hey everyone today i'm going to be
making a fire tornado
to show you how an atmospheric vortex
engine works
the interesting thing about fire is that
it always goes up
and the reason it goes up is because it
heats up the air
and the air becomes less dense and that
less dense air then rises
and the cooler air falls down around it
now normally when fire is just regularly
burning
the hot air is mixing with the cold air
and so there's not an efficient rise of
the hot air
it's kind of all getting mixed together
and jumbled together the hot air doesn't
just have a column it can go up
it's kind of like in this setup when you
have two 2-liter bottles
one that has water on top and air on the
bottom and you let the air go to the top
if it just bubbles to the top
it doesn't flow very efficiently the
water doesn't flow to the bottom very
well
but if you create a vortex in the water
then it creates an efficient system
because the water stays to the outside
because it's more dense
but the less dense air can just go
straight up to the middle
and so basically it creates this tunnel
so the air can go to the top the water
can come to the bottom
so a vortex is a really efficient method
for
less dense things to rise and heavier
things to fall
now what that means for the fire is that
if you can create a vortex for fire
it will make it so the hot air can rise
more easily and the cold air can come
down around it
and that means that it'll bring in more
oxygen too to the fire and feed it
so overall it will be able to burn the
fire better and that hot air will get
out of the way
faster now one way to create this vortex
is just to stick a fire in a spinning
trash can
and that will create the air moving
around it and it will create a fire
vortex or a fire tornado
and it's really awesome to look at and i
recommend not trying this one at home
so this is how big it is without
spinning it now watch what happens when
i spin it
so you can see that as i spin the fire
it starts the air moving
now the reason it forms a vortex is kind
of like the water air
setup that i showed earlier in this case
the hotter air is less dense
so it moves towards the center and the
colder air is more dense so it moves
towards the outside
so the centrifugal force pulls the cold
air to the outside and the warm air
towards the center
and that creates this nice column for
the warm air to rise and also brings in
fresh oxygen below and feeds the fire
even more so you can create this really
tall column of fire just by spinning it
a little bit
it's really amazing
now to get this really looking cool you
can add some chemicals to it like borax
to make green fire
so here's a green fire tornado
[Music]
wow
[Music]
do
now usually when we use fire in an
industrial setting we're using that fire
to heat up
gas and that gas either pushes a piston
or turns a turbine
so the expanding gas pushes something
and does work and usually that hot gas
is just vented to the atmosphere
now what's interesting is after it's
vented to the atmosphere it's still hot
and so it rises
but we usually don't care about that
because we just let it be waste heat
into the atmosphere
but there's a researcher named louis
mccod and he proposed that instead of
just wasting that buoyant energy
that just floats the hot air up into the
atmosphere what if we were actually to
use that to turn some turbine somehow
but the problem is you can't just have
stacks of turbines that turn and get
that energy back as the hot air floats
up into the top of the sky
but a better way to do it is to create
what's called an atmospheric vortex
engine and basically what it does is
just to create this man-made tornado
that uses waste heat from power plants
and so it forms the tornado just
depending on how the hot air is coming
into this
channel and it funnels it up so it
creates a vortex
up and the incoming air runs through
small turbines that can capture some of
that energy
now it's not yet proven how much energy
you could collect from that
unless you have a huge plume of hot air
going up
you couldn't collect a lot of energy
from that but besides collecting energy
from this another interesting thing that
you can do
you notice how high the fire went up
from the bottom of where it was burning
just by spinning it so what you can do
is you can create these virtual chimneys
for the fire or hot air to escape to the
higher atmosphere
so usually these power plants will have
to create really expensive chimneys
to make sure that the hot air gets high
enough above the ground
to easily flow to the upper atmosphere
but in this case if you create enough of
a vortex
it will channel itself up it will create
this nice
virtual chimney made out of air just by
the centrifugal force
just to let that hot air flow up by
itself now the inventor for this has
high hopes
one question is do cross winds affect it
you can see that when i'm blowing on it
it kind of blows the fire over pretty
easily but it does recover as soon as i
stop
so the centrifugal force is still there
of the spinning air so it recovers
really easily
so probably on a large scale that same
thing would happen it wouldn't just
disrupt the vortex altogether
unless it were a really strong crosswind
coming through
now people have been researching this
for as long as 20 years and it doesn't
look like there's been a lot of progress
in this
but it does have some potential which is
quite interesting
what's interesting about it to me is
that usually we're
focused on heat being able to use the
heat right away
and then we dispose of this waste heat
but what's interesting is we've created
this now less
dense gas that can still be used because
we can float it up into the atmosphere
and potentially still use it
the question from there is just can we
get enough energy back from that to make
it worth our while to even try to
recover it
now fire tornadoes can start on their
own these happen in wildfires a lot
basically the fires create this micro
climate and if you can get
walls of hot air and cold air to move by
each other they'll naturally form these
vortexes and once they start they're
hard to stop
now in the wild these things are
terrifying they're basically a tornado
made out of fire
and thanks for watching another episode
of the action lab i hope you enjoyed it
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and thanks for watching and i'll see you
next time
you