as anyone spent time on these issues and have some info or insight on current designs and applications?

This is my first post, hence I came across some good reads on this forum I signed up, so greetings all!

I am not an engineer but I read and xperiment, and I heard of elevators in some Hong Kong buildings feed back power, and Holland is researching floating communities (complete with floating roads and bridges!) in case of freak tides from the Atlantic.

I did some homework and none of these seems to work on a small scale, also the control (mechanical) apparatus would be a nightmare to design, probaly. In this forum years back there was a thread on flywheel utilization - which I always considered great for harnessing energy from a freely dropping mass (no thight control needed lowering the mass). But how Buoyancy could be controlled?

I'm somewhat aware of the pityful efficiency issues, yet RE is just the question of money, generous estimates and scaling will any of this in any form could be viable? Since the mass is already there, and always must be there (roads, bridges, buildings, watertowers, parking garages) just how much is there to engineer for raising some multi-millions of tons a few feet every day by PV, and lowering them during the night?

I have no one to talk to about this, and a few engineers (or close to it) I asked so far just hummed for a while and said "Interesting".

Is there a forum this post would better be on than here, I hate to post to a wrong forums. Thx(PUP)

 

Half of your problem is very easy as there is a way to transfer any amount of water, lift it to any height and this method has been used to do this since the Roman times. The Archimedes Water Screw. The website is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_screw

I believe that Grundfos patented the design in the 1970s.

There are no magnitude issues with this, you can make as large or small as your application.

The water ram is another free energy method of pumping water. It can pump 24/7 to very high storage areas for your later use, all for free. The desigh is at http://www.motherearthnews.com

I hope this helps,
William Hinton

 

Recovering energy from elevators is just regenerative braking. This is a standard feature built into many drives, although I don't know how common it is for elevators. Multiple drive systems on a common DC bus will feed the energy back into the DC bus which lets other drives can make use of it. Typically though, it isn't worth trying to feed the energy back into the power mains.

As for "energy from buoyancy", your description sounds like wave energy. Wave energy is currently in operation generating electric power on a small scale in a number in a number of places in the world, with the main centre of development being in the UK. Wave energy technology is currently not as well developed as wind or tidal energy. You can do a search using Google for more information on wave energy.

 

I don't know if this is important to anyone here in particular, but I've stumbled upon a miracolous idea on how to generate power and it involves the subject in question. It came out of nowhere over christmas. I went stupid with excitement when I thought about it. I'm still researching the web to find a similar way to no avail. It's so simple and suprisingly not anywhere to be found. I'm sure someone would have eventually thought of it but only as we're all alert to this climate changing phenomenon lately we're only putting our minds to it now. If anyone has an idea what to do with my idea, can you suggest what I might do with it or where to go with such an idea?

wizzard2087

 

Take a look at the following link:
http://www.rexresearch.com
They have many ideas that are out of the box.

I hope this helps,
Bill

 

Why make us read your whole reply and not tell us what your idea is?