hydro powering our tanks

[kaptken]

you can build a simple overshot wheel with more than 70% efficiency.
http://www.hp-gramatke.net/pmm_physics/english/page0450.htm
like i said in my first post, we would not want a tight fitting turbine. they require a higher head of water and flow which means back pressure and would overflow the tank. and could sieze up.

generator and inverter also mentioned in my first post. its all there. build one if you can. a simple engineering lab experiment to account for bucket volume to handle the flow, lever arm length, and shaft power and speed and pulley ratios.

 

[Buckeye ME]

If I had a large enough tank and a few more resources, I would be interested in trying something like that with a car alternator.

You can't expect to get a whole lot out of any setup like this, but it would still be cool to experiment.

 

[samtheman]

Well, when will you build one?

 

[Buckeye ME]

When someone gives me 10G to start a tank big enough to make this worthwhile.

You interested?

 

[Sk8r]

Lol---well, there's a semi-free-lunch to be had from a two-story downflow...and for those of us stupid enough to buy too much pump. I have to throttle back considerably. I KNOW I could power my fuge light off same...but we're talking 13w.

I think a gerbil on an exercise wheel could probably power that light, for biodegradable kibbles.

 

[kaptken]

Never under estimate the power of Kibble.

In the Mid-evil period of great cathedral building in Europe, men, walking in squirrel cage wheels, powered the cranes that lifted the great stones and sculptures to extraordinary heights to erect those magnificent, artistic, soaring structures.

Mostly fed on midevil,... Kibble.

 

[greenbean36191]

Well since the energy of the water draining into the sump is just wasted anyway it certainly makes more sense to try to reclaim energy there than where the OP asked. But still, all the energy you reclaim from the falling water is energy you originally put in with the pump.

The question becomes how much energy can you expect to reclaim and at what point does it become practical to try to do it. Sure you might be able to build a wheel and generator for $100 or less, but if you're getting 10w back and it's going to take 10 years for the power savings to cover the cost is it really worth it? I can't really see this being very practical for most people. In a few cases where people have their sumps in the basement it might make sense, but that's about the only case I can think of.

 

[Twisted]

I actually was looking into this, and ran it past a friend of mine which is also the President of the Chico reef club, and runs an alternative energy business. His name on here is Boviac if anyone wants to run an idea past him.

I was personally thinking about setting up a coral grow out system that was all self contained, useing solar, wind, and hydro power to operate it.

The deal is, when useing energy to create energy you lose a lot of energy.

So say, useing a solar panel under your lighting to generate power, while you are useing say 300 watts to power your lights, a small solar panel may only generate 45 watts.

While useing a strong enough pump to generate electricty from a hydro turbine, you may only generate 20% to 40% of that energy back.

So you are going to have a loss of power, even if you managed to regain 50% of your power, what is going to make up the other 50% needed to power the original equipment.

If you had thousands of dollars you could set up solar panels, hydro turbines, and wind turbines to collect as much energy as possible, but while it may support most of your set up on a sunny, windy day, your power collection will drop off at night, and when the wind dies down.
So you would have to buy a bunch of batterys, an invertor, and a few other things to develope a power storage system.

It would probablly cost you more to make your system power effecient, then it would to just pay your electricty for the couple dozen years.

 

[Twisted]

Although, from what I understand, if you had a river in your back yard, you could use it to generate a lot of electricty.

 

[boviac]

Thanks Twisted,

I do get questions often about some great ideas but often they are missing some basic energy laws or concepts. Now, that being said I'm no one to stiffle energy capture concepts or ideas. This is how things advance. For the most part nowadays in this information age... most new inventions aren't really new at all but piggybacked.

I've got a solar cell 1.5V from Harbor freight sitting on top of my canopy. I too have been waiting to try this to capture light scatter by placing it 90degrees or vertical to the horizontal lights and power the fans to cool the lights. That's about all the energy I might expect.

First Solar PV panels are designed for full incident sun. In an aquarium we provide a mere fraction of that. Further, I'm placing the cells parallel to the light, The purpose of the light is for the aqaurium, I'm just capturing some of the scatter towards the back. So I haven't made this jump because I didn't leave enough room on the wires to modify this when I made the canopy initially and I'm too lazy to take the whole thing down and rewire it on something that may not even work sufficently.

As for water generating energy from your tank/sump fall... sure you might be able to power some LED's or a small fan but is it worth it?

YMMV and good luck!

