21st century shelter Solar a/c
Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 12:15 pm
Hi Folks:
I'll bet you are dying to ask me what I patented.
Well it's patent pending but I can tell you the equipment was not new but I combined them in a new way. and designed equipment to use the process.
My previous plans are ashes, my roof won't have flat panels at all. The technology I described to you has been superceeded ....I just got the way last week. My new method allows a walk in freezer , a refrigerator and a 10 ton A/C plant. Total cost under 500 bucks. WOAH! You Say! Woah indeed. The flat plate collectors were ok but were slow as Christmas at gathering energy.
I started with a blank sheet of paper and looked at all the stuff I've done over the years. ( I've done solar work 13 years longer than my fusor work...I have a trust fund and had a half million dollar a year company. My ex sure likes it! LOL! :>) ) One experiment years ago ,I took a portable frig and filled it with brine and ran it on a solar panel and a 40 watt inverter. A kid's pail of water froze solid in 4 hours. Then I took a thermo electric fridge
filled it with brine and made ice with just a solar panel. I did the same with ammonium nitrate. when it's in solid form and drip water on it and get -20 degree temps. Don't Believe it? Try this fill a beaker with ammonium nitrate and put in a teaspoon of water. Put a bead of water on a small board and then set the beaker on it. The water will freeze soo hard you can lift the beaker and the board will be stuck tight to it. (use small wood though)
I worked for six years to use solid ammonium nitrate with dripped solution to air condition my house at night. The 20 ton Prototype had a massive Ice tank and held 20 tons of ice at the end of the day. It barely did the job in 110 degree 80 % humitity Arkansas summers. 20 tons will only last 8 hours tops. So at two or three in the morning I would have to turn on the regular A/C.
The savings were huge but it fell short. I had dreams of going commercial but that unit would not sell. Since my recent Apiphany about patents that I grabbed the rottening brown notebook from 1984. Nitrates destroys paper over time.
I studied it for a day and came to the following conclusions:
#1 The tank must go.
#2 It must work day and night
#3 It must not use any electricity. Only sunlight.
#4 Be the same size as a normal A/C.
#5 Must be competative with standard A/Cs of the same size.
(my first system filled a 20x20 shed)
If I did all that I would have earned the right to get a patent. In the past I would have stopped dead in my tracks and given up. After building a pulse fusor from a paragraph in a journal ...it looks trivial. You know what ... it was. If something does not work don't lower the bridge lower the river. I switched to fresnel lenses and got 3000 degree on focus. Water's out. So liquid metal is the thing. So what to use....I'm familliar with NaK but I won't use it in any water based system . It blows in water. So I decided to use a eutechtic mixture of lead and bismuth . the 50:50 mix of these two elements melts at 230 degrees . the stuff boils over 4000 degrees so using it won't poise a problem. It is water safe and will not freeze solid in the water exchanger. Very Good! So in 30 seconds I solved the speed issue.
OK That left storage.
The storing on the ass end (as ice) was simply a bad design choice. It would have been better to store the heat on the front of the process design wise. A valuable lesson I learned auditing Process Thermo in Chem. Eng. class in the school of Engineering at Ole Miss. My Philosophy and Religion adviser just stared at me when I used that course as an elective for my Philosophy degree. Academics just ain't flexible ya know ! So at a bargan price of 540 bucks I learned a lesson that could be turned into a commercial product. Well worth it. So I now use a tank with a 50:50 mix of of NaCl and KCl the mix melts real close to 2000 degrees but the ratio must be fiddled with by raising the percentage of potasium chloride to raise it up to 2000
degrees. The higher the process temp the better carnot efficiency would be but the limit as usual was the material of the pipes you have to stay below the softening point of the exchanger pipes. Inconal X pipes starts turning to putty at 2200 degrees so a safety margin of 200 degrees was desirable.
You can get 3/8 inconal pipe at any speed shop. Just get high performance fuel lines for dragsters..they can get it for you. If that fails call Boing surplus in Kansas City, get the number and call. They throw away tons of Inconel daily. That plant builds the engines and airframes for the 747 , 737 and all Boing drones and fighter aircraft. Great place for slightly worn end mills and
tooling. My 8 ft ice tank shrank to something I could hold in my hands. The itty bitty tank has the capacity to store an entire day's sun in a 6" tall and 4" diameter tank. Now we have real heat and great storage to work with. But how to get the heat in the jug? Well you don't want a window on the tank for it will melt unless it's saphire. That makes it too expensive for a commercial Product. So we need some kinda of heat port in the tank. Humm inconel tube coiled inside with some kind of collector outside. Yep that'll do it. Just hIt the pipe at the focal point and we are cooking with solar. But you need to move the metal to get the heat in the tank. You need some kinda Pump.
HYumm...My theoretical musings of liquid exchange in and for hypothetical fusor power plants gave me the answer. Liquid metal MHD Pump. What you don't dig magnetoheterodynamics?
(I admit it's an aquired taste.)
