Water Power R&D

Archive for the ‘pipelines’ Category

The crises in Haiti has an interesting desalination story. The  aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson is currently offshore of Haiti sending supplies ashore and picking up the wounded. Its onboard nuclear powered desalination plant   makes some 400,000 gallons of its own fresh water every day, and much of it will soon be going ashore.

The nuclear-powered vessel, which had been heading to its new home port in San Diego when it was diverted to Haiti hours after the quake, has massive desalination capacity - purifying the same ocean saltwater it traverses - and the Vinson has a daily excess of 200,000 gallons “that we can give away,” says Cmdr. William McKinley, who oversees the desalination process.

Nuclear powered aircraft carriers have been desalinating their own water for 30 years and submarines have been nuclear powered for 50 years without incident.

The reason I mention this is that two inventions in the last several years or so will make it readily possible–later  this decade to assemble a portable nuclear powered desalination plants in  fairly short order. The first is  the portable desalination plant. The second is the portable nuclear power plant.  As part of disaster relief it might become a part of FEMA’s tools to have portable nuclear power plants and portable desalination plants in storage ready to be rolled out on short notice.

There are a number of portable desalination systems developed in the last couple years that might scale.

UCLA has developed a portable desalination system that can desalinate any kind of salty feed water.

The M3 demonstrated its effectiveness in a recent field study in California’s San Joaquin Valley in which it desalted agricultural drainage water that was nearly saturated with calcium sulfate salts, accomplishing the desalination with just one reverse osmosis stage.

M3 could also be deployed to produce fresh water in emergency situations for up to 6,000 to 12,000 people daily.

There is another portable desalination plant developed at San Dia National Labs

When the research plant opened in August of 2007, Zero Discharge Desalination, a high-tech portable laboratory designed by Dr. Tom Davis with Dow Water Solutions and Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, was brought in for dignitaries to tour during the opening celebration.

ZDD is a state-of-the-art technology for removing the salt solids dissolved in brackish water and managing the concentrated wastes.

Already emergency tested is the portable desalination unit from the Tularosa Basin National Desalination Research Facility.

When Gulf Coast residents were left without a drinking water source in the aftermath of Katrina, Tularosa Basin National Desalination Research Facility sent its portable reverse osmosis (RO) membrane purification system to Biloxi, Miss., to provide drinking water to 40,000 local inhabitants. The unit can produce over 100,000 gallons per day of drinkable water from contaminated river water or from seawater.

In fact, for anyone wishing to do further research on the latest portable desalination units available today a visit to the Tularosa Basin National Desalination Research Facility is order. They have set up a test site for anyone interested in testing out their new desalination designs.

What about portable nuclear power plants?

The World Nuclear Association has an international list of   small nuclear power plant designs. The list is small. However, there may be as many as 90 portable nuclear power designs worldwide. Given that scale and variety  of design innovation–its likely that portable nuclear power plants will be one of the great technology stories of this decade

Two early American entries in the field are still 3-8 years away.

The first, Hyperion Power Generation has thus far hogged the mini nuclear reactor spotlight, but NuScale Power claims that it can cut nuclear plant construction costs and increase safety with its Lego-like 45 megawatt modular reactors. For disaster relief Hyperion might be best because their model is designed for off grid use.  Besides, NuScale Plants would need refueling every two years.

There are many other American companies that will come on stream in the next couple years. I’ll mention two.   TerraPower “runs primarily on natural or depleted uranium, rather than enriched uranium. With un-enriched fuel, the reactors could be loaded up with fuel and sealed for 30 to 60 years. ” Their product is further away from being completed.  A fourth company  “Babcock & Wilcox, a large energy management company, is getting into the market for small nuclear reactors.”

While TerraPower and Hyperion are staffed and run by experienced nuclear executives, Babcock & Wilson can brag about something else. Namely, that they’ve been in the nuclear reactor construction business for 50 years. That, and they have lots of money.

Since Babcock & Wilson have been providing small nuclear power plants for the navy for decades — you would think they would be first to market for portable nuclear power plants for the civilian field– but maybe not.
Therefor Hyperion may well be the first to market:

Hyperion Power Generation’s Power Module is a modular, hot tub-sized nuclear reactor that delivers 70 megawatts of thermal power or 25 megawatts of electric power for seven to 10 years. Hyperion expects to sell 4,000 of the $30 million reactors when they go on sale in 2013. The company has already received 70 pre-orders, proving that there is a market for small nuclear devices.

Mark Campagna, representing Hyperion, explained that the firm’s 25 MW “nuclear battery” (slides) is a spin-off from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The firm continues to rely on expertise from the federal science facility with a cooperative R&D agreement.

Unlike B&W and NuScale, both of which emphasized hooking up their reactors to existing electrical grids, Campagna said the competitive advantage of Hyperion’s design is that it is focused on providing local, or “distributed power,” where there is no grid. Key export markets will include remote oil and gas fields, mining, and military installations. A target use for developing nations will be to power potable water treatment facilities.

Hyperion’s focus on off grid power generation might make them best for FEMA type disaster relief operations.

But– and here’s the kicker. If you can drop a power plant with this much free standing power anywhere–more interesting things become possible. One of the uses for an off grid power plant mentioned above is to cook oil from oil shale (at +600 degrees) in places like Colorado and Wyoming. But as I mentioned in a blog a while back –this same technique might be used to cook water out of gypsum at 212 degrees.

Now here is where it gets fun.

