More Tornadoes

In most industrial environments you have to burn something in order to create. This process generally produces a lot of extra heat that is considered waste heat. That wasted energy is usually dumped into a river or some other water source.

Well Louis Michaud has a pretty interesting idea about how to reclaim a bit of that lost energy. He proposes building a giant cooling tower like you see next to nuclear power plants, a big concrete cylinder. He would then surround the base of the tower with the heated water from an industrial plant. Using some big fans, he would push air through the water which heats it and adds humidity. The air is then dumped into the cooling tower in a whirlpool like motion.

The hot air in the cylinder will now rise and be displaced by more air through the heated water. The convection process creates a certain amount of mechanical energy that will begin to pull the air into the cooling tower. As more and more air rises a funnel will form.

In Kansas, we call that a tornado.

The water will continue to supply heat energy, while the tornado will convert it into the mechanical movement of the air. Eventually the tornado's motion will be self sustaining which will drive the fans that originally started the process. Those fans will be attached to generators.

We would be creating electricity off of a domesticated tornado. While I'm not sure if the process will work, it is something I'd really like to see.