[zapkitty]

Tulse wrote: I’m curious as to what, if any, regulations there are about waste heat in residential areas.

Apparently very few regulations that don’t involve something being burned.

Tulse wrote: Many houses in northern climes of course have chimneys, but I doubt any fireplace is putting out 5MWt.

This is off the cuff but about 250 large homes with their furnaces going…

Tulse wrote: What effect would a large 60 C air stream have on a local clime?

Even in a stiff breeze it would rise ~20-30 meters and would disperse laterally even further before impacting the neighborhood.

Tulse wrote: I don’t have a good sense of the relative scale of the heat being dumped — is this comparable to the exhaust of an industrial air conditioner, or something much more substantial?

… an office buildings total heat output or a car being set on fire… 🙂

[zapkitty]

Tulse wrote:

Y’know, in some of those socialist countries they disguise substations of similar value and power as houses for aesthetic purposes.

That’s certainly true where I live, in Soviet Canuckistan — Torontograd has many such substations.

I thought the Indiana Imperial Senate had renamed that city North Hoosierville after the last time we invaded you?

Tulse wrote: I’m very dubious, however, that a residential plant would be permitted with such a large cooling tower — the height alone would prohibit it from many such locations.

One, it’s not what most people think of when they think of an industrial cooling tower… it’s actually just a vent duct over an air-cooled heat exchanger (ACHE). For those unfamiliar, these are akin to a really big car radiator and are extremely common in industry with capacities ranging from a few kilowatts to gigawatt-range installations.

The only thing that sets this one apart from myriad others is that the coolant in the radiator is helium fresh from a fusion reactor… 🙂

Second, and perhaps more relevant :), the duct and its height are not needed if you’re willing to pay a bit more for the installation. I was aiming for “universal” and “cheap.” But throw more coolant at the unit and you can even bring down the temp to where a standard off-the-shelf ACHE can lift the 5 MWt… and its exhaust would only be 60 C.

(Somewhere along this path the cost of expanding the helium loop will overtake the cost of using a water loop and the helium loop will be scaled back to just getting the heat out of the core to where the water can take it away.

http://www.gearainey.com/opencms/opencms/gem/en/calculators/AFC_Calculator.html

Attached find crude representations of just such an off-the-shelf unit engulfing the building housing the FF 🙂

Tulse wrote: However, if the idea is to place small modules all around cities, I wonder if one can’t use the existing water/sewer system as a heat sink.

Speaking from my experience at the Indianapolis Department of Public Works, it would be very iffy in general and impossible here. In general urban water systems are not designed for the extra energy input even if it is distributed over a large area. And many systems such as ours in downtown Indy are shamefully antiquated… they’d collapse. Literally.

The problem with water cooling, and thus the increasing dominance of “dry” systems such as ACHE, is that heated water must go somewhere and will get you in a lot of hot water of your own if you’re not very careful.

Tulse wrote: Even if one isn’t going to use the plant for district heating, one might be able to simply run the cooling pipes into the local water infrastructure.

Or, alternatively, build such plants at sewage treatment plants, and use the excess heat in the water treatment process.

For the long term you’d certainly design the infrastructure around the availability of such units.

That’s for the long run. But currently in the U.S. our infrastructure planning, never strong since the conservative rise to power, has now been overtaken by the teabaggers… who don’t believe government can work and are intent on proving it.

Thus plug-and-play units are the best way for distributed use, even if air-cooling costs a bit more for units in residential areas.

And of course FF units installed in existing power and industrial infrastructure can make use of the existing water cooling.

Attached files

[zapkitty]

AaronB wrote: Looks good. I would add high-voltage lines coming out of one side,

Well, it’s intended more as a concept to hang numbers off of rather than an actual model to add details to 🙂

And if it’s supposed to be part of a distributed grid, a node, would it need particularly high voltage to supply its allotment of 2000 or so homes?

Perhaps there would be dedicated “export” nodes scattered along the grid to either provide peak power or, when local demand is low, to package their own output along with excess power from the grid for high-voltage export?

AaronB wrote: and maybe a barbed-wire fence around it.

Well, in America at least, chain link with barb wire tops. Given crime rates and the voltage for even district-wide distribution, yeah. They’re even having to secure wind turbines behind such fences.

Still want to keep folks 12 meters away from the housing in case of that impossible core breach and we want a meter of grass between the fence and the sidewalk so the land plot goes to 26 meters a side…

Y’know, in some of those socialist countries they disguise substations of similar value and power as houses for aesthetic purposes. Looks just like any other home on the block except for the warning sign on the front door.