Portable nuclear power plants collapse the complexity of providing energy for pumps to pump rivers of water in pipes 1000’s of miles. All you need is pipes,  pumps and off grid portable nuclear power generators to push water 1000’s of miles inland from any coast.

So?

The main point of this blog is that the 21st century will kick off in earnest when the cost desalination and bulk water transport collapses. Thereby making it cost effective to pump fresh water from the American coast inland 1000 miles  to various places out west  where crops can be grown. Deserts would be turned green, the habitable size of the US would be enlarged by 1/3. Just as the Hoover dam created the model for water policy around the world– the US model could be replicated world wide –thereby doubling the size of the habitable earth.

If their costs come down sufficiently –portable nuclear power plants may just make this possible.But even in the near term …in the next ten years portable nuclear power plants just collapse the complexity of pumping bulk water long distances. So while the cost of shipping water might be high–it still can be accomplished without too much difficulty.

There is one other thing that portable nuclear power plants make possible.

It becomes  technically easy to do bulk water transfers on the fly.

What does that mean?

With a portable nuclear power plant it would be technically easy to build a pipeline, line it with pumps powered by portable nuclear power plants and pump vast volumes of water 1000 miles for 2 months of the year. And then the rest of the year, either move the portable nuclear power plants, shut them down or send their electricity elsewhere.

Hmm what 2 months of the year are we talking about?

Well currently everyone hates bulk water transfers–that is the people in the great lakes and Canada. but what if  you could pull rivers of water out of the Mississippi for two months of the year while the river was at flood stage–thereby lowering water flows below that of flood stage. There’s a lot of people along the Mississippi would think this a good idea. So instead of paying the army corps of engineers a billion annually for Mississippi flood control and FEMA another billion for flood managment– you spend the money on pumping a river of water over the South Pass in Wyoming and then letting it run down into the Colorado basin (& maybe use the downslope over the great divide to power generators for electrical production) –or pump flood water to the sinks of eastern Colorado to refill the Ogallala aquifer. or further south, send the water to west Texas.

Nobody dams the Mississippi. But if you pumped a lot of water away from the Missippi at just the right time–there would be no more need for vast expensive flood control projects.

Just a thought.

Recently,   a Minnesota company announced plans to use a oil derrick off the Texas coast to site  wave power energy production devices to power a desalination plant. It would serve as demonstration pilot. Desalination has never been done quite this way before. They started work in August. They’re interested in producing bottled water from shallower depths than the water harvested off the Big Island in Hawaii–where water is first pumped ashore –before its desalinated.

I think something like  an oil derrick platform would be the model that DVX Technologies should use whenever they go out to sea. The platform would house the maintenance crew– while the desalination work was done 850-900 feet below.

I have written a number of blogs about DVX Technologies in the last year or so on the idea of  using ocean pressures to desalinate water. On several occasions I have mentioned that one way to bring water ashore would be to drill a slant well from onshore (or offshore–whichever is cheaper) so that the water runs down hill toward shore. On shore, then, the fresh water could be pumped up as from a well. What’s the cost/benefit of this procedure amortized over, say, 30 years? Beats me. A good water–or more likely an oil — consultant would have the tools to figure  out the capital energy and maintenance costs.

How do you evaluate the costs?  You’d do that by comparing the costs of comparable procedures for getting water ashore.

As far as I can see, the other procedures involve various technologies for pumping water in pipes along the ocean bottom up hill to shore.

So this time I’ll discuss various power sources to pump fresh water ashore uphill along the ocean bottom from the underwater desalination plant . I’ll make the assumption that the oil companies will already have optimized the best way to lay and maintain pipe. Further, I’ll assume that the oil companies will already have optimized the best practices for installing & maintaining an offshore platform–and that their crews would be best suited for installing and maintaining a water platform. Finally I’ll assume that the rough cost of oil or gas generators to pump water ahsore is already known; that this can also be used as a baseline against which to evaluate  other  ways to power the pumps.

Oil rigs have desalinized ocean water for years– but they have done so for their own use. They don’t produce fresh water on a commercial scale. (However, except for the membrane plants themselves, the oil companies have all the skills/tools necessary to do offshore commercial grade desalination.)

Most off shore drilling rigs have diesel or  gas powered generators.

If a desal plant on the ocean floor was sited over a natural gas deposit below the ocean floor being drilled by  an oil rig…then the natural gas could be used to power the pumps that pumped fresh water ashore from the underwater desalination plant. Did you get that? This won’t happen very often–especially not in the waters off southern california where more coastal drilling is frowned on.

So how else could you power big offshore pumps onsite?  That is, without importing power to the platform by means of oil or gas.

Another way to power pumps — to send desalinized water ashore–would be with wind generators on rigs. Something like this is currently in planning in the north sea. If you read the article you’ll notice that they have all the attendant construction and installation issues resolved. However, the waters off southern California are not as world famous for wind as is the north sea.

I should also mention that it would be easy to drop a portable nuclear reactor onshore opposite the oil rig desalination plant–and run a power cable out to sea. Here’s another company. At present  its unlikely  that any kind of nuclear plant would be built in Southern California. But that could change.

So what other sources of power might be used to drive a pump?

Four properties of salt water can be exploited for energy to power pumps.

1.)The most esoteric/furthest from commercialization/expensive is R&D by which the navy is looking for  ways to turn salt water into diesal and jet fuel.

