Can the Sun Keep You Cool?

I probably don’t have to tell you that it’s been hot this week—almost every state in the country reported a high temperature above 90°F somewhere within its borders yesterday. And as we all know, oppressive heat means oppressive energy consumption, a vicious cycle that perpetuates the effects of global warming. New York City’s power company, Con Edison, reported all-time usage records earlier this week as people remained indoors with their air conditioning cranked, causing scattered blackouts across the city (our managing editor has been without power for three days). But what if our air conditioners were able to harness some of the sun’s wicked heat and turn it into the life-saving cool air on which our comfort depends? Florida-based Matteran Energy might be able to help us do just that.

Instead of using expensive photovoltaic cells to convert solar radiation to electricity directly, Matteran’s solution uses far-cheaper thermal-collection technology to heat a synthetic fluid with a very low boiling point (around 58°F), creating enough steam to drive a specially designed turbine. And although a fluid-circuit system converting heat into electricity is nothing new, Matteran’s innovative solution increases the system’s efficiency to a point where small-scale applications make economic sense (see the animation on the company’s Web site for a more thorough explanation).

So far, Matteran has created only small amounts of refrigeration, but the technology is in place to take the next step, creating a unit with the equivalent cooling of a standard window-mounted A/C that is powered entirely by the sun’s heat—something I don’t think our carbon-choked  planet will be running out of anytime soon. —John Mahoney

Link – matteranenergy.com (via Treehugger)

Related:
It's Pretty Easy Being Green
The Life Aquatic

Comments

[William Thomas]

Conservation of energy can still be preserved, it just means his system is more efficient at gleaning energy from the car's engine then the drivetrain is. Seems unlikely but not impossible.

[warenb]

Has anyone looked up DHMO on Wikipedia yet?????

[Chris]

Re: Hytechapps

The main problem with saying "more efficient"
or similar things is: What Is It That You
Are Referring To?

Hydrogen is a really nice energy source.
Kind of. It's not particularly dense, even
when liquified (think about the Space Shuttle
main tank)...

BUT - you have to crack the Water (/DHMO/etc
for those with a Sense Of Humour)
to get the Hydrogen - and that requires
energy. You have to supply energy to
electrolyse the water, you have to use
energy to compress/liquify the Hydrogen -
which will be less than the energy you get
back from burning it.

Another point is that a gas mix of Hydrogen/
Oxygen isn't the safest thing to have sitting
in a gas tank. Never mind that Oxygen is
corrosive, but given that the H2/O2 reaction
to form water is exothermic, it doesn't take
much for it to happen - either by combustion
or detonation.

Back to the point of the article...
Now - given this A/C system... well... I'd
want to see some unbiased engineering
analysis of it first.
My primary thought is that having the heat
is one thing, but you have to dump the
energy somewhere... That is, yes you
can use solar heating to generate power,
but you generally have to provide a
temperature differential in order to extract
work...

[Andy]

Matteran's idea is pretty much a relatively efficient Sterling Engine. They use a series of valves and heat to replace the 'injector' pump on a traditional closed circuit turbine geration system. The difference here is that they are using a low boiling point liquid and ambient temps to recondense the liquid. Think of it this way, you have a black pipe in the sun that heats the liquid in it at least 50 degrees above the air temp even if the airtemp is 100 deg. Lets say that tube is on a reflector to make it even hotter. Then you just pipe the gas that you want to recondense through a pipe that is UNDER the reflector and has some fins on it. It cools down to ambient temps and is pumped back into the system using some gating valves and some more solar heat. Their website has animations that explain it quite well. The idea is not a huge amount of energy all at once but a steady flow. It's like parallel computing, you want lots of small units in parallel rather than just one big one. Fossil fuels and Biodiesel are both just ways of converting sunlight into energy and those cycles are far slower than this one.

[Andy]

OK, I should correct some of what I said above. The term is Stirling engine, not Sterling Engine. And this is not a Stirling engine. Maybe more of a 'Stirling Turbine'? Either way I love the idea. The only thing that make my BS meter blip (just a TINY bit) is that the name is Matteran Energy but if you look at the website name matteranenergy... 'Matter, an energy'? or 'Matter and energy'? I know everybody likes to be clever with their startup company names but... and the contact's name is Jeff Sterling. Sterling, Stirling.... que Twilight Zone background music... Like I said, if it can replace buring things to make electricity I'm all for it.
As to what Chris posted above:"My primary thought is that having the heat
is one thing, but you have to dump the
energy somewhere... That is, yes you
can use solar heating to generate power,
but you generally have to provide a
temperature differential in order to extract
work..." the differential is there, ambient air temp versus temp of liquid in a black tube with a reflector in the direct sun. They are just monkeying with a different boinling point than water and a different expansion rate than water to steam.

[Calvin]

The real problem is that the guy who wrote the article is forgetting that a generator like that relies on a temperature gradient being available. Another poster before this brought up the excellent point that if you have a source of cooler temperature than the ambient temperature, why aren't you simply using that to cool your place? That would cut out the middle man and improve efficiency.

The real practical application of this would not be heating or cooling, but rather generating a small amount of electricity to power devices.

[gnomic]

First off, you can find the Aquygen patent online at freepatentsonline.com advance search for Klein Dennis. Basically its a hydrolysis machine. And if you go to the site, they are just injecting H2 and O2 from an auto-based electrolysis mmachine - no big deal and certainly not a big advance - just a lot of hype from a dumb Fox reporter (that's redundant). It they injected N2 (nitrogen, an inert gas), they would get some boost as well. Certainly doesn't look economical based on total system costs.