AaronB wrote: Maybe put an EV charging station in front of the truck.

I’ll leave that to the visually-abled types 🙂

AaronB wrote: The reactor, capacitors, cooling equipment and transformers could be in the basement level to help with the shielding,

What help with the radiation shielding? All the shielding that’s needed is included with the standard 3 meter x 2 meter x 2 meter FF box in the housing… I’m still using the standard box unless and until the team changes the parameters.

And anyways a subsurface setup would make accessing equipment for installation, maintenance or replacement a bit more difficult, no? … of course one of those socialist countries might do something like that… 🙂

Anyways, the equipment housing in the generic design has no basement… instead it’s raised 10 cm off the ground on a platform that can serve as a fire ant barrier or, depending on local conditions, it can house drainage passages (with optional high speed pumps for post-tsunami duty) or even apartments for mongooses (useful for places where you might find cobras coiled amongst the ‘caps).

Of course anything I could place in the housing now besides the FF unit would just be busywork… but attached find the interior w/ some random boxes along the walls and some extra tanks of switch gas just for Derek 🙂

AaronB wrote: and the sauna for the occasional maintenance worker could be on the main level as you walk in.

Well, of course if you’re going to drag water cooling into it then you could make the blasted thing invisible 🙂

(scene: a stream wends through a park… the only odd note is the large submarine-type snorkel poking up out of the stream…)

…. anyways, here’s some intermediate figures…

previousIy I’d said:

Practical examples show that conduction and convection from similar plant heat outputs aren’t a problem for their surroundings with suitable exhaust stacks but still want to run dispersion models for insurance.

hmmm…. what’s this? online tools…. how cheap and tawdry of me would that be?

…lessee what they give us 🙂

It seems that with an exhaust temp of 250 C the governing conditions for plume rise and dispersion are superadiabatic by definition. Of course by the time the plume gets high enough for the lapse rate to mean much it’s already become a non-issue for local concerns… but the variety of calculation tools online are all aimed at finding the locations and amounts of pollutants entrained in the plume, not the plume temp itself per se.

But the tools should serve for a rough cut… here the one I’ll use for now:

http://www.ajdesigner.com/phpdispersion/effective_stack_height_equation_superadiabatic.php

With the given stats and a windspeed of 15 m/sec (33.5 mph – bad weather!) the plume rise will be 31 meters for a total of 42 m height (on a calm day that goes up to 465 m)…

… given the poor thermal conductive properties of air and the convective tendency to rise it seems that this whole heat thing just became a non-issue… except for tall buildings within a few hundred meters downwind…

Still need to model it all out properly though.

Attached files

[zapkitty]

willit wrote: Omg. Where do I send the money? And as far as superflies i seem to be breeding them in my garbage can. 😉

Actually, if you can get a close look at the bar codes on the thorax without getting eaten you’ll find that those flies are actually the product and property of Monsanto, all rights reserved…

[zapkitty]

Universal Generic FF 5MWe Power Plant

First numbers: keeping things cool with the neighbors…

Plot of land: 24 meters on a side.

Building: 6 meters square, interior height 3 meters, exterior height 4 meters. The height difference is made up of the intakes, fans and ducts of the cooling system.

air cooling

Sufficient volume on intake grills to handle high-altitude/high-temperature locales. More temperate climes can reconfigure to suit.

exhaust duct – probable overkill – double-walled aluminum 7 meters high and 2 meters wide. total duct height from ground level 11 meters.

exhaust air: 46 cubic meters/sec at 250 c
duct diameter: 2 meters at exit
duct flow: 14.6 meters per second

Given the low emissivity of aluminum and the very low emissivity of air this should bring sensible heat outside the fence close to never mind.

Practical examples show that conduction and convection from similar plant heat outputs aren’t a problem for their surroundings with suitable exhaust stacks but still want to run models for insurance.

Thoughts?
Glaring errors?
Musings on the fate of a 50s vintage pickup arbitrarily rescaled to the size of a modern large pickup?

Attached files

[zapkitty]

DerekShannon wrote: @zapkitty, it sounds like you are looking for Table 3 of “Technical Paper I” listed under the LPPx category here on FFS, in which beam and x-ray output relative to input is calculated for various parameters. Direct link.

So the 50/50 ratio was yet another Unofficial Forum Object? 🙂

[zapkitty]

Tulse wrote:

Well, the overall energy released will be the same

…which I suppose upon reflection should have been obvious, but which wasn’t made clear in the original article. Oh, well, so much for violating the laws of conservation!