2.)Another exploitable power source is thermal conversion power plants. These are  big on shore because of new technologies especially in Utah. However, offshore the temperature differences are narrower and the opportunities fewer. But they exist. In 2008 Hawaii entered into an agreement to develop thermal conversion power plant off the Big Island.

November 20, 2008 (ENS) - Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle Tuesday announced a new energy partnership to develop a 10 megawatt ocean thermal energy conversion pilot plant in Hawaii. Electricity will be generated from the difference in temperature between the ocean’s warm surface and its colder depths.
During the Governor’s official state visit to Taiwan, she came to an agreement with the Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute and the Lockheed Martin Corporation to build the initial pilot plant in Hawaii.

The energy produced is used to desalinize bottled water for export to Japan. The water depths they are talking about +-2000 feet. It would take more research to know whether the same technology could be used for 850-900 feet ie shallower depths and lower temperature differences. For now, I don’t think the temperature differences are great enough for commercial grade energy production. But I could be wrong about that because Oasys they can exploit only 20 degree differences to produce power. The jury is still out on this.

3. Osmotic power plant might be developed to take advantage of the  salinity differences between the desalinized water and seawater to produce energy to pump  water ashore. The Norwegians are currently trying to develop this technology. Its a pilot. IBM is looking into it as well.  The technology isn’t anywhere near mature. Moreover the volumes of water needed to make energy are too large. However, this technology can be reversed. As I first mentioned in this piece from 2007 on Forward Osmosis and again this year, Oasys promises to desalinate water for US$ 0.37-0.44/m³ once fully scaled up. (That was in the Spring of 2009. By the Fall, Oasys was promising much cheaper costs.) Oasys promises to use the use the same process as the Norwegians to produce electricity only much more efficiently. Their procedures for producing desalinated water looks more mature than their electrical generation idea.

4.  Ocean pressures at 900 feet should convert  to electrical power. Trouble is I have not seen any examples of companies actually doing this.

This technology developed by Energy Recovery Inc. might  be adapted to convert the waste stream from a deep water desalination plant– into energy to drive a pump. According to this Forbes Magazine article

Competing pressure exchangers work by capturing energy in the exit water via a turbine (analogous to a waterwheel), then transferring that shaft power to a pump (waterwheel in reverse) for the entering seawater.

It shouldn’t be too tough to create an exit stream. (Think WWII sea war movie. The submarine has just been hit by a depth charge. Water hisses into the hold through the cracked hull.) You convert that water to shaft power to power a pump — to pump water ashore.

5. As used on the Texas oil derrick, wave power could be harnessed to pump water ashore. This article about wave power generation in San Francisco lists the companies under consideration.  All are in various stages of prototype. They could be used to either generate electricity to run the pumps that pump the water ashore… or pump the water ashore directly. Here is another article about wave power being used to generate power for the  small scale desalination plant for bottled water on a platform in the gulf of Mexico

Of the choices mentioned above, I think the best ie cheapest– would be  4.)Energy Recovery’s tool. It could be adapted to convert 850 ft depth ocean pressures into electricity to drive a pump to push water onshore. imho it would cost +-400k to make the adaption.

DVX  about whom I’ve done several blogs on deep water desalination currently has a ” small installation of the technology in the San Joaquin Reservoir near Newport Beach.”  (Here’s a diagram.)They’re looking to set up another test site in the near future.  They experienced biofouling problems at the first site. Now they are looking into pretreatement technologies. Here is one. They expect to license out their technology in 2010.

Finally, I should mention again that NanoH2O has a much more efficient membrane coming out in the next couple months. However, its not likely that they’ll have the membrane configured to the specs for DVX Technologies. It would be helpful if someone could find the ways/means to get some prototype NanoH2O membranes for the DVX Technologies work.

A little housekeeping before I get started…anyone interested in the Kanzius effect should thumb down to comment #74–and after looking at the comment– just for the hey of it — ask a buddy in the labs with an RF machine to fire some radio waves at salt water at RF 26.451. (If the experiment is a success — his lab will blow up…just kidding…but some caution is required.)

Another item. I’ve shifted to a new url. If you have found this blog to useful/helpful/interesting I would appreciate it if you would ask your webmaster to provide a link to this website.

Ok, on to biz.

On January 8 President-elect Barack Obama called for doubling the nation’s renewable energy production over the next three years.

According to the latest “Monthly Energy Review” issued by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, renewable energy accounted for more than 10 percent of the domestically-produced energy used in the United States in the first half of 2008.

So Obama is talking about doubling renewables as a percentage of the national energy output from 10% to 20%.

The growth of renewables as a percentage of national energy production has been 1.5 annually averaged over the last two years. (In 2006 renewables accounted for 7% of the US energy output.) So Obama’s proposal is to double the rate of growth of renewables. This doesn’t seem to be too big a challenge considering the amount of money they will be throwing at the problem and the immense momentum for change already built up.

Still a leap in renewables as a % of the US energy picture from 10% to 20% is an enormous jump.

From where will the growth come?

Currently, biofuels and hydo are the largest component of renewables — with each taking roughly an equal share. Its not likely hydo will get much growth from here. Solar and wind are experiencing 40% growth annually but they’re coming off such a small base that even if their growth rates soar to 100-200% annually– they’ll still only account for 2-3% of the total US energy output portfolio in three years.

That leaves biofuels.

I don’t think the incoming administration will push for more ethanol from corn or soybeans.

