Any Fluid Dynamicists in the House?

[Maat Mons]

So, a vortex tube converts air movement into cooling with no moving parts. If you were aiming to use wind energy to cool a house, could this ever be as efficient as using a standard wind turbine to power a standard air conditioner?

[gomipile]

So, a vortex tube converts air movement into cooling with no moving parts. If you were aiming to use wind energy to cool a house, could this ever be as efficient as using a standard wind turbine to power a standard air conditioner?

Efficient? No. Vortex tubes are shockingly inefficient. What they're good at is being very durable and easy to maintain, using compressed air as sole power source, and blowing air and cooling at the same time.

If you wanted to use renewables to heat and cool a house in our world, a refrigerant heat pump will be much, much more efficient.

If you wanted to make a system to heat and cool a building for the next 1000 years with minimal maintenance(basically just disassembly and cleaning occasionally) and little to no need for spare parts, vortex tubes might work as your heat pump. If, that is, you're willing to use probably dozens of times the area of wind power catchment area and massively over-engineer the wind power system and air compressor to also last a millennium.

Maybe you could use a purely mechanical windmill to power a very durable water pump. Pump the water up high and dump it into a trompe to compress air. Now you've got compressed air for your vortex tubes.

You could use this information to help worldbuild a Ghibli style post-apocalypse. But even in the remotest parts of our world, using a refrigerant loop heat pump/AC will be far more efficient in the literal STEM sense of efficiency.

[Rockphed]

Which is not to say that there are no ways to cool a building without using energy. I don't remember the details, but there was a structure used in modern Iran that would, without fans, draw outside air through the basement to cool it and then into the main living space. As memory serves they used it to cool some rest stops in Utah. Also, having more trees around tends to cool things down. In temperate climates deciduous trees keep things shaded and cool in the summer while allowing sunlight to heat things in the winter.

[Maat Mons]

Thanks for the answer! I had no idea the efficiency of vortex tubes was so bad.

It’s funny you would mention durable water pumps. I’ve been thinking lately about tube-style or trough-style Archimedes’ screws directly attached to wind turbines. Two bearings, so not a zero-moving-parts solution, but if you want to over-engineer for extreme reliability, magnetic bearings are a thing.

Unfortunately, an Archimedes’ screw needs to have a diagonal access. So, to connect the wind turbine to the screw with no gearbox, you’d need the wind turbine to also have a diagonal access, which is not really what any wind turbine likes, whether VAWT or HAWT. I guess you could just put a VAWT at an angle and eat the efficiency loss (for most wind directions). Or maybe use a diagonal HAWT with some sort of funnel to direct the air diagonally too.



Yeah, wind catchers. But I was wondering if the idea could be cranked up to 11.

[gomipile]

Yeah, wind catchers. But I was wondering if the idea could be cranked up to 11.

Wind towers combined with a qanat or system of qanats can work well for cooling in some places.



( image from the Wikipedia article "Qanat")