The vortex proposal is interesting, certainly worthy of some
engineering study to confirm the numbers. I have not read the Michaud
proposal, I am simply reacting to the idea.
As I understand it, heat energy available from some source, like
waste heat from a power plant, would be allowed to rise through a
vortex, which converts heat energy to rotation, that rotation could
drive a turbine.
It would be an artificial tornado, which seems to arouse some, ah,
safety concerns. However, the devil is in the details.
It is not clear that this would be extremely noisy. Maybe. Maybe not.
Again, this would depend on details.
The argument is made for the proposal that the vortex would be
maintained through the vortex machinery, and that it would dissipate
rapidly if the machinery failed or the vortex began to escape the
machinery to become a live tornado. The heat powering the vortex is
coming from a specific source, substantially elevated source
temperature over ambient. It's difficult to see how these conditions
would allow escape. Shut off that heat (i.e., shunt it out of the
vortex entry, spreading it out, or massively cool it by, say,
injecting water spray), the vortex would shut down immediately, from
loss of energy input, as well as whatever the machine does to stop
source rotation.
So, I would't want one of these things next door, but the comment on
PESN about 200 miles seems extreme, indeed. One would not want to run
one of these things in a high-natural-tornado zone, I'd suspect,
though it's actually possible that it would suppress natural tornados
to a degree, by heating the atmosphere, reducing the natural heat
engine "fuel," i.e., the differential temperature. I rather doubt
that this suppressive effect would be large, unless these machines
were in *massive* use.
Obviously, if engineering studies support the practical possibility,
this would be tested in remote regions, not naturally susceptible to
tornado activity.
What this idea would do, essentially, is convert a fairly small
temperature difference, ordinarily difficult to harness, into rotary
motion powering a turbine. Instead of *consuming energy* to cool the
heat source (i.e, fans), this would create large atmospheric flow,
cooling by converting the heat to air motion and power generation.
