My Friend Andre just introduced me to this really cool idea: clean, green, compressed air created vy falling water.
It’s called a trompe and has existed for decades (like much of the cleanest and earth friendlist technology). Some information can be found here.
There’s all kinds of things you can with compressed air, like power a car, perhaps an airplane too (remember those little air powered airplanes that flew for about 10 seconds?).
Recently, chaptor, wrote about the vortex tube cooler/heater… it requires compressed air to run. Andre immediately concluded that if we hook up the Trompe to the vortex-tube then voila… free cold (or hot) air. Put that cold air in a well insulated box and you could ship such things as vaccines and fish.
And guess what… water flows off your roof too. So catch it on it’s way down to the rain barrel, harness the water for your garden and the air for… something else.
I bet there could be hundreds of uses for free compressed air!
Related posts:
This same idea was used in-the-old-days to get to very low vacuum. They could use conventional piston type pumps to get most of the air out, then they hooked the system up to a mercury drip. The vacuum chamber was connected to the mercury drop by an inclined tube. The “few” remaining air molecules traveled into the drip tube. As the mercury fell it swept those molecules down and out. Then more air from the chamber filled in behind. All you had to do was have a “drop” of mercury tall enough to overcome the suction from the vacuum tube down to the low pressure you needed. This could be used to make light bulbs, florescent bulbs etc.
(Soon I will be blogging about an hydrolic ram pump that is a similar concept too.)
Reply
oops… forgot a link… http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1999-09/936855480.Eg.r.html
Reply
Whilst shamelessly surfing to see how Goggleesk our Scroggles blogs are I chose to Google “trompe”. As usual, I found something amazing and unexpected… Trompe l’oeil – “trick the eye” oil painting. Check it out! Amazing! http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/t/trompeloeil.html
Follow the link to the cupboard illusion to see some really cool shapes including an icosahedron and several variations like my favorite truncated icosa… the volley ball! circa 1520! …nothing is new…
Trompe is French for “trick” or “fool”, as in “trompe le monde” meaning “fool the world”
Now back to ferreting the Googleeskness of Scroggling…
Reply