The Lily Impeller is a flow form. It moves water as water wants to flow and thus can process the same amount of water as other impellers while using approximately a third less energy. It is made by Pax Scientific using the Streamlining Formula developed by Jay Harman based upon his years of observation and experimentation with flow forms. Pax also makes fans for cooling with similar efficiency gains and is working on heating systems and heat sinks too.
"The universe is made up of turbulence and movement," Harman says. "At first it looks chaotic, but it's not. The same patterns repeat. if you can understand the movement of the single whirlpool when you pull the plug in your bathtub, then you can understand a great deal about movement in the universe... Biomimicry is a gestalt shift of humanity," he says. "If we look at what nature can do and reproduce it faithfully, I think we can solve just about any problem on earth."
Pax is working with Stanford University and Paul Hawken on developing the Pax technology and patents. Janine Benyus, author of _Biomimicry_, is on the Pax advisory board. The company is licensing its fan technology through master licensees PaxFanand PaxIT. In some cases, it is merely the replacement of one set of fan blades with another, more streamlined version to reduce energy consumption and noise.
Flow forms are also fundamental to a Franz Zotlöterer's low speed, low drop, fish safe turbine
In the prototype installation, the water drop is 1.6 meters, with a flow of 1.3 m3/second, but the utilized water is 1 m3/s flow with 1.3 meters drop. The vortex basin has a diameter of 5.5 meters. In the first year of operation, the plant has yielded 50,000 kWatt-hours of electricity--with efficiency of around 73%, a little lower than the theoretical 80% achievable efficiency due to the use of smaller generator for ease of operation. The cost for installation was about €40,000 after about 40% subsidy. At close to 1$/watt capacity, that is a sweet point that may make this technology a viable alternative energy. If the claims that the turbine has little negative impact or is even beneficial for wildlife can be supported, this would be interesting for anyone with a home sitting on a hill near a stream. One more arrow in the alternative quiver. If you happen to be passing by Wildgansstraße in Obergrafendorf, Austria, stop by and take a look.
http://www.treehugger.com/...
Zotlöterer's design works, partially, by concentrating the densest water at the center of the vortex. This idea of water density and the temperature at which water is densest, 4°C, was important to Viktor Schauberger too. Schauberger wrote that we should change our explosion technology for an implosion technology and designed turbines and impellers that he believed did just that. John Wilkes' work with flowforms also deals with the forms that water flows to.
As an anarchistic syncretistic Taoist Buddhist, this watercourse way of design makes sense to me.
Crossposted at Daily Kos
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Beautiful piece.
It's about so much more than turbines.
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