energy is put in by pumping air into the bag. energy is taken out by releasing the air out of the bag. it is like a battery. without the harmful/dangerous/rare/expensive chemicals. storing energy is just as important a problem as capturing it (burning hydrocarbons/windmills/solar/tidal etc). Another way to think of it is a hydro-dam. when they make more energy than needed, they pump the water back to the top to store the energy. putting it deep underwater helps contain more compressed air.
Great idea - similar to one I had last night (way behind!) Some differences: - high-pressure tanks; more expensive, but use 1/6 of the space (or less if stored underwater) - Integrate into existing wind turbine designs (implement a compressor & and air impeller to turbine generator). - scale: want to store ~4MW per turbine to provide valuable constant supply from offshore farms to mainland (~13m litres of air in bags / 2m in tanks). This would remove the biggest problem of large scale wind.
If one had a place with very high tidal difference, they could be inflated at low tide, and energy taken out at high tide. Or maybe used in other places with rapidly changing waterlevels, like reservoirs of pumped-water stations. To reduce the energy needed to fill them with air that is. edit: Might be easier to use other methods to harvest extra energy from places with "rapidly" changing water levels though.
I am so intrigued by this avenue of research. I absolutely love the genius use of mechanical batteries to store renewable energy for grid use at a later time. Bravo, Professor, you might end up saving humanity from global warming.
Wow what an interesting concept.. a barometric battery. Here's a thought. Perhaps I'm just stating the obvious here, but these could be used not only as batteries, but as tidal generators too. =D Set them up in shallow ocean areas like beaches. Pump air into the bags at low tide. Extract air from the bags at high tide. You should get a net energy gain from the added pressure created at high tide.
I'm not sure, but I guess is because is more cost effective to make a bag rather than a pipe. And probably the geometry of the bag and the way the water exerts pressure on the bag helps too.
makes since to me. filling the bags above water level with air takes little effort. but when you pull them down under the water the pressure on the bags would be 20 times more forcing the air out giving you 20 times the energy you put in back out..
Oh wow, that's wild. I had heard of mine shafts and such being used for compress air energy storage. But using the ocean is a neat twist. That circumvents the issue of needing to find massive geological features to harness. Sounds like transmission back to the shore would be mildly annoying, but less so than a sports stadium full of batteries for energy storage. Plus if you get a bunch of these rocking, then it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to get an OTEC system out there too.
Umm hey Professor. Can't you just variable the pressure and use the lift force to drive the generator? Seems to me your not using this system to it's full potential. Instead of anchoring the bags, try placing a pulley system that will use variable pressure to spin the generator. I think you'll get more energy out. Reference me in the assistance of the design! :)
ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT!! Very innovative design, and the cool thing that you could do is make a system that can recharge batteries on electric boats at sea. The freaky thing is that I had the same idea of compressing air with wind power to store energy when I was in 6th grade when I got a compressed air powered airplane. I'm not kidding! I can't wait to see these contraptions off the coast of England or any other country for that matter. Cheers!
why not use a fixed shape like a sphere or cylinder with hole at the bottom? as you press in the air, it will push out the water through the bottom hole. and you don't have to worry about material exhaustion, as you have no moving parts. same concept but better, what do i win? i'll take a warm handshake.
Impressive. I love the simplicity of it and the fact that it has the potential to be clean. I was just thinking about ways of winching them down, but I wonder if the effort is any less to fill them with gas once they are submerged? I suspect it's just as much since the gas has to get down there. All the best :)
What if we used genetically engineered plants to make a solid or liquid chemical that we can put in the balloons in it's denser form, and as time goes on, have the liquid vaporize, which would pressurize the inside of the balloon. It's roughly the same concept as gasoline, sun>chemical>reaction>pressure energy process, but without all the fumes.
so i take excess solar energy or some such runs the compressors to fill the bags and then when you need the energy you you run the air through a air terbine to get electrical current again? .
i believe XKCD has a comic showing that uranium has something like 76 million megajoules per kilogram of material. i just thought of that when you were asking someone to come up with a better idea.
