice vertical axis wind turbine. More than anything, this is my proposal for them as a solution of minimal costs, with effective energy collection, planned material flows for farm area sustainability, and maximized self reliance ability.

Whether it is plausible or practical... is the reason why it is posted here with a question mark.

[Airstream]

The first steam engine pumped water from mines - they simply filled a weirdly stomach shaped tank with live steam then shut off the feed and allowed it to cool which drew a vacuum to pull water up to drain away once the pressures equalized. How is that for simplified?

[TomW]

Max;

Maybe it would be easier to convey your overall idea with a flow chart / block diagram type drawing.

Break it down into processes like:

Heat source>>thermosiphon to raised reservoir>>drain through alternator>>use electricity.

Thats as far as I got with the text you submitted after the post. The drawing is too crude for the complexity of the ideas you attempted to incorporate.

Solve the pieces individually when you decide on a n overall process.

Overall the idea may be OK but I would venture a guess that efficiency would be horrible compared to other, more common methods?

I would suggest you build a small prototype and run some tests. A simple PM DC hobby motor could be the electrical producer and they are common. Sometimes an hour in the lab can save a decade in the library.

Figure out how much water you can raise how far with X heat source then do some math from known data to see what is available from a given source. Most coffee makers "pump" water up with heat so that technology is understood and works. Simply a check valve and a tube thats heated.

Pumping water into reservoirs is another known technology and is commonly used on a large scale to store excess power from hydro dams.

Most of the pieces "work" so the only thing to do is figure out how to do it on the scale you need.

Just an idea.

Good luck with it.

Tom

[electrondady1]

i think you need to ask your self what do i have and what do i want

if you have a fuel source and want electricity then build a steam generator

something like danb made.

if you want to pump water then fine

but don't use steam to pump water to make electricity with gravity

just the volume of water you would need would require a large pond not a metal tank

[BigBreaker]

Water in a raised tank for an energy storage is very low density by volume and weight.  I suggest you do the calculation of energy contained in one ton of water raised ten feet.  I get 8watt hrs per ton per ten feet.  It is easier to move to a place with a hydro resource than make this scheme work.

If you want "lasts forever" energy storage get a nickel-iron battery.  The battery will last longer than you will and the main electrolyte, KOH or caustic potash, can be made from wood ashes.  Potash lye has been made since antiquity with essentially no tools.

For driving a gen head, a telsa turbine fueled by wood gas is pretty good.  The turbine has one moving part and the air compressor may have a couple more.  Both the turbine and the compressor have parts that only rotate - no moving pressure seals.  The rotating parts can be floated on air bearings with air from the compressor and have no rubbing parts whatsoever.  There are no off the shelf tesla turbines right now but there aren't any steam driven water raising gadgets either.  Some stirling engines are similarly robust and can be purchased off the shelf (though hard to find).  The technology for using wood gas in a fuel cell is coming along and that has no moving parts.  It isn't really ready yet though.

For heating water, solar thermal wins by a long shot in terms of simplicity.  The exhaust from the turbine would work too.  I'd be careful about tapping the heat from the wood gas generator.  Generally you want that thing insulated and hot, hot, hot.

Steam is a demon that wants to escape your device and kill you.  Seriously... it is dangerous, great at making hot water and lousy at doing mechanical work.  Steam works on seals and ferrous metals to degrade and corrode them.  If you don't care about efficiency a hydrodyne or other air (stirling) type engine is the better bet.

Lastly you should do the calculation of how much wood or other fuel is needed to power your scheme.  You will quickly see the need for fuel efficiency.  Even a very green/conservative western lifestyle powered by steam will require an enormous woodlot.  An acre of hardwood grows by about a ton each year and a ton of wood has about 12 million btus or 3500 kwhr of heat energy.  That seems high until you multiply by fuel to plug efficiency rates of 2-3%.

[MaxT]

Water on a tank up high.

Keeps on getting filled.

At same time keeps on getting drained through generator.

No pond needed. As a reserve capacitator it indeed wont be great.

But same tank can also be simultaneously be filled with wind turbine with pump. Preferably centrifugal one... thus, one generator handles all collected energies.

And on that farm, in cold Finland in Scandinavia will use most of the generated energy to heating anyways... so doing steam first, turning to electricity, using electricity make to heat would seem to be unnecessary amount of moving parts that could eat away on the energy and/or break down at one point or another.

Idea is kind of... No separate generator for wind turbine, other generator for biogas burning, and no third generator for possibly less pure pyrolysis gasses. possibly not even separate generator for solar parabolic mirror. Anything that makes heat, or movement that can lift water... could be used to heat same steam chamber here. And no precision turbines needed, no mechanical pistons needed... hopefully no efficiency lost.

