Posted: 12/25/2014 11:10:31 PM EDT
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This is GD so my crazy ass can ask this.
If you had maybe 200 thousand of these in a desert built 30 foot tall could they produce any viable electrical output. Or would the top hat prevent it? 
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Haven't used one of those in long long time so hopefully I remember this correctly.
Yes you could get enough power for your cell phone with one that's 50ft tall but only until the water reaches the same temp as the surroundings. ETA: Wikipedia has your answer: An analysis showed that the evaporative heat flux driving a small bird was about half a watt, whereas the mechanical power expressed in bird's motion was about 1/20,000 of a watt. The system efficiency is about 0.01%. More practically, about 1/1,000,000 of a watt can be extracted from the bird, either with a coil-magnet setup or a ratchet used to winch paperclips. |
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Quoted:
Haven't used one of those in long long time so hopefully I remember this correctly. Yes you could get enough power for your cell phone with one that's 50ft tall but only until the water reaches the same temp as the surroundings. ETA: Wikipedia has your answer: Quoted:
Haven't used one of those in long long time so hopefully I remember this correctly. Yes you could get enough power for your cell phone with one that's 50ft tall but only until the water reaches the same temp as the surroundings. ETA: Wikipedia has your answer: An analysis showed that the evaporative heat flux driving a small bird was about half a watt, whereas the mechanical power expressed in bird's motion was about 1/20,000 of a watt. The system efficiency is about 0.01%. More practically, about 1/1,000,000 of a watt can be extracted from the bird, either with a coil-magnet setup or a ratchet used to winch paperclips. So you'd need about a million of the little ones to get one watt. Is that over a day, a year, a century, what? Don't give Al Gore, Obama, or the Democrats any ideas. |