That means they’ll be converting corn stalks wood chips, lawn clippings agricultural waste city sewage, garbage darn near anything carbon based– to biofuel.

The Pentagon has already signed some major contracts here. Biomas production plants are springing up on military bases all over the country.

imho cellulose biofuels is where most of the growth in renewables will come in the next two years.

However,–at current rates– by year three –or maybe four — imho something else will happen.

The trouble with cellulose is that the new administration is going to sign the Kyoto accords. Much of biomass production does not actually advance the goal of carbon footprint reduction. So even this will not be quite the answer that the new administration is looking for.

What does that leave?

Well in biomass there is one solution that will enable the US to reduce its carbon footprint in line with Kyoto restrictions –while producing energy. That is, algae production sited next to installed coal plants. I’ve mentioned that here and here.

Rather than pipe carbon dioxide into underground formations–the idea would be to pipe carbon dioxide into greenhouses or green ponds. About +-300 acres of algae will support one coal plant’s carbon dioxide output.

The smart money at DARPA has been investing in algae production since 2006 In Dec 2008 they signed more contracts with SAIC and General Atomics to collapse the cost of algae oil.

During the first 18 months of the project, teams from General Atomics and SAIC will try to get costs of algae-based oil down to $2 a gallon. In the following 18 months, they will push to drop it to $1 a gallon and build a 30-to 50-acre demonstration facility.

One team, headed by General Atomics, says they’ve already cut the cost of algae-based oil from $30 a gallon to about $6 or $7 a gallon (in three years from 2006-2008). But the price needs to get closer to a dollar to make it competitive, said David Hazlebeck, the chemical engineer and biofuels program manager who is heading General Atomics’ efforts.

The general impression I’ve been getting from reading various representatives of the industry is that algae to oil costs respond very well to economies of scale. For example, an El Paso algae to oil company called Valcent is currently running algae to oil trials. What would the costs be to scale up the trial?

A Vertigro plant of the size needed to supply a large biofuel refinery would require about 200 to 300 acres and “probably cost about
$800,000 per acre” to build and operate. That means a full-scale plant would cost about $160 million to $240 million.
The Vertigro system is expected to be able to produce algae oil for about $1.70 a gallon versus about $2.63 a gallon for soybean oil. Those numbers are without government subsidies or tax credits.

There are about 100 small algae to oil companies and the number is growing. None of them are well funded–except for Microsoft funded Sapphire Energy

imho a federal investment of 5 billion into the algae to oil business to fund acres of algae to oil greenhouses/ponds would push down algae to oil costs quickly and create jobs quickly. Likely the best way to do the funding would be to spread it across many small companies.

Is there method to this uh–you name it? Yeah. OPEC is draining oil production currently from the system so that in xxxx months when the world economy turns–oil prices will instantly shoot up. This will suck out America’s growing capital base/tax base–and throttle any nascent expansion. The proper response for the US is to grow our oil production capacity fast so that when demand picks up — supply will be there to meet it–without prices jumping sky high. If we can’t drill here drill now–then we have to grow here grow now.There won’t be any great push to get more ethanol from corn, soybeans or any other food source on crop land. So for growing energy–algae is the answer.

Maybe a five billion dollar investment in algae to oil is too little.

What does this have to do with water and water desalination in particular? According to the article:

Of course, algae grow in water. But scientists say that’s not necessarily a problem since the organisms can be grown in brackish – or salty – water and would not compete for dwindling supplies of fresh water.

Some companies like Algenolbiofuels use seawater.

Last year PetroSun claimed they had completed the first commercial scale algae to oil production center in Rio Hondo Texas in a series of saltwater ponds spanning 1,100 acres.

Green Star Products, Inc. uses brackish water.

Green Star Products, Inc. today announced that EcoAlgae USA, LLC, has received a signed resolution from Saline County Missouri commissioners to construct a commercial Algae Production Facility in conjunction with an Integrated Biorefinery Complex.

Valcent Grows Algae Oil in El Paso with fresh water–and not much fresh water. Their CEO Glen Kertz has figured out a solution to two problems with his closed-loop algae-growing system, preventing water evaporation and stopping infiltration of foreign species of algae. Mark Townsend Cox, CEO of the New Energy Fund, an $11 million New York-based fund which invests in companies developing renewable energy products, and Global Green consultant, said Global Green and Valcent appear to have one of the better algae-growing systems among 15 to 20 companies working on projects to use algae for biofuel production. “They have a really smart design that I believe is scalable and (has) the ability to do it pretty rapidly,” Cox said. Kathyrn Dodson, director of the city Economic Development Department, who toured the Vertigro research facility Wednesday, said at least three other companies are working on biofuel projects in the El Paso area.

Here is the CEO of Vertigrow on video discussing algae production system.

The reason I find the El Paso algae story to be interesting is that El Paso is the site of the recently opened — and world’s largest — inland water desalination plant. Are the two related? I think so. In any case the presence of both brackish and fresh water gives algae companies more choices as to algae species to choose from.

For further study see:

Scientific American: Energy versus Water: Solving Both Crises Together

A Guide to Water Investing: Desalination

One Word: Plastics Algae

Oil from algae? Scientists seek green gold
Valcent Products Inc.

Altela uses low grade waste heat for desalination

Stonybrook purification uses a better membrane.

Algae: ‘The ultimate in renewable energy’

Greenfuel has done the initial testing of algae production with CO2

‘The 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy’: 2008-09 Rankings Published by Biofuels Digest

An interesting article here. Arizona Mulls New Water Source: Ocean

According to the article:

The water for Arizona’s future needs may lie off the coast of a popular Mexican resort, in the Gulf of California.

