Donald Noble's Website

An interesting concept for generating renewable energy is the Atmospheric Vortex Engine.

This is an extension of the principal of the solar chimney. The solar chimney is a device where a current of air is created by the difference in temperature and hence pressure between the base and the top of the stack.

The issue with this is that building a tall enough chimney for this to be effective is both challenging and expensive. The Atmospheric Vortex Engine creates the chimney, not by a structure, but with a vortex of air, otherwise know as a tornado!

Whilst this may seem like a crazy solution, the energy source is from a controlled and fixed location, so it shouldn’t be able to migrate. The authors also claim that this technique may also actually reduce the likelihood of tornadoes occurring although this is still to be proven.

The paper by Louis Michaud can be found on the Energy Bulletin website and more information, including diagrams and video on the Vortex Engine website

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This entry was posted on Tuesday 4th October 2005 in Engineering and tagged climate change, energy, Engineering, environmental, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.