Scargill

Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

In a recent newspaper article in the Northeast, Coun Mark Wilkes refers to the "new form of heating" known as ground source heating and suggests that he’s started a petition to invest in this "new" form of heating to install the pumps in social housing.

In fact, geothermal heating is far from new. Wark social club fitted this some time ago and I’ve been looking at it as a domestic source of heat. Sadly, individuals usually do not have enough land to harness this efficient source of heat (effectively taking heat from underground and concentrating it to a useful temperature needs a lot of square footage).

I did object to the implication that we taxpayers should pay for it’s use in "social housing" – don’t we pay enough already and get next to nothing back for it? I wonder how many tax-payers the councillor asked before coming up with that little gem?

A better idea by FAR would be to use the space under new constructions to offer such facilities to ALL. There is no reason other than the will and start-up costs why any new or refurbished large area (football fields etc) could not be fitted with underground pipes – outside the back of our house is a massive field – the farm uses only the top of this and yet a couple of metres down there is an almost limitless source of heat.

Someone might encourage farmers to diversify by offering this form of heat to villagers? Indeed once could argue that given that there is a vast area to tap UNDER our green and pleasant FIELDS all over the country – perhaps a change of law to gain access to that heat might be something worth considering. Just how far down from the surface DO farm owners own? If they’re digging the land up ANYWAY… would it not make sense where appropriate to install piping for geothermal installations, especially on the edge of villages…

Community power and heat – as against power from the grid and heat using nationally distributed materials – is an idea that we’d be fools to ignore. If someone popped up to my place and offered to plug me in to half-price hot water or heating I’d jump at it.

Another area that seems to be largely ignored is that of water power – sure we put generators on large rivers – but it hasn’t stopped raining in the Northeast for months and all of that energy down every single stream… is simply going to waste – I’m convinced given the right gear I could power our house off the stream in front of it – but I’m sure if I did the water board would throw a fit. Solar power works for countries like Spain (see image of one of MANY solar arrays over there)  and they really DO make use of it. Perhaps it’s time to make better use of the resources we have here.

We’ve been talking about air-powered cars recently.. turns out an Indian manufacturer is bringing them out – using very highly compressed air. It seems also that the Americans are taking an interest also…

One of the issues with these vehicles is range – and so adding a petrol (or other fossil fuel) engine seems sensible but another problem is that of heat – or lack of it – so in the cold weather, the air simply doesn’t give out as much power… and that started me thinking.

Surely the answer is for the fossil fuel unit not to provide power – but to provide air compression – and heat. The fuel engine would feed a compressor – to generate more compressed air – and the exhaust would go through a heat exchanger in the air tanks – to heat up the air – and make it more effective – not to mention the fact that the fresh air exhaust from the vehicle would then be usable as warm air to warm the car!

At night, outside of the house, the car air tanks would of course be recharged by electricity – but as it gets near time to use the car, either the mains electricity, or the fuel engine – or both could be used to preheat the air. The fuel engine from that point on would only kick in when it was necessary to top up the air tanks or provide heat for passengers or both.

I can’t help thinking that with some clever engineering and simple programming this is a much better potential idea than electric hybrids.

Add to this the possibility of motorway-fuel stations offering compressed air generated and stored in huge underground tanks which themselves are topped up from nearby windmill power (already the M6 and other motorways have the occasional windmill nearby) – and you have the possibility of an infrastructure for generating compressed air from whatever natural resource is nearby (water pressure, wind-power, solar, whatever is appropriate) – hence making the air powered car a practicality.

I just hope someone, somewhere has the vision to push this as far as it can go..