if you increase the power generation past the point of need, kind of where we are right now, your biggest hindrance is not power storage to increase the available delta but is in fact the infrastructure itself. this energy storage while a great idea for energy storage doesn't do anything about the problems involved with wrangling the energy in the first place nor does it do anything about transmitting the energy and implementing it which is where the infrastructure comes in. i don't know a darn thing about british economic history so i'm going to use the USA as my example. in the 20's, 30's, and 50's before and after world war 2 we started making great investments into our infrastructure as a whole, mostly roads and telecommunications but we also introduced electricity to the common household as a standard of living. they might not have had tv's or radios but by the fifties just about every house had electricity of some form. this hasn't changed since about the late 60's when the economy started going downhill and inflating. as a result the infrastructure has degraded a lot and nothing has been done to make it better which has further increased the problem. rough estimates have it out at about 40 percent of the power generated here in the united states being wasted to ground faults and other infrastructure problems. it's also inefficient when compared to latest technologies, such as green wires which passively monitor for ground faults and breakages. all this to say is that it's a bit like putting the cart before the horse, we would want an advanced energy storage capability if we were generating far less energy than what's required in the daytime compared with what's required in the nighttime. not a problem with current power sources but if we're going to start relying on "green" power sources then we're definitely going to need storage alongside it. but that's if. with nuclear energy especially the fast neutron reactors which are fission fusion hybrids we would never have a need for storage devices, the change between night and day could be met easily by resting reactors at night and waking them up in the morning to be active during the day, if we even need to do that in the first place. personally if i was going to store electricity it would be a bit unconventional but i would focus on tank circuits, large capacitors with large inductors that store the electrical energy in the form of a "ringing" of charge between the two.
waldosan I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You mentioned that if green power becomes a thing, we'll need energy storage methods. But one of the factors holding back green energy is the lack of energy storage. Liquid salt solar plants, for example, need to store their energy as heat in the liquid salt itself over night, and they go through a lot of effort to do that. All because energy storage methods don't exist. There are current needs for storage of this kind, though. Power providers have to dance a lot around the fact that they are constantly only producing as much power as is being used. That dance is costly. Many times different production facilities have to coordinate expertly and carefully to share power to meet the needs of different areas at different times. Being able to essentially buffer the energy would already save a very significant amount of effort. I do agree that if we switched to primarily nuclear power then a lot of these problems would be much less of problems. I am a very big fan of nuclear power. But the way things have been going in the world, I'm not confident that we are anywhere near that becoming the norm. So if they can figure out the energy bag thing, there would be a lot of people lining up to use it right now.
I have a better idea but as a lone inventor I cannot get any support from the existing system in Scotland.I was offered a £500,000 grant in 2009 for an electricity generator but I needed a university on board to qua;ify for the grant.Any offers?
What does 'high proportion' mean? Since you don't have high pressure, I'm guessing that thermal losses are minimal. Just how efficient is the cycle? That's the $ 1,000,000 question with ANY battery tech.
would this not be more efficient than pumping water back up a dam you could use the electricity remotely to pump the air into the reservoir could be fixed to the dam floor on just a cage of balast would lessen your need for the cool lil balast gismo you have now. awsome idea. thnking along the same lines myself for something but this seems a lot more cost effective if slightly less efficient.
why not just make a system where you drag a heavy weight up in the air trough a pulley system(store potential energy), and let it drop, when energy is needed. an electric motor drags a massive object up, and..when it falls, it spins the motor, turning it into a generator.some kind of a gear system is probably needed too :) it would work on land which is good. about these bags...well, pump them full during low tide when its easy, and let the tides create pressure...then release it
is the idea to pressurize air at one atmosphere then used water pressure to increase pressure to create gain in the release? my imagine the energy used to fill the volume may not be less than the energy gain from releasing the air. this look like a scam project.
That's the point. It's a battery not energy production. The problem with solar and wind energy is that it is sporadic so we need stable long term storage solutions and chemical batteries are bad at this. So this is just an energy store. You put in energy and you store it and you get almost as much back later when you need. So wind cans fill these on windy days and then we can deflate them on still days for example.
@@thatcrazykid1393 This comment is 8 years old and I'm pretty sure it was a part of a thread of replies to another user where I was walking them through their own idea.
Then again solar doesn't ruin the health of people and the environment. But yes it is more expensive, probably not be able to rival coal for another 10-15 years.
energy is put in by pumping air into the bag. energy is taken out by releasing the air out of the bag.
it is like a battery. without the harmful/dangerous/rare/expensive chemicals. storing energy is just as important a problem as capturing it (burning hydrocarbons/windmills/solar/tidal etc).
Another way to think of it is a hydro-dam. when they make more energy than needed, they pump the water back to the top to store the energy.
putting it deep underwater helps contain more compressed air.
Great idea - similar to one I had last night (way behind!)
Some differences:
- high-pressure tanks; more expensive, but use 1/6 of the space (or less if stored underwater)
- Integrate into existing wind turbine designs (implement a compressor & and air impeller to turbine generator).
- scale: want to store ~4MW per turbine to provide valuable constant supply from offshore farms to mainland (~13m litres of air in bags / 2m in tanks).
This would remove the biggest problem of large scale wind.
If one had a place with very high tidal difference, they could be inflated at low tide, and energy taken out at high tide.
Or maybe used in other places with rapidly changing waterlevels, like reservoirs of pumped-water stations. To reduce the energy needed to fill them with air that is.
edit: Might be easier to use other methods to harvest extra energy from places with "rapidly" changing water levels though.
