Barometric Wind And Power Tunnels

Kirk Carter@ Chew Bear Productions@ Copyright 2014

Barometric Wind And Power Tunnels

(Barotec)

 How many times have you walked between a corridor of buildings or hills and felt the compression of a constant force of wind? That friction against your body as you struggle to move forward...

    No surprise, it's the Earth's natural atmospheric pressure being forced to make it's way through a surfaced corridor. It's the Earth's natural movement, the imbalance of temperate regions of cold air moving down, while hot air attempts to rise. It's this constant which dictates the seasons, climate variations, and from anyone who has ever lost anything during a bad storm...complete disaster!

    Question is, this natural phenomenon seems to be completely misunderstood...at least underused, somewhat ignored by all the theoretical engineers, at least of our era! They instead place highly inefficient wind mills in the middle of nowhere, where they can only really spin when there is severe turbulence, or a shift of pressure systems. Problem is, they not only interfere with the wildlife that attempts to get by, trying to migrate on predictable magnetic corridors, but they're noisy, with constant "whoop-whoop" which is annoying to the ears. As though that wasn't enough, they clutter up the landscape, not particularly pleasing to look at!

    My answer to all this is Barometric Tunnels. The same technology which brought you the L.A. and Boston tunnels can be applied to making a one of these systems. The idea is to create a naturally constant drafting tunnel which doesn't that doesn't depend on climate trends to generate it's current. By using the constant of barometric pressure, there will always be a breeze. By putting a turbine in the tube, and controlling flow gates on each end of the tube, you will always be able to set the perfect amount of convection for maximum flow and compression.

The first thing you need to do is drill a tunnel (about 10 feet in diameter) from the base of a mountain or hill, drilling up at about a twenty degree angle, clean that out, and construct a tube skeleton of rebarb, then spraying concrete to secure the walls. From a costing standpoint, you could also do a steel sleeve type insertion, it would depend on the tube length and environment, as most of these tunnels need to be at least 150 feet in length in order to create the necessary induction. From there a track is installed which will hold a flatbed train car, which is pulled up the tunnel from a cable which is controlled from a winch at the top of the tunnel.

Placed at the center of the tunnel, brakes set, holding a 20 kilovolt generator complete with two opposing sets of turbine blades. Being on the track allows for easy installation, maintenance, and quick replacement. This is why I encourage the installation of a two tube system, so that electricity is constantly being produced, although at half the potential.

The turbines themselves would be free spinning, with a traditional relay engaged high speed starter just to get things going. At each end of the tunnel, there would be a computer operated motorised vent gate mounted on hinges for opening, it's frame firmly secured to the opening walls of the land mass. Senors for wind velocity, temperature, and of course barometric pressure would be fed to a computer which would calculate at any given time how much air to let in from the bottom vent and how much to let out from the top vent. The average velocity should be around 50 miles per hour.

Power cables from the generator would be fed down to a grid of IGBT rectifiers which would convert the direct current into alternating current while smoothing out the purity of the signal waveform, eliminating spikes and spurious emissions. This could be placed anywhere along the path, but it's best placed as close as possible to the source of generation.

Depending on the distance, most any township or community could set a couple of these up and not have to worry about energy sources or drop out latency due to environmental matters, or fuel prices. It would be especially useful for large scale water supplies where high-current demands become necessary for pumps and where traditional desalinating is being considered. The new school of thought seems to be using pulsed laser technology which neutralises sodium and other impurities, to be safely vented off to the atmosphere. 

The average price for a dual tunnel system would be in the $100 million range, depending on the topography, length of tunnel, and weather conditions during the construction. Contact me at kscarter58@gmail.com for more information.