 

[kaptken]

Well, the water and expended energy just falls back to the sump anyway, unrecaptured. There is no such thing as a free lunch Rube Goldberg perpetual motion machine. Which is why I called it SUBSIDIZED. How much energy one can recapture, and at what cost is what creative engineering is all about. Taking a fanciful ideal and refining it to be a practical and cost effective reality.

Obviously the water wheel and generator would have to be small, light and highly efficient. Safety would require a bypass, should the system plug up. Plastic sounds good. One off proto-types are always too expensive, but the idea is to mass produce a winning solution.

Power plants and refineries and most industrial processes recapture expended waste heat, flow, pressure, and material to reheat, recycle, or repressurize the input stream . Recapture. If they didnt do that , our electric bills would be much higher and everything else would cost more. Because of the wasted energy and material going down the drain.

Hmmm?? I wonder how much overflow and head capcity they have at some places like the National Aquarium in Baltimore? Might be enough for an industrial sized water wheel! Millions of gallons flow per day coming down 3 floors from the surface skimmer to the sump! They have a volunteer intern program, I wonder if i could interest them in a project like that?

Or theme park water rides? Or water towers? Some might work. Some might not. But you can't say there is "No Potential". Elevated water is: potential.

As for our tanks, well, that is just a matter of scaling down, cost effectively.

That is The challenge.

any takers?

 

[thematt]

power = density * volumetric flow rate * gravity * height

This is for an ideal situation, which doesn't exist, so this is a limiting case, meaning you will only get a fraction (usually less than 40%, and will most likely be 10%-20% for a water wheel that doesn't catch all the available energy) of the power that is calculated by this equation. However, it is useful to get an idea of where things are. Assuming the density of your water is 1025 kg/cubic meter and gravity is 9.8 m/square seconds you can calculate how much power you will be able to produce. I did a quick calculation and assuming a straight drop of 7 feet (any angles in the pipe will further lower energy recaptured), it would take around 44.4 gallons per hour (gph) to produce 1 watt of power. Taking into account 30% efficiency this changes to about 148 gph needed to produce just 1 watt of power. To run my 240 gph power head I would need ~666 gph going through the waterwheel.

Just to put some numbers out there.

 

[trblmkr]

Here ya go....
Hydro generators for just about anything.

http://www.bitterrootsolar.com/hydro.htm

 

[kaptken]

I think that is an Erronious concept on the water wheel power conversion. It's not a straight through type of turbine. a water wheel is a force(the weight of the water in the buckets) acting at a distance, lever arm(radius of the wheel rotating ) to produce a torque and rotational speed at the axle.

Calculate again with an assumption of various diameter wheels, and the bucket capacity can vary too to capture any given flow rate. Then apply gearing or pulleys to turn a DC generator, and condition the output DC current to AC with an inverter if needed.

Don't say it can't work. Water wheels have worked for a couple thousand years to power gris mills and pumps and stuff. We just got lazy when electric power was distributed. There is potential to be captured. How much depends on how good an engineer or inventor we might be.

Exercise a little creativity. It's for fun. And... maybe profit?

HMMM~~~ Nice link for hydro turbines.

 

[greenbean36191]

Don't say it can't work. Water wheels have worked for a couple thousand years to power gris mills and pumps and stuff.

Yeah, but mother nature was providing the potential, not your Mag 9.

 

[kaptken]

Wellllll....Not exactly GreenBean. The mills meerly harnessed the potential of rain water falling at higher altitudes returning to sea level by inserting a water wheel in the path at a point of elevation change..

In the case of our hypothetical tank, the Mag 9 has already consumed the energy to raise the water from sump to tank. The overflow is just natures way of returning that potential to the sump, by gravity. The point of this thread seems to be to explore any means of recovering some portion of that spent energy at the expense of gravity. and put it back to use, thus reducing the carbon footprint of the tank.

Remember, on average in America, every kilowatt hour of electric power generated produces about 2 pounds of CO2 from the average fuel mix for power plants running on coal, gas, wood, trash, nuclear and hydro. it's about the national average in a nice round easy to remember number.

and all the running around we do in cars, searching for Nemo produces about 20 pounds of CO2 per every 6.2 pound gallon of gasoline burned. And all that CO2 goes up and creates global warming, heats the seas and disolves in the oceans to reduce the PH which then hurts the corals and reefs that supply our hobby tanks.

So....?? Yeah, I think a little exploration of recovery technology and energy efficiency in our hobby, as well as everything else we do that consumes energy is a worth while effort. It Soytantly can't Hurt!

There are reefs out there i would like to snorkle on someday, before they go away. Hopefully we can preserve them.