I am so intrigued by this avenue of research. I absolutely love the genius use of mechanical batteries to store renewable energy for grid use at a later time.
Bravo, Professor, you might end up saving humanity from global warming.
It's wonderful to see such a terrific idea come to fruition! Good luck with the sea tests!
Maybe turn on the tap before you yap.......🤣
This idea is brilliant, I can't wait to see how successful it is.
Wow what an interesting concept.. a barometric battery.
Here's a thought. Perhaps I'm just stating the obvious here, but these could be used not only as batteries, but as tidal generators too. =D
Set them up in shallow ocean areas like beaches.
Pump air into the bags at low tide.
Extract air from the bags at high tide.
You should get a net energy gain from the added pressure created at high tide.
They look awsome!
Great idea, Seamus!
I'm not sure, but I guess is because is more cost effective to make a bag rather than a pipe. And probably the geometry of the bag and the way the water exerts pressure on the bag helps too.
makes since to me. filling the bags above water level with air takes little effort. but when you pull them down under the water the pressure on the bags would be 20 times more forcing the air out giving you 20 times the energy you put in back out..
Oh wow, that's wild. I had heard of mine shafts and such being used for compress air energy storage. But using the ocean is a neat twist. That circumvents the issue of needing to find massive geological features to harness. Sounds like transmission back to the shore would be mildly annoying, but less so than a sports stadium full of batteries for energy storage. Plus if you get a bunch of these rocking, then it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to get an OTEC system out there too.
oooo, I was looking forwards to this continuation video! thanks!
Umm hey Professor. Can't you just variable the pressure and use the lift force to drive the generator? Seems to me your not using this system to it's full potential.
Instead of anchoring the bags, try placing a pulley system that will use variable pressure to spin the generator. I think you'll get more energy out.
Reference me in the assistance of the design! :)
ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT!!
Very innovative design, and the cool thing that you could do is make a system that can recharge batteries on electric boats at sea.
The freaky thing is that I had the same idea of compressing air with wind power to store energy when I was in 6th grade when I got a compressed air powered airplane. I'm not kidding!
I can't wait to see these contraptions off the coast of England or any other country for that matter.
Cheers!
انا مخترع بهذا الميدان.
شكرا على الترجمة.
Seamus:
What is your thesis?
Paul
why not use a fixed shape like a sphere or cylinder with hole at the bottom?
as you press in the air, it will push out the water through the bottom hole.
and you don't have to worry about material exhaustion, as you have no moving parts.
same concept but better, what do i win? i'll take a warm handshake.
27 (number) I wondered that too but this video is over 5 years old so I don't think we'll get an answer from anyone involved.
Then you'd have to deal with your air loop being in direct contact with salt water, vastly increasing maintenance costs i'd imagine.
The problem is due to the seals not being secure due to poor design, as the person in the video said, and not a problem with moving parts !!
Impressive. I love the simplicity of it and the fact that it has the potential to be clean. I was just thinking about ways of winching them down, but I wonder if the effort is any less to fill them with gas once they are submerged? I suspect it's just as much since the gas has to get down there.
All the best :)
i wasn't asking for it. i wanted the other guy to realize he was asking for it.
What if we used genetically engineered plants to make a solid or liquid chemical that we can put in the balloons in it's denser form, and as time goes on, have the liquid vaporize, which would pressurize the inside of the balloon. It's roughly the same concept as gasoline, sun>chemical>reaction>pressure energy process, but without all the fumes.
precisely why Egan's idea was incomplete.
@UninstallingWindows There would be lots of friction involved. The key here is efficiency.
As the bags are pressurized with air, they will heat up. This heat will dissipate. How much energy does this represent?
Wow I would love to work with you all one day. I'm an information systems student and a full stack developer.
so i take excess solar energy or some such runs the compressors to fill the bags and then when you need the energy you you run the air through a air terbine to get electrical current again?
.
i believe XKCD has a comic showing that uranium has something like 76 million megajoules per kilogram of material. i just thought of that when you were asking someone to come up with a better idea.
if you increase the power generation past the point of need, kind of where we are right now, your biggest hindrance is not power storage to increase the available delta but is in fact the infrastructure itself.
this energy storage while a great idea for energy storage doesn't do anything about the problems involved with wrangling the energy in the first place nor does it do anything about transmitting the energy and implementing it which is where the infrastructure comes in.
i don't know a darn thing about british economic history so i'm going to use the USA as my example. in the 20's, 30's, and 50's before and after world war 2 we started making great investments into our infrastructure as a whole, mostly roads and telecommunications but we also introduced electricity to the common household as a standard of living. they might not have had tv's or radios but by the fifties just about every house had electricity of some form.
this hasn't changed since about the late 60's when the economy started going downhill and inflating. as a result the infrastructure has degraded a lot and nothing has been done to make it better which has further increased the problem. rough estimates have it out at about 40 percent of the power generated here in the united states being wasted to ground faults and other infrastructure problems.