State officials are studying the idea of importing filtered ocean water from an as yet unbuilt desalination plant in Puerto Peñasco, 60 miles south of the U.S. border.

Such a project would raise a host of political, economic and environmental issues, and it’s not clear who would pay the construction costs, which could top $250 billion.

Did you read that: 250 billion. That’s with a B. I figure that has to be a typo. But I don’t know.

The New York Times discusses Alaska Governor Palin’s gas pipline from the North Slope. The cost is 40 billion for a 1700 mile pipeline. Its a long way from being built.

Gallon for gallon — gas is more valuable than water. So water pipelines need to be cheaper than gas pipelines. How to do that?

Recently I posted a piece about the importance of cheaply researching (by way of computer modeling)a new kind of energy efficient, easy to manufacture, easy to repair kind of pipeline   for shipping water inland 1000 miles and more at little extra cost –beyond the cost of desalination.

There’s another step to the process. So what would happen once you had several different material and design specs for a pipeline in the computer… what then. Well the way to get down costs for a big project is to do a 3D fax of the pipeline–maybe changing the material and design specs as the pipeline snaked its way up through the inland desert.

This technology is already in fast forward.

USC’s ‘print-a-house’ construction technology

Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment, is starting to support research on the “Contour Crafting” automated construction system that its creator believes will one day be able to build full-scale houses in hours.

This technology would easily adapt to the creation of pipelines by way of this extrusion mechanism.

Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, says the system is a scale-up of the rapid prototyping machines now widely used in industry to “print out” three-dimensional objects designed with CAD/CAM software, usually by building up successive layers of plastic.

They want to move from plastic to concrete.

“Instead of plastic, Contour Crafting will use concrete,” said Khoshnevis. More specifically, the material is a special concrete formulation provided by USG, the multi-national construction materials company that has been contributing to Khoshnevis’ research for some years as a member of an industry coalition backing the USC Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT), home of the initiative.

The feasibility of the Contour Crafting process has been established by a recent research effort which has resulted in automated fabrication of six-foot concrete walls.

Consider if they can go from plastic to concrete–it won’t be long before they can do just about any material. Not just any material. Any design as well. They can already extrude walls.

The feasibility of the Contour Crafting process has been established by a recent research effort which has resulted in automated fabrication of six-foot concrete walls.

The project has major backing:

Caterpillar will be a major contributor to upcoming work on the project, according to Everett Brandt, an engineer in Caterpillar’s Technology & Solutions Division, who will work with Khoshnevis. Another Caterpillar engineer, Brian Howson, will also participate in the effort.

The goals for the project are really everything needed to develop pipeline extrusion machines.

Goals for this phase of the project are process and material engineering research to relate various process parameters and material characteristics to the performance of the specimens to be produced. Various experimental and analytical methods will be employed in the course of the research.

Future phases of the project are expected to include geometric design issues, research in deployable robotics and material delivery methods, automated plumbing and electrical network installation, and automated inspection and quality control.

Somebody needs to be developing a pipeline script to be ready when these machines are ready to read the instruction set.

The environmentalist case for using wind and solar now dovetails with national security concerns for getting off dependence on foreign oil. You can see it in T-Boone Pickens ads on tv now. Something similar is afoot with water. Only in this case rising sea levels would seem to force the same change as falling rainfall in desert regions. Read this LA Times article about environmentalist Carl Hodges making the environmental case for shipping seawater inland to neutralize sea-level rise (as well as raise food and fuel.)

Hodges only wants to ship seawater a little way inland. I don’t think he quite understands the technological revolution underway currently.

In May 2007 I posted that IBM Predicts Big Changes in Water Production & Distribution in 5 Years

imho in order to have a successful 21st century water policy– desalinated water from the ocean will need to be piped to deserts 1000 miles inland on a vast scale. In order for this to be done economically — a way needs to be devised to cheaply create in bulk very low maintenance pipes that push water uphill over long distances with little or no added energy cost. In order to cheaply invent these pipes–a computer modeling system will have to be undertaken.

There are three variables that I can think of right off that might be modeled to push water uphill passively: some variation of hydrophobic vs hydrophillic material inside the pipe. Some variation of heat & cold conduction from the outside to the inside of the pipe. Some variation of shape inside the pipe. Nor is it clear that a pipe needs to be completely hollow. A redwood tree pushes immense amounts of water straight up daily. In fact, according to this physorg article tree branching key to efficient flow in nature and novel materials. Finally, some allowance for solar energy to be used for pumping can be made for early models as the cost of solar power falls under the cost of coal in the next few years.

What would be the algorithms to use in the computer models? First of all, I think that materials simulations are already well understood. What may not be so well understood is the flow of water across complex materials & surfaces and the interaction of that in a pipe. So the idea is to find algorithms that enable researchers to test new materials either singly or in combination with others–and with different shapes– as they interact with water in a pipe. What algorithms? NIST is going come out with a new library of mathematical references.

NIST releases preview of much-anticipated online mathematics reference

That’s a whole library of equations on which to base algorithms.

My suggestion would be three formulas. These are not algorithms. But they could be incorporated into algorithms. One formula models the flow of water over complex shapes and variable materials. Another formula models water in a pipe. A third models how fluids separate from a surface under certain conditions See below.

