Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Has anyone else been catching the science channels show Invention Nation?

This past monday they visited an ecovillage that is completely off grid in North Carolina where the villagers used a pipe that diverted flowing creek water to a small turbine to produce power. They also use solar power to power all their power tools to construct solar passive homes in their 420 acre village. Another guy in North Carolina is building homes that are very energy effecient using native southern pine wood as the heat sink. Basically a house within a house design that is like a lincoln log set that is screwed together. (It can be taken down later and reused elsewhere he claimed) The air is heated on the (here) southerly side flows up to the attic and down on the north (cold) side into the basement then back up on the solar side. The wood retains the heat di=uring the day releasing it during the night hours.

Later in the show they visited a fellow who is working on converting sound into refrigeration. Very, very interesting. The guy said it cannot really be scaled up to power plant size, but would be ideal to use in every home. It has something to do with resonance and gas compression and expansion. Even sound waves create a temperature variation, he is simply amplifying the resulting variation to produce a cooling unit - it could also produce electricty. He showed the reverse of this action by heating the capped end of a piece of copper pipe (the other end was open) to produce sound.

The next show had a segment on a new solar cell being developed in Colorado that would be far cheaper to mass produce than the silicon based cells being produced now. And a bicycle that had a gas engine in the front wheel that gets 150 miles per gallon it is also being built in Colorado.

Tis a very good show but they don't delve into the subjects near deep enough for my likes.

Those ideas are brilliant, I haven't seen the show but keep the ideas in my brain somewhere. Thanks for diffusing them here. When I'll need them I'll dig the net for them.

They offer full replays on their website http://video.discovery.com, but 'not available for your region'.

Damn, would have liked to see that.....

I wonder if we could convert our double brick houses into this house in house heating/cooling you mention. I'd love more info, not that I have a double brick, but would be interesting...

BTW does anybody know of a proxy in the US we could use so that it is 'available in our region' ???

that resonance cooler is commercially available i think. is used in very small cryo applications i think

Hilsch tubes are used in small cryo will have to check resonance as it 'sounds' interesting

sounds right.i they were the ones i was thinking of.

Interesting link Steve
http://ranier.hq.nasa.gov/Sensors_page/ ... THist.html