Genius Bladeless Hydro Turbine is Cheaper Than Solar

this video is sponsored by incogni harnessing energy from water is a tale as old as time but most of our current hydropower comes from large dams considering we are running out of locations for these why aren't we making more use of our Rivers there are rivers all over the place and many of them flow 24 7 which saves us from the intermittency of wind and solar so can a new bladeless Hydro turbine help harness more of this energy two of the key challenges when placing turbines in a river are that the water doesn't fall from very high known as having a low head and there are often a lot of Fish and Wildlife that need to be kept safe this is why the recent bladeless Hydro turbine is really interesting because it could unlock so many more energy sources from all of the rivers around the world that currently can't have those energy sources because of the fish and other Wildlife I previously did a video about natal energy who are using a low head turbine with special fish safe blades however the clear upgrade for fish from Fish safe blades is no blades at all the thing is with some of these bladeless turbines I've seen is that they just hide the blade somewhere else however this is truly a bladeless Hydro turbine the turbine is called the setter rolling fluid turbine and to understand the basic idea of how it works I actually have a small experiment to show you this experiment gives the rough idea of some of the working principles but there is actually a lot more to it in the setter turbine so make sure to keep watching for that the two things I needed for this experiment were firstly a ping pong ball and secondly a paper cup which makes up the body of the turbine I took a Sharpie to draw some lines in a sort of cross pattern once that was looking good I put a hole in the bottom of our cup which would allow the water to flow from the top to the bottom in the actual turbine the hole would be the whole bottom of the cup here but for this sake I needed a small hole so I didn't lose all the water straight away we can now start to see how the turbine works because I'm giving it an initial rotation so we get a Vortex forming within our turbine when I drop the ball inside it you can see that it starts to rotate and this is the core principle of the setter turbine it creates a Vortex inside we can clearly see it rotating inside the vortex that is formed within our turbine it's also interesting to see that if I put my finger over the bottom to block the water coming out it collapses The Vortex and the ball stops spinning you can now imagine if a shaft was attached to the ball it would be spinning and able to create electricity using a generator but the question I was asking was how does this Vortex form and how is the setter rolling fluid turbine controlling this Vortex so it can get the most energy possible so we see vortexes in many places famously we see them in the plug hole of a bathtub for example the key to getting these vortexes or vortices I'm not sure on that one is that they first need a small initial rotation this small initial rotation kicks off the larger process of getting the vortex which goes to step two of conservation of angular momentum a common example for the conservation of angular momentum is a figure skater as they pull their hands in closer they'll start to spin faster the same thing is happening to the water as it gets closer and closer to the drain in the middle because it must move faster to conserve its angular momentum using the principle of conservation of angular momentum to turn the container that is so cool that's the kind of stuff they should teach in school next Gravity forces the water down the drain so the circular flow can become a spiraling Vortex what makes the setter rolling fluid turbine really different though is that it doesn't have a whole bathtub to create this vortex in it instead needs to create and guide this vortex in a flowing stream of water to see how they manage this I searched high and low over the Internet however doing this can accidentally lead you to some untrustworthy sights this is why I now use incogni who are the sponsor of today's video to keep my online data private because some of the stories about how our data is sold and shared really shook me and as we continue to use the internet more and more of our data is being collected and sold all published online without us even knowing about it thankfully you can ask for this to be removed however if we were to do it manually this could take years in cogney instead reaches out to all of the data Brokers on your behalf and requests your personal data is removed they then also deal with any of the objections that might come from this process it made me really sick to hear about how some of this information is being used to Target elderly people for scams and increase people's healthcare insurance premiums so incognee make sure to keep your data offline by conducting repeated and ongoing removals which makes their yearly subscription plan really appealing so please stay protected and use my link below which is incogni.com xeroth and the first hundred people will get sixty percent off with peace of mind from incogni I continued researching the bladeless turbine I actually asked the company as well to buy a turbine and get some more information from them but they said it was unavailable due to high demand and they didn't want to create more hype around the product so whether that was true not I was left with some of the online resources I could find and it turns out the secret is in the ball this ball is what makes it different from other Vortex turbines like a similar one from the company called turbulent the turbulent turbines are also good for low head applications but they require quite a lot of infrastructure so that they can generate the initial rotation to get the vortex the general idea for this construction is that some of the river water is redirected through the vortex the snail shell design gets it rotating and flowing down into the middle where it creates a low pressure region which is meant to be fish safe so the really cool thing about this ball is how it creates instabilities which form the vortex before the system starts up the ball rests on the side wall as the water flows through it the ball begins to move and create instabilities because the ball is pushed around the inside of the turbine the instant abilities create a rotational effect providing the perfect conditions for a Vortex as well as going around the inside wall of the turbine The Vortex also makes the ball rotate like the ball from the earlier experiment from one of the diagrams in their papers you can see a clear distinction between these two types of rotation and that rotation of the ball is what is used to drive the generator though in their diagram it's more of a hemisphere and by changing the size and dimensions of this you can apparently optimize the turbine for different settings there is some test footage available of this and you can see how the ball is used to spin a generator though their footage isn't really that clear they quote at maximum efficiency of 55 percent I was actually kind of surprised it was that high but it is still lower than the turbulent Vortex turbine which has a maximum of 75 efficiency that 75 looks pretty good for when you compare it to some of the old-fashioned ones it isn't really comparable when we look at the Francis Kaplan and Pelton turbines these ones are peaking around 90 efficiency but if the bladeless turbine can be used in places that these can't then it doesn't really matter because these would technically be zero percent efficient if they could never be installed in the first place I also wonder if there are ways to increase the efficiency with new designs like different channels for the water to flow through or ball sizes or maybe I was wondering if they could put fins on the bottom of the balls so it would help create a bit more of a rotational force on that but who knows using information online we can also do a simplified cost comparison between the bladeless turbine and some solar panels let's say we go with five kilowatts of installed power which is the size of the largest bladeless turbine just looking at the cost of the systems and ignoring installations and electronics the solar panels would cost around five thousand dollars and it would be around 22 000 dollars for the hydro turbine if these then ran at full power for a year this would capture around 300 000 kilowatt hours of energy however solar panels only average around 17 of full power because of clouds the night time and shade whereas small hydropower can average over 50 percent of this full power as the rivers keep flowing this means for five thousand dollars we would get 50 000 kilowatt hours from solar and for twenty two thousand dollars we would get 150 kilowatt hours from the bladeless Hydro turbine this works out as 10 cents per kilowatt hour for solar and 15 cents per kilowatt hour for the hydro turbine however because the hydro turbine can run 24 7 there is much less need for expensive batteries to store the energy this is part of the reason why a more detailed analysis from the World Bank that took everything into account with the levelized cost of energy for found that small hydropower can be cheaper than wind and solar in mini grid applications however this is very dependent on the geography and resources available at the mini grid so as always it depends but I'll definitely keep following updates on this turbine because I think it looks pretty interesting and as you're still watching please like And subscribe to the channel because I think you'd like some of the other videos I make like one on a different Hydro turbine also please make sure to stay protected and use my link to get incogni the first hundred people will get 60 off I've been Ryan and thanks for watching

Channel: Ziroth

Views: 764,327

Keywords: Science, Engineering, STEM, Electric, Zero, Tesla, News, Research, EV, Battery, hydro, energy

Id: ArQE3SB0kyM

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023