Hot air towers

tower


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_KRDJpnVx0 DIY solution. Inject plastic sheeting into squares for construction. See Preciousplastic.com for shredder and injection mold machine. Collect as much scrap metal and glass as you can find, the tower shown in the image creates between 500 and 1000watt, enough to power your micro Greenhouse.

The energy at the exit port increases considerably by encircling the inclined base of clear or black painted glass? spaced around the tower center with heliostat mirrors spaced several meters away from the outer perimeter of the glass sheeting, using open loop tracking. The sun tracking precision isn't as important as it would be with a small thermal element because the surface area of the inclined target glass is so large. This reduces the labor in cleaning of the inclined base, due to the air that it sucks in fouling the mirrors on the inside. Each base mirror section pivots like a door for easy cleaning. Use the 80c heat at the exit port for either driving a turbine or storing the heat in a soil thermal battery around the greenhouse. The exit temperature is much higher with surrounding heliostats aiming at the base. Obviously scrap glass sheets is used to keep costs down, larger sheets are assembled out of smaller ones with fire sealant paste(1200c) and metal struts.

The surrounding heliostats are made out of cheap plastic timber with reduced size, negating wind loading issues. Any design which eliminates quantities of steel is preferred, especially if a high resolution closed loop tracking device can't be procured. Open loop tracking is done with a single mega2560 calculating the suns position and RS485 signal loop to each heliostat attiny controlling the small dc motors azimuth and zenith orientation as per Arduino irrigation.

Store the heat from the tower by venting it trough a hole in the ground filled with basalt rock. A metal container can't be used because the expansion of the rocks will break it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhi4ybqDrMs diy experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2BT5yENlLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrGsPBEQLP8

large commercial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTkmTsKLRq0

Air tower
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2japP5d0qCI Hot air is cooled down with water at the tower's top, creating a 100km/h wind draft that turns turbines at the bottom. This allows for 24hour operation as the hot air is generated after sunset with a heat exchanger from the MoltenSalt solution, that soaked up heat during the day. A Solar]] energy furnace heats the salt during the day.

energytower.org
https://web.archive.org/web/20120120143459/http://energytower.org/ This is a project to design and build a system that uses a combination of direct and indirect solar collection to generate electricity and store thermal energy in an economical, environmentally friendly, scalable, reliable, efficient and location independent manner using common construction materials. The project is being managed with a similar methodology to Open Source Software Development and the ideas and contributions are being published openly on the Internet without an attempt to secure patents. The hope is that with an open philosophy that the project shows similar Rapid Application Development and success as Linux and other Open Source Software projects and provides a system that can meet future energy requirements in a sustainable manner.

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