Egad! More to post...later!
I'll bet you are dying to ask me what I patented.
Well it's patent pending but I can tell you the equipment was not new but I combined them in a new way. and designed equipment to use the process.
My previous plans are ashes, my roof won't have flat panels at all. The technology I described to you has been superceeded ....I just got the way last week. My new method allows a walk in freezer , a refrigerator and a 10 ton A/C plant. Total cost under 500 bucks. WOAH! You Say! Woah indeed. The flat plate collectors were ok but were slow as Christmas at gathering energy.
I started with a blank sheet of paper and looked at all the stuff I've done over the years. ( I've done solar work 13 years longer than my fusor work...I have a trust fund and had a half million dollar a year company. My ex sure likes it! LOL! :>) ) One experiment years ago ,I took a portable frig and filled it with brine and ran it on a solar panel and a 40 watt inverter. A kid's pail of water froze solid in 4 hours. Then I took a thermo electric fridge
filled it with brine and made ice with just a solar panel. I did the same with ammonium nitrate. when it's in solid form and drip water on it and get -20 degree temps. Don't Believe it? Try this fill a beaker with ammonium nitrate and put in a teaspoon of water. Put a bead of water on a small board and then set the beaker on it. The water will freeze soo hard you can lift the beaker and the board will be stuck tight to it. (use small wood though)
I worked for six years to use solid ammonium nitrate with dripped solution to air condition my house at night. The 20 ton Prototype had a massive Ice tank and held 20 tons of ice at the end of the day. It barely did the job in 110 degree 80 % humitity Arkansas summers. 20 tons will only last 8 hours tops. So at two or three in the morning I would have to turn on the regular A/C.
The savings were huge but it fell short. I had dreams of going commercial but that unit would not sell. Since my recent Apiphany about patents that I grabbed the rottening brown notebook from 1984. Nitrates destroys paper over time.
I studied it for a day and came to the following conclusions:
#1 The tank must go.
#2 It must work day and night
#3 It must not use any electricity. Only sunlight.
#4 Be the same size as a normal A/C.
#5 Must be competative with standard A/Cs of the same size.
(my first system filled a 20x20 shed)
If I did all that I would have earned the right to get a patent. In the past I would have stopped dead in my tracks and given up. After building a pulse fusor from a paragraph in a journal ...it looks trivial. You know what ... it was. If something does not work don't lower the bridge lower the river. I switched to fresnel lenses and got 3000 degree on focus. Water's out. So liquid metal is the thing. So what to use....I'm familliar with NaK but I won't use it in any water based system . It blows in water. So I decided to use a eutechtic mixture of lead and bismuth . the 50:50 mix of these two elements melts at 230 degrees . the stuff boils over 4000 degrees so using it won't poise a problem. It is water safe and will not freeze solid in the water exchanger. Very Good! So in 30 seconds I solved the speed issue.
OK That left storage.
The storing on the ass end (as ice) was simply a bad design choice. It would have been better to store the heat on the front of the process design wise. A valuable lesson I learned auditing Process Thermo in Chem. Eng. class in the school of Engineering at Ole Miss. My Philosophy and Religion adviser just stared at me when I used that course as an elective for my Philosophy degree. Academics just ain't flexible ya know ! So at a bargan price of 540 bucks I learned a lesson that could be turned into a commercial product. Well worth it. So I now use a tank with a 50:50 mix of of NaCl and KCl the mix melts real close to 2000 degrees but the ratio must be fiddled with by raising the percentage of potasium chloride to raise it up to 2000
degrees. The higher the process temp the better carnot efficiency would be but the limit as usual was the material of the pipes you have to stay below the softening point of the exchanger pipes. Inconal X pipes starts turning to putty at 2200 degrees so a safety margin of 200 degrees was desirable.
You can get 3/8 inconal pipe at any speed shop. Just get high performance fuel lines for dragsters..they can get it for you. If that fails call Boing surplus in Kansas City, get the number and call. They throw away tons of Inconel daily. That plant builds the engines and airframes for the 747 , 737 and all Boing drones and fighter aircraft. Great place for slightly worn end mills and
tooling. My 8 ft ice tank shrank to something I could hold in my hands. The itty bitty tank has the capacity to store an entire day's sun in a 6" tall and 4" diameter tank. Now we have real heat and great storage to work with. But how to get the heat in the jug? Well you don't want a window on the tank for it will melt unless it's saphire. That makes it too expensive for a commercial Product. So we need some kinda of heat port in the tank. Humm inconel tube coiled inside with some kind of collector outside. Yep that'll do it. Just hIt the pipe at the focal point and we are cooking with solar. But you need to move the metal to get the heat in the tank. You need some kinda Pump.
HYumm...My theoretical musings of liquid exchange in and for hypothetical fusor power plants gave me the answer. Liquid metal MHD Pump. What you don't dig magnetoheterodynamics?
(I admit it's an aquired taste.)
Egad! More to post...later!