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Permalink Reply by Sepp on May 15, 2008 at 5:02pm

I came across this kind of by chance.

Having studied Schauberger's writings (he was an Austrian naturalist and "water wizard" as they called him) I was always looking for ways to use the vortex principle in technological stuff. The good thing about a vortex is that it acts to convert the random molecular motion of heat into a directed macroscopic motion of the medium itself, meaning it consumes some of the stored-up heat and accelerates the flow of water.

What we normally have in hydroelectric applications is a stationary body of water (stored behind a dam) and pressure that gets released near the bottom of the dam to then drive a turbine. This is kind of inefficient because two forces oppose each other. The pressure wants to accelerate the water, while the water's inertia opposes the acceleration and thereby the efficiency of hydropower generation.

Two of my early articles that try to explain the problem and the advantage of using vortex-type flow in water as proposed by Schauberger are

UNDERSTANDING WATER POWER

and

Dynamic Hydropower

While this would be a worthwhile area of research, no one seems to have taken up where Schauberger left off.

But recently, I came across this report on an Austrian engineer (Zotlöterer) having put a turbine in a creek in his property. I collected the information here:

Water Vortex Drives Power Plant

and good thing I did, because the site of the engineer has meanwhile disappeared off the net. (I don't think it is because of any suppression - merely a failure of appreciating the importance of his discovery and of getting the data out there.)

The advantages of Zotlöterer's system:

Low head - it can be installed in practically any river without need for a dam. Installation "in series" is possible, i.e. one village can have a plant and the same river can supply the energy for the next and the next village down stream, as each can repeat the installation.

Simple and cheap - the system can be built largely with local materials. In the Austrian prototype, the turbine blades are "home-made" of simple bent metal sheets. A generator to be connected to the turbine can be sourced from whatever is available locally.

Environmentally friendly - the original intention of the Austrian engineer was to oxygenate the water of the brook. The turbine was really an afterthought. So the vortex spins some air/oxygen into the water, bettering the water quality.

Fish friendly - the fish are not hindered in their way up or down river. The slow vortex and the correspondingly slow moving turbine do not pose an obstacle to fish migration.

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Permalink Reply by Vinay Gupta on May 15, 2008 at 6:38pm

This is really great information. I'm passing it on to a group called WHIX which does a lot of work on microhydro. I also think that Smari and Marcin, who are into turbine design, would be very very interested too.

I will have more questions once I have done some reading, but thanks and welcome!

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