It should be helpful and I’m glad Aaron stopped by… but the discovery is potentially helpful at best and not a real game changer… I’ve been fishing instead for confirmation on the 2/3 – 1/3 ratio for ions vs. x-rays that Lerner-hakase mentioned in that last video pep-talk 🙂

If not an error THAT would shift the parameters quite a bit in favor of success.

[zapkitty]

YordanGeorgiev wrote: How does this relate to the findings of LPP ?! To my humble understandings this seems to differentiate to the predictions of LPP’s models ?! As whole how does this correlate to the current findings of LPP ?

As far as I know they are not yet using boron in the LPPX so it’s a theoretical question at the moment.

Of course it would be a nice treat if one of the team were to drop by and comment on this 😉

[zapkitty]

opensource wrote: “Rossi Cold Fusion Validated by Swedish Skeptic’s Society”
http://pesn.com/2011/04/07/9501805_Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Validated_by_Swedish_Skeptics_Society/

What do you guys think?

Edit: http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3144827.ece

They took that latest Rossi PR op apart over on talk-polywell. While there’s no evidence of fraud the arbitrary conditions of the “tests” still allow way to much room for error, misdirection or both.

[zapkitty]

It should be easier (and thus more efficient) to gain energy from higher energy particles.

Thus two higher energy particles and one low should make for better coil output than one high and two low.

[zapkitty]

I’d think it best to design a good FF membership badge first and then design a special “500” badge based on the standard badge.

[zapkitty]

redsnapper wrote: What you mean, “we”, Kemosabe? I expect the Japanese engineers know quite well what the temperature and watts of the thermal input is. And because “we” know the first law of thermodynamics, we do to (that is, apparently we do, since you’ve said the electrical and thermal output have been published). I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at here. There’s no mystery about the efficiency, there was only a small disagreement as to whether it was being calculated correctly – not if it could be.

Just poking around the issue a bit… I can screw up as well as the next neko or even more so 🙂

But the parameters discussed are actually relevant to one of the potential issues that you raised in your initial posts: the local effect of the thermal output of a plant when air cooling is used. I wanted to be sure that the terms I was working with were ones others could agree on.

The solution is a sort of chimney, almost certainly fan-driven. The amount of air moved at a given temp, the chimney height and the chimney diameter would govern the extent of the local heating effect, if any.

Of course it isn’t technically a “chimney” as no combustion products would be expelled… and it would not be a “smokestack” or a “flue” nor would it even be a “cooling tower”… so what would be an benign yet accurate name for this column poking up over the neighborhood rooftops?

As for the stats, in general local ordinances are concerned almost solely with an appropriate flue height for dispersing specific pollutants before they reach the ground… something that is utterly inapplicable to an FF installation… and there are very few mentions of heat. Apparently 99% or more of heat regulation concerns thermal pollution of water… something else that would be inapplicable to a standalone FF station.

But I believe that the dispersion models used to determine standard stack heights would be a good starting point for a cooling system that fits in with the “plug n play” and “zero-impact” attributes of FF… but the varying ordinances in varying localities specify varying models…

[zapkitty]

redsnapper wrote: A diversion, I think.

So the electrical output leaves the power plant via the grid, and the thermal output via the cooling towers. One does not include the other, and they both came from the fission reaction. Neglecting any other significant losses, the total energy generated by the fission reaction is the sum of the two (1st law of thermodynamics). Efficiency is defined as useful energy output (electrical) divided by thermal input to the cycle, so you must do it the way Brian H has described: eff=w(elec)/(w(elec)+w(waste)).

… ah, but as external observers we don’t have the temperature or the watts of the thermal input to the cycle… so doesn’t that imply that we can’t get an actual efficiency rating for the plant using external observation and the standard equation?

(The aardnanas move into flanking positions…)

[zapkitty]

Hmmm… recently Lerner-hakase was heard saying that the ion vs x-rays ratio was expected to be .66/.33 instead of .5/.5

[zapkitty]

redsnapper wrote: I’m beginning to think zapkitty’s thermal number is (somehow) measured thermal output of the reactor core (i.e., thermal input to the high side of the conversion cycle), not thermal output of the low side of the conversion cycle.

I understand what you’re getting at but my numbers were indeed for the ganged output of the plant cooling towers, i.e.w(t) is the low temperature side of the thermal cycle, and the plant’s total electrical output as w(e). These are two things that can be measured external to the plant and are thus fair game for my manipulations.

The serious question is this: are the aardvark-banana hybrids a valid counter or are they merely a clever diversion?… 🙂

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