140-year-old math problem solved by researcher

Academic makes key additions to the Schwarz-Christoffel formula

A problem which has defeated mathematicians for almost 140 years has been solved by a researcher at Imperial College London.

Professor Darren Crowdy, Chair in Applied Mathematics, has made the breakthrough in an area of mathematics known as conformal mapping, a key theoretical tool used by mathematicians, engineers and scientists to translate information from a complicated shape to a simpler circular shape so that it is easier to analyse.

This theoretical tool has a long history and has uses in a large number of fields including modelling airflow patterns over intricate wing shapes in aeronautics. It is also currently being used in neuroscience to visualise the complicated structure of the grey matter in the human brain.

A formula, now known as the Schwarz-Christoffel formula, was developed by two mathematicians in the mid-19th century to enable them to carry out this kind of mapping. However, for 140 years there has been a deficiency in this formula: it only worked for shapes that did not contain any holes or irregularities.

Now Professor Crowdy has made additions to the famous Schwarz-Christoffel formula which mean it can be used for these more complicated shapes. He explains the significance of his work, saying:

“This formula is an essential piece of mathematical kit which is used the world over. Now, with my additions to it, it can be used in far more complex scenarios than before. In industry, for example, this mapping tool was previously inadequate if a piece of metal or other material was not uniform all over - for instance, if it contained parts of a different material, or had holes.”

Professor Crowdy’s work has overcome these obstacles and he says he hopes it will open up many new opportunities for this kind of conformal mapping to be used in diverse applications.

“With my extensions to this formula, you can take account of these differences and map them onto a simple disk shape for analysis in the same way as you can with less complex shapes without any of the holes,” he added.

Professor Crowdy’s improvements to the Schwarz-Christoffel formula were published in the March-June 2007 issue of Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

http://nick2.wordpress.com/2006/10/06/carbon-nanotube-research/

Navier-Stokes Equation Progress?

Penny Smith, a mathematician at Lehigh University, has posted a paper on the arXiv that purports to solve one of the Clay Foundation Millenium problems, the one about the Navier-Stokes Equation. The paper is here, and Christina Sormani has set up a web-page giving some background and exposition of Smith’s work.

Wikipedia describes Navier-Stokes Equations this way:

They are one of the most useful sets of equations because they describe the physics of a large number of phenomena of academic and economic interest. They are used to model weather, ocean currents, water flow in a pipe, motion of stars inside a galaxy, and flow around an airfoil (wing). They are also used in the design of aircraft and cars, the study of blood flow, the design of power stations, the analysis of the effects of pollution, etc. Coupled with Maxwell’s equations they can be used to model and study magnetohydrodynamics.

MIT solves 100-year-old engineering problem
Elizabeth A. Thomson, News Office
September 24, 2008

The green ‘wall’ in this 3D movie shows where a fluid is separating from the surface it is flowing past as predicted by a new MIT theory. MIT scientists and colleagues have reported new mathematical and experimental work for predicting where that aerodynamic separation will occur. Click here to read more
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When these equations pass peer review they’ll be very helpful in algorithms that model fluids flowing in a pipe.

Jeez, here’s still another amazing innovation. Get this. A couple of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have figured out how to make water boil at a 30 fold increase in the number of bubbles created per unit of energy. That means that energy costs to create steam would drop by 30 fold. This process “could translate into considerable efficiency gains and cost savings if incorporated into a wide range of industrial equipment that relies on boiling to create heat or steam.”

Ya think one of them might be desalinaton? Hmm well also there is the Kanzius effect. An efficient heat transfer process there might make the 3000 degree flame net energy for the process. As well you might be able to get more steam for less energy to reduce costs of a kanzius steam reformation process. or efficiently boiled water might be injected into gypsum deposits. imho the salt would play hell on the nanorods that coat the copper sufaces mentioned in the article below. but if you could desalt and heat the water before it hit the nanorod copper plates the steam could be used to drive electrical generation more efficiently to reduce costs of membrane desalination. Finally, a word about pipelines. Maybe an efficient heat transfer material in combination with hydrophobic materials would enable cheaper ways to push water uphill in a pipe. Anyhow check out the article below. Interesting stuff. There’s a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Pr

As well as the write up below in PhyOrg.

Anyhow consider the article below.

New nano technique significantly boosts boiling efficiency

A scanning electron microscope shows copper nanorods deposited on a copper substrate. Air trapped in the forest of nanorods helps to dramatically boost the creation of bubbles and the efficiency of boiling, which in turn could lead to new ways of cooling computer chips as well as cost savings for any number of industrial boiling application. Credit: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute/ Koratkar Whoever penned the old adage “a watched pot never boils” surely never tried to heat up water in a pot lined with copper nanorods.