In other types of areas, for example where cooling of house is more needed than heating of house, this precise solution might not be so very useful... at least not the water and house heating part.

What is had on this one farm ?

From area forestry:

Wood to burn.

Wood to charcoal.

Pyrolysis gasses to burn.

From Farm and Pond:

Plant mass to biogas... and biogas to burn.

Wind from vertical axis turbine.

What is wanted ?

Heating and Electricity for the farm.

Electricity to sell nearby through grid.

Plant nutrients for use in fertilization: Biogassing leftover slurry/cake.

Charcoal for use in heating. Possibly powdered.

Possibly both of the above to be combined into Terra Preta -type mixtures for making new permanent fertile soil lands from depleted sandlands (whether that will work this up in north, remains to be seen)... could be nice to make energy and food appear thus in the farm, with carbon and methane emission negativity (possible "carbon credits" to sell ?) and bioremediation of overnutrified nearby lake and any depleted sandlands found somewhere relatively nearby).

Technologies with maximum self maintainability.

[MaxT]

Thank you for very helpfull comment... very helpful data on existing things I had not pondered much. (My excuse is that I have no longer coffee maker since after 4th one broke out of shoddiness, decided to switch to more low tech of funnel filtering the coffee... )

I am working already on that clearer flow diagram, as almost everyone has pointed out that this definitely seems to be rather too cluttered and sketchy.

[ghurd]

Someone could have pointed out this is 300% wider than my screen.

[MaxT]

Again, much info that I did not know... That Tesla turbine with air bearings sounds really good... if hard to obtain/make...

On steam raising system... none would be bought. It is just a tank with water with open pipe at bottom and steam pushing down the water surface... up goes the water through the pipe. That tank (as well as the steam one) will have to withstand the pressure though... and that corrosiveness had not came to my mind.

Nickel Iron battery sounds like ideal device for storing any energy made with such...

The main source of fuel is assumed to be harvested overgrowth from nearby lake each year, which has suffered century of overnutrients from adjacent cattle farming... biogassed. The wood part is residue from area's smaller scale industrial forestry activities. Idea is not to burn the dry materials as they are, but to charcoal them for soil uses, and use the heat from resulting pyrolysis reaction into energy making as well as the biogas from biodigestors.

Heat reserver system might do something preferable for that efficiency.

The trick is not so much the storage of great masses of water as surplus energy... as in using all different dry and wet biomass processing byproducts (dry materials to charcoal powder, wet materials to biodigestor residue nutrients) into energy as well possibly incorporating the vertical axis turbine with centrifugal pumping if possible... only single generator for it all...

Corrosiveness... darn... will have to look into that... they had to keep those steam trains boilers from getting corroded inside somehow... but they do not exactly look like light homescale technology either...

[Stonebrain]

And if you run out of filters,

I just trow the coffee in the boiling water and wait a moment till it is on the bottom,then poor in my cup..very good coffee.

Nowadays ,everything must be complicated,because we need work.

cheers,

stonebrain

[Norm]

Ghurd

....It's only 200% wider than my screen .....

but it's still a pain in the .....and I get tired

of telling people if they would at least hit

return when they get to the end of the comment

box. The key thing

is previewing

before you post

your comment then you can see what it will look like after it's posted....after you post it ...it is too late to edit it...this way the only one that would be at fault would be the one that posted this too wide of a picture.

[ghurd]

Looks fine on my wife's Mac.

G-

[Ungrounded Lightning Rod]

When you're raising water with steam you have a heat engine with the water for a piston.  Because it's WATER, it limits the temperature of the steam you can use it with.  That limits the hot-side temperature of the steam engine, causing your carnot cycle efficiency to be pretty rotten.  (To be efficient you need to superheat the steam, which is not compatible with it being in contact with liquid water, even at several atmospheres of pressure.)

So your system will pump the water up.  But it won't do it particularly efficiently.  OK for pumping water when you don't care about how much fuel it takes (especially if you have the heat available for other reasons), lousy for storing energy for later use.

Re:  Nickel-iron-alkaline batteries.  They do have two downsides:

 1) In comparison with lead-acid batteries their efficiency is a bit lower, self-discharge a bit higher, low-temperature performance worse, and cost to build higher.  (Energy density is higher though and they're nearly non-toxic.)  They also are limited on charge and discharge rate.  Not a big deal for an RE system - in fact they're a pretty good match.  (Just make the windmill a bit bigger to make up for the extra losses.)  Rotten for an automotive starting battery on a vehicle that might sit for a couple months and then be expected to start.

 2) They last for many decades and can take all sorts of abuse.  Great for the user.  For a manufacturer this means there are very few repeat customers. (Mainly people putting in multiple installations.)

Apparently they're still being manufactured in China if you want some.