Thursday, June 22, 2006
Now All I Need Is A Giant Baggie...
Over the years I have had a number of good ideas (though this is a conceit, and perhaps unfounded), but never made good on them. Maybe "follow-through" is not a strong suit of mine (my wife certainly doesn't think so). At least one or two of my ideas I perhaps should have pursued to the patent stage. In the mean time I will offer one up for free, perhaps it is not unique, and I would love to get some feedback on why this would be impractical. It is an idea for providing plentiful fresh water without costly conventional desalination to arid regions, especially those close to ocean coasts.
Many years ago I read of a scheme to tow icebergs to large costal cities to provide abundant potable water. In the 30 years since I've heard this idea (probably in "Popular Science") I’ve not heard of any follow up, or any experimental projects. Most likely the energy needs for towing are similar to, or greater than, conventional desalination. Assuming you could take the time constraint out of towing, perhaps you could use the oceans natural currents and prevailing winds to do the towing largely for free. Plastic visqueen sheeting seems tough and cheep even in large quantities. Find a suitable smallish sized iceberg, wrap it in visqueen, and attach a series of Sail equipped steering mechanisms, which by action of wind and sea current nudge our nugget of ice where we want it. If all or most has melted by the time of arrival -- no concern, you are still delivering a huge baggie of fresh water. For regions closer to the equator, forget the icebergs completely, tow your huge baggie out to sea and launch it at a starting point that will eventually carry it where you want it, but not before collecting huge amounts of water from rain augmented by solar powered desalination through evaporation of sea water as our bag drifts through equatorial regions where rain is abundant followed by intense sunlight and heat to drive a solar distillation process. Being a "baggie" we would lose virtual no water to evaporation.
Granted there are hundreds of details to work out (which I will lazily leave to others) such as optimal size of our bags, how best to attach sailed steering buoys, how compartmentalized to make the collection areas, how best to pump the acquired fresh water in to the chambers isolating them from the sea water, how best to keep ocean spray and large waves from inundating the fresh water collected or ripping our bags to shreds, etc., etc... Still these all seem like surmountable engineering challenges if the core idea has merit. Should someone take this idea and run with it, I hope they would take the time to cite this blog entry and drop me a line. If not, at least I've put the idea out there. Most likely someone else has already studied ideas identical to or similar to these in wake of the research on towing icebergs. If it is impractical it is impractical. If practical, at least I'm not sitting on it when thirsty denizens might benefit from it.
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1 Comments:
Dawg says... it's impractical... the dang iceberg flips over randomly every three days or so...imagine the iceberg in the picture above being one ice cube in a glass of water, the part you see above the surface is about 10% (or less) of the whole thing... but I like how you think !!! ;-)
By Anonymous, at October 10, 2006