A new study from researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that by adding an invisible layer of the nanomaterials to the bottom of a metal vessel, an order of magnitude less energy is required to bring water to boil. This increase in efficiency could have a big impact on cooling computer chips, improving heat transfer systems, and reducing costs for industrial boiling applications. “Like so many other nanotechnology and nanomaterials breakthroughs, our discovery was completely unexpected,” said Nikhil A. Koratkar, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer, who led the project. “The increased boiling efficiency seems to be the result of an interesting interplay between the nanoscale and microscale surfaces of the treated metal. The potential applications for this discovery are vast and exciting, and we’re eager to continue our investigations into this phenomenon.” Bringing water to a boil, and the related phase change that transforms the liquid into vapor, requires an interface between the water and air. In the example of a pot of water, two such interfaces exist: at the top where the water meets air, and at the bottom where the water meets tiny pockets of air trapped in the microscale texture and imperfections on the surface of the pot. Even though most of the water inside of the pot has reached 100 degrees Celsius and is at boiling temperature, it cannot boil because it is surrounded by other water molecules and there is no interface — i.e., no air — present to facilitate a phase change. Bubbles are typically formed when air is trapped inside a microscale cavity on the metal surface of a vessel, and vapor pressure forces the bubble to the top of the vessel. As this bubble nucleation takes place, water floods the microscale cavity, which in turn prevents any further nucleation from occurring at that specific site. Koratkar and his team found that by depositing a layer of copper nanorods on the surface of a copper vessel, the nanoscale pockets of air trapped within the forest of nanorods “feed” nanobubbles into the microscale cavities of the vessel surface and help to prevent them from getting flooded with water. This synergistic coupling effect promotes robust boiling and stable bubble nucleation, with large numbers of tiny, frequently occurring bubbles. “By themselves, the nanoscale and microscale textures are not able to facilitate good boiling, as the nanoscale pockets are simply too small and the microscale cavities are quickly flooded by water and therefore single-use,” Koratkar said. “But working together, the multiscale effect allows for significantly improved boiling. We observed a 30-fold increase in active bubble nucleation site density — a fancy term for the number of bubbles created — on the surface treated with copper nanotubes, over the nontreated surface.” Boiling is ultimately a vehicle for heat transfer, in that it moves energy from a heat source to the bottom of a vessel and into the contained liquid, which then boils, and turns into vapor that eventually releases the heat into the atmosphere. This new discovery allows this process to become significantly more efficient, which could translate into considerable efficiency gains and cost savings if incorporated into a wide range of industrial equipment that relies on boiling to create heat or steam. “If you can boil water using 30 times less energy, that’s 30 times less energy you have to pay for,” he said. The team’s discovery could also revolutionize the process of cooling computer chips. As the physical size of chips has shrunk significantly over the past two decades, it has become increasingly critical to develop ways to cool hot spots and transfer lingering heat away from the chip. This challenge has grown more prevalent in recent years, and threatens to bottleneck the semiconductor industry’s ability to develop smaller and more powerful chips. Boiling is a potential heat transfer technique that can be used to cool chips, Koratkar said, so depositing copper nanorods onto the copper interconnects of chips could lead to new innovations in heat transfer and dissipation for semiconductors. “Since computer interconnects are already made of copper, it should be easy and inexpensive to treat those components with a layer of copper nanorods,” Koratkar said, noting that his group plans to further pursue this possibility. Source: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

As I’ve mentioned from time to time, as to the goal of seawater desalination research — my favorite idea is just a pipe with a semi permiable membrane that you stick out in some part of the ocean with a good coastal current or rip tide.

There’s nothing like it out there right now. What’s currently being built is an Under Ocean Floor Intake and Discharge Demonstration System at Long Beach California.

Together with its funding partners, Long Beach Water is also undertaking design and construction of an Under Ocean Floor Intake and Discharge Demonstration System, the first of its kind in the world, that will seek to demonstrate that viable, environmentally responsive intake and discharge systems can be developed along the coast of California.

That plant incidently expects to save 20%-30% in energy costs for RO.

Using a small 9,000 gallon-per-day pilot-scale desalter, the Long Beach Water Department has reduced the overall energy requirement (by 20 to 30 percent) of seawater desalination using a relatively low-pressure two staged nano-filtration process, developed by Long Beach Water engineers, known as the “Long Beach Method.”

This unique process is now being tested on a larger scale. With funding assistance from the United State Bureau of Reclamation and the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, Long Beach Water is conducting research at a constructed 300,000 gallon-per-day, fully operational facility incorporating the two-stage nano-filtration process. This large-scale facility is needed to verify the energy savings when employing full-scale membranes and energy recovery units, among other things. The goal is to verify energy savings of the two-stage nano-filtration process and to optimize the process so that it can be duplicated.

But the Long Beach intake discharge system should only be considered first generation. So what’s the next generation? Interestingly enough, according to this article in photonics.com some researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have used steel tubing to grow carbon nanotubes.

NEWARK, N.J., Aug. 7, 2006 — In less than 20 minutes, researchers can now seed, heat and grow carbon nanotubes in 10-foot-long, hollow thin steel tubing. The ground-breaking method will lead to improvements in cleaner gasoline, better food processing and faster, cheaper ways to clean air and water, the scientists said.

“The work took us three years to develop and get right, but now we can essentially anchor nanotubes to a tubular wall. No one has ever done anything like this before,” said lead researcher Somenath Mitra, PhD, professor and acting chair of the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) department of chemistry and environmental science. Graduate and post-doctoral students who worked on the project are Mahesh Karwa, Chutarat Saridara and Roman Brukh.

This is especially interesting because of the work at Lawrence Livermore announced back in June.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have created a membrane made of carbon nanotubes and silicon that may offer, among many possible applications, a less expensive desalination.

Scott Dougherty, LLNL

Artist’s rendering of methane molecules flowing through a carbon nanotube less than two nanometers in diameter. (Click here to download a high-resolution image.)

The nanotubes, special molecules made of carbon atoms in a unique arrangement, are hollow and more than 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. Billions of these tubes act as the pores in the membrane. The super smooth inside of the nanotubes allow liquids and gases to rapidly flow through, while the tiny pore size can block larger molecules. This previously unobserved phenomenon opens a vast array of possible applications.