As for the Colorado coolers, the trick is that they are getting more cooling (thermal transfer) than standards swamp coolers. Sure, it uses water instead of electricity - but if water is available and cheap, and the humidity in your area isn't normally high, it may be cheaper than standard heap pumps.

As for minerals left after the eval - a real problem - note that the evaporator core is both cheap and replaceable. Still, it is a weakness of the system.

As for hydrogen's monoxide (literally, 2 hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom) more commonly known as H20 - its an old freshman high school chemistry joke. ITs possible that we might find ways to make hydrogen cheaper - algae or physical chemistry tricks - there are lots of problems with the system that make it unlikely to be a viable technology in the near term (despite what president that thought science was too much hard work). It needs more research but current claims that H2 if viable and economical are for suckers.

[Erich J. Knight]

Totaly agree Gnomic, except the last part on the prospects for H2.

These are my favorites:

Solar H2: http://www.hydrogensolar.com/index.html

Bio H2: http://www.nanologix.net/

[vega]

Sorry to post about a subject other than the original article but there have been too many people on here running their mouth without even reading anything. In regards to AGUYGEN, it is not the Brown version of electrolysis. They say that many times in the descriptions. If you read the technical papers you get even more information. It doesn't split the water to H2 and O. What they did, roughly, is change the polarity of one of the hydrogen atoms in PURE water. It changes the chemical bond so that what was H-O-H is now (HxH)-O. They invented a new kind of chemical bond that turned water to a supergas at room temperature and gave it a different weight and mass, which gave it new properties. The gas bonds and reacts with solids, liquids and other gasses. This is not some simple electrolysis. It is almost like quantum chemistry.

[Martin Tibbitts]

The beautiful thing here is that this crew duped a local news crew into putting them on the 6 O'clock news!

Martin Tibbitts

[Suave SMOOTH]

yea , what the fuck is the democratic societies within the world going to do about the up coming oil crisis?

This shit is really going to happen within five years.

The Middle east is going to be all fucked up and people are going to die, because they wont have gas to drive to the supermarket and buy food.

Supermarkets wont be able to get food to the stores because there will be no gas to power semi-trucks.

Global warming is melting ice caps faster than your momma on crack. Florida will be under water in 50 years. This will be worse than Katrina.

This world has some nasty disasters coming very soon. Including the great earthquakes that are due for the coastal regions of California. Massive fires and death tolls will arise from a 8.0 quake that is expected to occur within 15 years.

Everything that I am telling my audience is factual.

The last major earthquake to hit San Fransico was in 1906 and it was the type of quake that averages out to occur every 100 years.

Humans have developed urban areas in placed that will be destroyed within a 100 years.

Seattle Washington is built right next to Mount Rieneer. When that volcano blows its top, the city will be destroyed without warning. The whole climate of the NorthWest will be fucked. Also, when Yellowstone's super volcano blows up, the whole United States will be able to see the dust cloud from that shit.

Basically I'm informing the world that some serious shit is going to happen in our lifetime and we should be expecting it to happen.

Ignore the mass media deception and rhedoric. Mass media is out to make a profit and only gives news that the people want to hear and see. African genocide is happening everyday and the mass media does not report it. Why? Because Americans don't want to hear the bullshit.

More people are dying in Africa today than people in the Holocaust. Fuck the American free media asshole shit fucks.

The United States needs to stop supporting retarded countries like Isreal and giving money to fake democracies.

Other democracies should not be playing the world police and killing innocent civilians. We need to be preaching peace on Earth and people need to smoke marijuana and listen to Bob Marley. This will be the ultimate solution for the peaceful end to all war.

Thats all I got to say, GO MIAMI HEAT!!!

[J]

Eric Knight wrote: "It changes the chemical bond so that what was H-O-H is now (HxH)-O."

Now it has been a while since I took chemistry in either HS or College, BUT I think the above mentioned combination (H-H-O) would be a little hard to achieve since Hydrogen only has one electron with which to form covalent bonds with. This is why H2O forms as H-O-H.

[thinker]

martin tibbits just stated everything ive been telling people for the past year. thank you

[Criga Li H]

I don't think anyone has mentioned Matterand Energy's low temperature power cycle's biggest advantage. Low temperature heat is available almost everywhere cheaper than any other form of energy.

[pjs]

Hmm... Looks to me like this could work with just distilled water, but to make the boiling point real low the whole circuit would need to operate at less than atmospheric pressure. Any "vacuum" leaks to the outside and the cycle would break down as the boiling point raises. (Dunno if that'd be the case with any other "special" working medium. Alcohol?) The other thing it relys upon is the operation of the valves at the right setpoints. (Looks simple enough from anyone dealing with a plant or HVAC operation.) The one other part that's not too clear is the cool end of the thermal cycle. It'd probably require a second constant flow with a radiator or a ground cooling coil. (Which would require a pump and possibly a fan.) The question is whether or not the differential pressure across the turbine produces significantly more power than what's used to drive the cooling fan and or pump.

[George E]

Could using electroysis produce those unique properties by submitting differing Fourier Series of waves to change chemical bonds H-O-H into (HxH)-0 ? If that was the case, one can not patent old science, or can they?

[El Chivo]

When producing the gas through electrolysis, it's easier to add a bit of Potassium Carbonate (K2CO3?).

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[Orlowski Zygmunt]

Clean the air? It is possible. Clean water? It is possible too.
Clean energy? It is possible as well.
My idea is very difficult for understanding. It is not difficult for engineer - mechanic, who knows very good the Pascal's law and even-arm lever.
Please open GOOgle and find metozor and next :
index of metozor.
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