it's also inefficient when compared to latest technologies, such as green wires which passively monitor for ground faults and breakages.
all this to say is that it's a bit like putting the cart before the horse, we would want an advanced energy storage capability if we were generating far less energy than what's required in the daytime compared with what's required in the nighttime. not a problem with current power sources but if we're going to start relying on "green" power sources then we're definitely going to need storage alongside it. but that's if.
with nuclear energy especially the fast neutron reactors which are fission fusion hybrids we would never have a need for storage devices, the change between night and day could be met easily by resting reactors at night and waking them up in the morning to be active during the day, if we even need to do that in the first place.
personally if i was going to store electricity it would be a bit unconventional but i would focus on tank circuits, large capacitors with large inductors that store the electrical energy in the form of a "ringing" of charge between the two.
waldosan
I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You mentioned that if green power becomes a thing, we'll need energy storage methods. But one of the factors holding back green energy is the lack of energy storage. Liquid salt solar plants, for example, need to store their energy as heat in the liquid salt itself over night, and they go through a lot of effort to do that. All because energy storage methods don't exist.
There are current needs for storage of this kind, though. Power providers have to dance a lot around the fact that they are constantly only producing as much power as is being used. That dance is costly. Many times different production facilities have to coordinate expertly and carefully to share power to meet the needs of different areas at different times. Being able to essentially buffer the energy would already save a very significant amount of effort.
I do agree that if we switched to primarily nuclear power then a lot of these problems would be much less of problems. I am a very big fan of nuclear power. But the way things have been going in the world, I'm not confident that we are anywhere near that becoming the norm. So if they can figure out the energy bag thing, there would be a lot of people lining up to use it right now.
+waldosan yeah but it costs billions to store the end product.
I have a better idea but as a lone inventor I cannot get any support from the existing system in Scotland.I was offered a £500,000 grant in 2009 for an electricity generator but I needed a university on board to qua;ify for the grant.Any offers?
What does 'high proportion' mean? Since you don't have high pressure, I'm guessing that thermal losses are minimal. Just how efficient is the cycle? That's the $ 1,000,000 question with ANY battery tech.
Should imagen they're testing two materials that just happed to be different coloured.
-I believe you're asking for free energy, which doesn't exist.
have you considered a giant spring?
Any news on that?
would this not be more efficient than pumping water back up a dam you could use the electricity remotely to pump the air into the reservoir could be fixed to the dam floor on just a cage of balast would lessen your need for the cool lil balast gismo you have now. awsome idea. thnking along the same lines myself for something but this seems a lot more cost effective if slightly less efficient.
Very cool.
why not just make a system where you drag a heavy weight up in the air trough a pulley system(store potential energy), and let it drop, when energy is needed.
an electric motor drags a massive object up, and..when it falls, it spins the motor, turning it into a generator.some kind of a gear system is probably needed too :)
it would work on land which is good.
about these bags...well, pump them full during low tide when its easy, and let the tides create pressure...then release it
is the idea to pressurize air at one atmosphere then used water pressure to increase pressure to create gain in the release? my imagine the energy used to fill the volume may not be less than the energy gain from releasing the air. this look like a scam project.
it's to be deployed in the sea. this is just a testing facility.
So, you create a pressure of about 0.12 bar. What are you going to do with that. :D You can produce more pressure with your lungs.. This is nothing..
it's about the scale and the depth of water that the bags are stored at.
Ohh my apologies, in my ignorance I didn't see you were replying to someone else, yeah, that was pretty much meant for him instead.
You definitely need a faster tap LOL
Great Idea though
10.000 megawatt balloon
but they are talking about storing energy not producing it
Energy bag filler? I 'ardly know 'er!
No problem 👍 I can do it
Weights?
how would you reset the system every time without putting in as much energy as you got out?
That's the point. It's a battery not energy production. The problem with solar and wind energy is that it is sporadic so we need stable long term storage solutions and chemical batteries are bad at this. So this is just an energy store. You put in energy and you store it and you get almost as much back later when you need. So wind cans fill these on windy days and then we can deflate them on still days for example.
@@thatcrazykid1393 This comment is 8 years old and I'm pretty sure it was a part of a thread of replies to another user where I was walking them through their own idea.
@@snowballeffect7812 oh haha. I totally didn't look at any timestamps for this video. My bad
@@thatcrazykid1393 lol no problem. I appreciate your help!
Damn. He is smart.
Looks proming
you didn't answer the question.
you cant recharge coal
Then again solar doesn't ruin the health of people and the environment. But yes it is more expensive, probably not be able to rival coal for another 10-15 years.
?? Ahh solar energy prices just went lower than coal energy price
How does this ruin health and the enviroment?
)))))))))))))))))))) ! oral- erotika !)