The team was able to measure flows of liquids and gases by making a membrane on a silicon chip with carbon nanotube pores making up the holes of the membrane. The membrane is created by filling the gaps between aligned carbon nanotubes with a ceramic matrix material. The pores are so small that only six water molecules could fit across their diameter.

“The gas and water flows that we measured are 100 to 10,000 times faster than what classical models predict,” said Olgica Bakajin, the Livermore scientist who led the research. “This is like having a garden hose that can deliver as much water in the same amount of time as a fire hose that is ten times larger.”

Of course anything you stick out in the ocean is going to quickly encrust in barnicles algae and such. One solution, I’ve mentioned previously is sharkote — a US navy funded coating announced last year.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — University of Florida engineers have developed an environmentally friendly coating for hulls of ocean-going ships based on an unlikely source of inspiration: the shark.

UF materials engineers tapped elements of sharks’ unique scales to design the new coating, which prevents the growth of a notoriously aggressive marine algae and may also impede barnacles, according to preliminary tests.

If more extensive testing and development bear out the results, the shark-inspired coating — composed of tiny scale-like elements that can actually flex in and out to impede growth — could replace conventional antifouling coatings. These coatings prevent marine growth but also leach poisonous copper into the ocean.

“The copper paints are wonderful in terms of keeping the ship surface clean, but they are poisonous and they accumulate at substantial rates in harbors,” threatening marine life, said Anthony Brennan, a UF professor of materials science and engineering and the lead developer of the coating. “By contrast, there are no toxins associated with our surface.”

Brennan’s project is being sponsored by the U.S. Navy, the world’s largest maritime ship owner, which has contributed at least $750,000 to the effort so far.

A National Science Foundation funded project at Rutgers Camden has recently developed a new polymer-coating process which might be appropriate for sharkote and the desalination pipes.

As gas prices continue to soar, the Navy will be eager to learn of research underway at Rutgers University–Camden. “Barnacles that attach to naval ships are a huge cost to the Navy. Imagine if you drove a car with a parachute attached; this extra drag force requires more gas,” says Daniel Bubb, an assistant professor of physics at Rutgers-Camden, who has developed a new method for coating polymers.

Used in a variety of industries, including protecting battleships from freeloading barnacles, polymers are materials made from long chains of molecules.

Thanks to a $129,463 National Science Foundation grant in its third year, Bubb and his team (including a post-doctoral fellow, undergraduate, and graduate students) are refining this new coating process. By employing a pulsed laser deposition technique, a high-power laser is focused onto a target material in a vacuum chamber, creating a plume of vaporized material. The object that is to be coated is placed in the path of the vapor. The Rutgers-Camden research team then tunes the laser to a specific vibrational mode of the polymer to ease the vaporization process and limit photochemical and photothermal damage.

This research will benefit many industries that rely solely on the most commonly used method of spin-coating, a viable technique for certain applications but inefficient for coating devices that are too large or small for its apparatus.

“With spin-coating, it’s difficult to layer and adhesion can be a problem” says Bubb, whose research also could improve biocompatibility in devices that require coating only on very specific and sensitive areas.

The Rutgers-Camden researcher also has advanced coating polymers that are too thermally sensitive by treating materials with a solvent before using the laser. This aspect of the research is funded through a $35,000 Cottrell College Science Award.

A model for moving from R&D to manufacturing might be a deal signed by Los Alamos National Labratories and CNT Technologies Inc. in which CNT bought the rights to some nano tech developed by the Los Alamos Labs.

Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman

LANL has big plans for nanoscience
By ANDY LENDERMAN | The New Mexican
August 22, 2006 A Seattle company has bought the rights to a nanotechnology development at Los Alamos National Laboratory and plans to manufacture a new product in the city’s research park based on lightweight nanotubes that are 100 times stronger than steel.

The lab has made some longer carbon nanotubes, which makes them easier
to weave into super-strong materials. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter in size. A nanotube is a long carbon molecule and its typical size is about two to three nanometers in diameter and up to five millimeters long. The company has developed a product called SuperThread made of these nanotubes.

“What we’re working with is nanotubes that are one to five millimeters long,” Tremper said. “But those are longer than anybody else’s at the moment. It’s the longer length that allows us to spin the fibers into threads and make a usable product.”

Tremper said his company plans to have a pilot plant based at Los Alamos Research Park within six months that will produce one kilogram of SuperThread a day.

“And that will allow us to give major quantities of samples to companies and government agencies that need material that is ultra strong and ultra light,” he said.

Full-scale production — if everything goes smoothly with the pilot project — would come in about 18 months.

Tremper said the pilot plant in Los Alamos would have 15 to 20 employees. He said it’s unclear where a full-scale production factory would be located, but he said the factory would have hundreds of employees. The company is seeking investors.

The lab researchers working on the technology and the company will be in the same building, Peterson said.

Kudos to Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman for pushing nanotechnology research.

Also Monday, U.S. Sens. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., announced a new federal nanotechnology research effort that will be based at New Mexico’s national laboratories.

Los Alamos National Laboratory received $18.3 million for a research center, and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque received $57 million. The U.S. Department of Energy is establishing research centers at three other labs as well.

“It is vital that our nation remain competitive with the rest of the world when it comes to science and technology, so the work being done at DOE labs is particularly important,” Domenici said in a news release.

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