A miniature version of Georgia Tech's Solar Vortex.
Now in its fourth year, the summit of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) never fails to bring out the most cutting-edge ideas in renewable energy. This week’s conference inWashington D.C. is no exception. I walked the exhibition floor today and ran across some sexy new concepts in solar power.
Solar Vortex: Dust Devil Power
The Solar Vortex borrows its inspiration from dust devils, those miniature twisters of excited dirt that sometimes arise in the dusty and dry stretches of the U.S. Southwest. What gets a dust devil going is the difference in temperature between the scorching-hot ground and the somewhat cooler air above. The hot air rises, twists and gives rise to a momentary dust tornado.
Georgia Techis the leader of a consortium that aims to capture this dust-devil energy inside a stubby cylinder. The concept is simple: The cylinder sits upon a dark surface that absorbs lots of heat. The “walls,” so to speak, are angled vanes that take the hot air rising off that hot surface and twists it into a vortex. At the top, a set of fan blades sit in the path of the rising air. The fan blades turn, activating a generator that creates electricity.
The video below is a miniature model of the Solar Vortex on the exhibition floor. The cylinder sits on a plate that is, like hot pavement, almost too hot to touch, about 47 degrees Celsius (116 degrees Fahrenheit). The movement you see in the blade is solely from the force of moving air.
Georgia Tech has already purchased a site in Mesa, Arizona — plenty of heat there — and is a working to build a 50-kilowatt model by 2015. Final negotiations with ARPA-E for funding are underway. Arne Pearlstein, a professor of mechanical engineering who is a collaborator, told me that this commercial-scale version might be 10 meters wide but only two or three meters tall, and that the units would sit about 55 meters apart. These squat machines could bring renewable energy to regions that are bombarded by heat but don’t have much wind. (Though gusts of wind would only serve to make the turbine spin faster, Pearlstein said.)
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