Michael Shumate wrote:About 25 to 30 years ago I designed a brochure (I'm a graphic designer) for a start-up company headed by a former aeronautical engineer who used to specialize in aviation transmissions (I didn't even know that airplanes had transmissions). He said his former enemy was always the heat generated by two sets of veins, paddles, blades rotating at different speeds. It made dangerous amounts of heat at the high RPMs that those engines operate at. After retiring he realized that the same enemy could be used to generate heat directly from motion for domestic use. When I was doing the brochure for him he had developed a system that used an agriculture style windmill with a vertical shaft that transferred the motion of the windmill down to a transmission box buried in the ground. The box was basically a transmission box with one set of blades immobilized. The friction in the transmission fluid made lots of heat that was transferred to water via a heat exchange coil into a tank. The pipes from the windmill to the house had to be well insulated but that was the gist of the whole concept.
I moved from there shortly after doing the brochure so I don't know if the company ever succeeded but I'd love to find out if any such set-up is commercially available. Failing that, I'd like someone's ideas on converting a transmission into a heat generator.
What say ye?
Directly heating is very good and efficient. Converting to other energy forms (electricity for example), always has extra losses and complication and cost.
A windmill that stirs paddles in a baffled container filled with water. The baffles preventing the water from simply spinning round. I do believe that in Sweden many years ago, some off grid housing used such units to heat the houses, day and night, with their windy winters.....
There are people making specialised rotors in the USA to do this very efficiently. Boiling water is easy to produce with no fuel needed if the wind blows. See here:-
There are plenty of these to look at.....
Even a simply DIY version in an old oil barrel will deliver useful heated water.....
Regards
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