11/01/2007
Canada - Creating tornadoes as a new way of generating wind energy?
If a Canadian inventor has his way, the world will soon be powered by man-made tornadoes. Retired engineer Louis Michaud patented his Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE) – a process for taking waste heat from power plants, or warm water from tropical oceans, to create a vortex – and he has recently won government funding to test his idea.
The concept is simple. Based on the principles of convection, the AVE captures the energy produced when heat rises and then cools in the atmosphere. Michaud’s garage in southern Ontario houses a one-metre working model of the AVE. It’s a small cylinder open at the top with slanted air entries around the base. A temporary, external heat source such as steam is needed to start the engine. Once going, the vortex can suck in heat from warm air or use an external source like industrial waste heat or warm sea water. The difference in pressure produced at the base of the vortex is used to drive turbines to make electricity.
Aside from the initial injection of steam to start the vortex, the process uses existing energy; it boasts zero emissions and relies on a clean, renewable energy source. Michaud says coupling the AVE to an existing fossil fuel-fired power plant could increase its output by 40%. The technique is cheap in comparison with other forms of solar-energy production. The AVE and the solar chimney are based on the same thermodynamic principle: both use updrafts to suck in heat and create wind to make electricity. But the AVE doesn’t need an expensive chimney or solar collector.
An Australian company was forced to scale down its plans for a thousand-metre, £400 million solar chimney because of high costs. The AVE can produce the same amount of energy at just 5% of the cost of a solar chimney, claims Michaud. “The beauty of the vortex is it can extend much, much higher than a physical chimney, basically we’re talking 10 to 15 kilometres up in the sky,” he says.
A commercial AVE could range in size from 50 MW to 500 MW – enough to power 278,000 homes each year. At 500 MW, the vortex would rise 100 metres and be 200 metres in diameter at the top. But critics fear a large vortex could spin out of control, suck in debris or jump out of the cylinder to become a fully-fledged tornado.
Michaud says he has heard it all before, he’s been at this for 40 years. The intensity of the vortex is controlled by deflectors between the AVE and the external heat source. Michaud claims the vortex can be stopped by closing or even reversing the deflectors and there’s little chance that the vortex could survive outside the cylinder because there’s no external heat or rotation source.
Michaud recently managed to secure $15,000 from the Ontario Centre of Excellence for computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modelling work. The University of Western Ontario just finished up the CFD tests.
Now Michaud hopes to secure funding to build the real thing. “I’d like to build an AVE about 16 feet in diameter and about six feet high,” he said. “The big thing is to demonstrate that you can produce a large vortex outdoors. I think it’ll make some of the difficulties of financing this development go away. Afterwards, we would use the CFD model to make more measurements and improve the design, size and shape of entries and air temperature.”
Michaud envisions building demonstration models of gradually increasing size, up to about 100 feet in diameter and 1000 feet high. Thermodynamic and meteorology professors, including Kerry Emanuel from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Nilton Renno from the University of Michigan, sit on his company’s advisory board.
Michaud says that convincing the people familiar with energy conversion processes, like power plant or petrochemical engineers, is the toughest. But he hasn’t come this far to turn back. “I’m aware of the problems that we have with eventual energy depletion and carbon dioxide, and when I saw this possibility, I figured that I can’t just ignore it,” he said. “I should make sure the potential is realized.”
About the author
Crystal Luxmore is a freelance journalist based in Toronto, Canada.
Please visit for more information:
http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/futures/31672/1/ERWvortex_09_07
http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/futures/31672/1/ERWave_09_07
The concept is simple. Based on the principles of convection, the AVE captures the energy produced when heat rises and then cools in the atmosphere. Michaud’s garage in southern Ontario houses a one-metre working model of the AVE. It’s a small cylinder open at the top with slanted air entries around the base. A temporary, external heat source such as steam is needed to start the engine. Once going, the vortex can suck in heat from warm air or use an external source like industrial waste heat or warm sea water. The difference in pressure produced at the base of the vortex is used to drive turbines to make electricity.
Aside from the initial injection of steam to start the vortex, the process uses existing energy; it boasts zero emissions and relies on a clean, renewable energy source. Michaud says coupling the AVE to an existing fossil fuel-fired power plant could increase its output by 40%. The technique is cheap in comparison with other forms of solar-energy production. The AVE and the solar chimney are based on the same thermodynamic principle: both use updrafts to suck in heat and create wind to make electricity. But the AVE doesn’t need an expensive chimney or solar collector.
An Australian company was forced to scale down its plans for a thousand-metre, £400 million solar chimney because of high costs. The AVE can produce the same amount of energy at just 5% of the cost of a solar chimney, claims Michaud. “The beauty of the vortex is it can extend much, much higher than a physical chimney, basically we’re talking 10 to 15 kilometres up in the sky,” he says.
A commercial AVE could range in size from 50 MW to 500 MW – enough to power 278,000 homes each year. At 500 MW, the vortex would rise 100 metres and be 200 metres in diameter at the top. But critics fear a large vortex could spin out of control, suck in debris or jump out of the cylinder to become a fully-fledged tornado.
Michaud says he has heard it all before, he’s been at this for 40 years. The intensity of the vortex is controlled by deflectors between the AVE and the external heat source. Michaud claims the vortex can be stopped by closing or even reversing the deflectors and there’s little chance that the vortex could survive outside the cylinder because there’s no external heat or rotation source.
Michaud recently managed to secure $15,000 from the Ontario Centre of Excellence for computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modelling work. The University of Western Ontario just finished up the CFD tests.
Now Michaud hopes to secure funding to build the real thing. “I’d like to build an AVE about 16 feet in diameter and about six feet high,” he said. “The big thing is to demonstrate that you can produce a large vortex outdoors. I think it’ll make some of the difficulties of financing this development go away. Afterwards, we would use the CFD model to make more measurements and improve the design, size and shape of entries and air temperature.”
Michaud envisions building demonstration models of gradually increasing size, up to about 100 feet in diameter and 1000 feet high. Thermodynamic and meteorology professors, including Kerry Emanuel from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Nilton Renno from the University of Michigan, sit on his company’s advisory board.
Michaud says that convincing the people familiar with energy conversion processes, like power plant or petrochemical engineers, is the toughest. But he hasn’t come this far to turn back. “I’m aware of the problems that we have with eventual energy depletion and carbon dioxide, and when I saw this possibility, I figured that I can’t just ignore it,” he said. “I should make sure the potential is realized.”
About the author
Crystal Luxmore is a freelance journalist based in Toronto, Canada.
Please visit for more information:
http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/futures/31672/1/ERWvortex_09_07
http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/futures/31672/1/ERWave_09_07
- Source:
- Environmental Research Web
- Author:
- Edited by Trevor Sievert, Online Editorial Journalist; Author: Crystal Luxmore
- Email:
- sales@environmentalresearchweb.org
- Link:
- www.environmentalresearchweb.org/...
- Keywords:
- wind energy, wind farm, renewable energy, wind power, wind turbine, rotorblade, offshore, onshore
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