Sahara Forest Project

Sahara Forest Project

Something big went on in the Sahara desert.

In 2011 a big and important project was developed. A project that that would have and produce water, energy and food in the middle of the desert.

It took place in Qatar, obviously in the Sahara desert but in the part that belongs to Qatar, and it was supported by ONU and was built up in collaboration with Yara.

The plan is still being implemented and constructions are not finished yet to exploit its full potential, however this is now a reality and the first crops were grown. 

Thanks to its efficiency they are still expanding and they are now being supported by different countries such as Norway and UK.

But what’s the most important part of it?

It is all thanks to thermal machines!!

Powered by solar thermal energy dare machines it becomes energy that bring seawater. This seawater passes through channels that evaporate to the atmosphere and make the air more humid and conducive to the cultivation as the weather there is extremely dry.

It works basically by:

• Concentrating Solar Plants (SCP), which store solar energy to generate steam, and later this steamdrives a turbine connected to a generator, producing electricity.

• Seawater Greenhouses (SG), which allow the irrigation of crops through evaporation of seawater and subsequent condensation into fresh water. In addition, salt water also helps cool the greenhouses.

But this goes beyond a simple experiment and has a very defined and important ends which are:

• Food production and biofuels.

• Generate a huge amount of potable water can irrigate these crops.

• Revegetate desert areas

• Create such amount of energy that can cover the electricity demand in Africa and Europe.

So we can see this plan is huge.

If you want to read more about Sahara Forest Project

http://saharaforestproject.com/

The car of the future

As we know, the vehicle industry has changed a lot in the last decades, now the conventional gas-running car is not the only option, now there are a lot of options if you want to help the planet using alternative fuels.

The green vehicles that nowadays are in the market are include hybrid electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, battery electric vehicles, compressed-air vehicles, hydrogen and fuel-cell vehicles, neat ethanol vehicles, flexible-fuel vehicles, natural gas vehicles, clean diesel vehicles, and some sources also include vehicles using blends of biodiesel and ethanol fuel or gasohol.

One of these examples is a perfect way to use a thermal machine and help the planet, the compressed-air vehicle or CAV is an air engine powered car that uses compressed air. The engine instead of mixing air with fuel, uses the expansion of air to drive their pistons, one of the manufacturers of this car claims that this car is designed to have an efficiency of 90%.

Typical compressed air engines use one or more expander pistons or rotary expanders. It is necessary to heat the air or the engine during expansion. For example, the Mekarski system heated compressed air with steam.

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/05/26/compressed-air-cars/

Thermal Printing

Welcome again to our blog!
Today we will be learning about a specific and very useful thermal machine, and it is called thermal printing!

Thermal printing  is a digital printing process which produces a printed image by selectively heating  thermal paper, as it is commonly known, when the paper passes over the thermal print head. 

Common Thermal Printer.

The coating turns black in the areas where it is heated, producing an image. Two-colour direct thermal printers can print both black and an additional colour (often red) by applying heat at two different temperatures.

Uses:
They are also smaller, lighter and consume less power, making them ideal for portable and retail applications. Its efficiency can be utilized in retail sectors. Roll-based printers can be rapidly refilled. Commercial applications of thermal printers include filling station pumps, information kiosks, point of sale systems, voucher printers in slot machines, print on demand labels for shipping and products, and for recording live rhythm strips on hospital cardiac monitors.

Prime Mover

A device that continuosly transform thermal, electric, hydraulic and other types of energy into power is called a prime mover. They are also calles heat engines, that's the reason why they are Thermal machines, and they are divided in two categories:

1. External combustion engines are the ones that generate power indirectly through the heat produced from the combustion of the fuel, some examples of these engines are the steam engines and the steam turbines.
2. Internal combustion engines are the ones that generate power directly from the gas that they produce, like gas engine, gasoline engine and diesel engine.



 
This is an image of a big steam engine that operated machinery in the Machine Hall of the Philadelphia International EXPO of 1876, in the same room there was eshibited the gas engine.

Easy, quickly and thermal :)

Today we are going to show you how to build your own thermal machine with this short video :)

In the video they show us how thermal machines can generate energy, and in this particular case wind energy it is generated.

Thermal power station

In one of the previus posts we talked about a company that used a solar thermal system to cool and heat the office buildings with a solar-thermal process, now we are going to present a more common type of thermal machine which is commonly used nowadays.

It is a thermal power station which is used to gneerate electrity by burning coal supply, carbon or other materials.

Although the following video does not have sound, we thought it is very easy to visually understand it but just in case the visual part is not enough here we will be telling you how it works:

1.-  First the video shows how coal supply is being burned creating high temperaures.

2.- Water goes through tubes which are exposed to high temperatures causing it to boil and eventually evaporate.

3.- Water steam goes into a chamber where it makes contact whit the turbines.

4.- Turbines start spinning when they get in contact with the steam.

5.- These spinning of the turbines gives the energy necessary for a generator to work.

6.- Finally these generator have the required energy to produce electricity which can be used for whatever you want.

We hope you like this post and if you have any question feel free to ask.

What is a thermal machine?

The purpose of a thermal machine is transform heat into work. For that we can use a heat substance like air or gasoline and that will do some thermal transformations in a cyclically way.



Thanks to those transformations the substance absorb the heat and turn it into work.




As we know, the machine works in a cyclically way so the change in the internal energy is null.Here we can apply work´s principle:

The work produced in a period of time is called "potency", and is defined as:

The purpose of a thermal machine is to increas the work produced and the heat absorbed, that is wtaht we call "efficiency". The work always going to be lower that the heat absorbed, so de efficienty of the machine always going to be lower than one.

Normally the efficienty is expressed in percentage. Also the most common machines has a percentage of 20%.