IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Coriolis Can Kill You - Dick LaRosa

The Coriolis force killed a lot of people in 2005. It collected a deep pool of warm water that extended from the entrance of the Gulf of Mexico to quite a distance west of New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina passed through the pool and gained a lot of energy. The northern edge of the pool was close to New Orleans, so Katrina was still devastating when it got to New Orleans. A previous post, "Coriolis Force Puzzlement" had an explanation that would apply to an artillery shell going through thin air. On the other hand, an ocean current must flow through a body of water that is at rest with respect to the local rotating Earth reference frame. In the steady state, the path of the current is also at rest in the rotating coordinate system, but the water flowing along this path experiences a sidewise force equal to the Coriolis parameter f times the velocity times the density. Because of the current path constraint, the sidewise force does not produce a sidewise acceleration of the moving fluid. Instead, the force is balanced by a horizontal pressure gradient.

This horizontal pressure gradient shows up as a sea surface height gradient in the radar altimeter plots in the Gulf of Mexico Near Real Time Altimeter Data Viewer. Dynamic height contours are shown in 5 cm increments. They are closest together where the velocity is greatest. That's where the Loop Current is running. Note that the sea surface here is higher than the sea surface outside the Loop, but not as high as the surface in the interior of the warm pool.

So what was all that nonsense about the gravity-driven Loop Current descending down through the Gulf so that the hydrostatic force of the higher level outside the Loop pushed it together into a narrow hairpin shape. That was the raving of a confused Dick LaRosa. Ignore him, and let's see if we can get this right.

WILL ELECTRIC-ONLY CARS FIT? -- Carl Schwab

WILL ELECTRIC-ONLY CARS FIT? by Carl Schwab

Starting around 1890, Edison felt that Electric cars, on battery, had a definite place in urban and city areas in direct competition with horse drawn carriages. Indeed these "horseless carriages" had a flurry of acceptance for about 15 years, but Henry Ford bet on gasoline.

Jumping forward in time to early 1990s, GM built the Electric-Only IMPACT/EV1 and product-tested it with potential customers but finally withdrew the car from the market refusing to sell them to the public outright. What was recognized by the writer and many of the other few hundred test-drivers was that the IMPACT/EV1, if increased to a 4-door was an excellent "second car". As Edison found before the 20th century, women loved Electric cars and they were superior for shopping, errand running, shuttling kids etc. BTW this is much along the lines that Marty Kanner suggested.

Recently Dick LaRosa and Jerry Brown have copied the writer on articles that are stressing the re-try of Electric-Only cars. Specifically the car in focus is the Nissan LEAF -it is the embellishment of the IMPACT/EV1 that was postulated 10 years ago. The LEAF delivers 100 miles on a charge and can be slow charged in 6 hour OR fast charged in 30 minutes. Top speed will be governed to 90 mph. The LEAF is a medium-size hatchback that seats five adults. The car will launch in the US in 2010. US production will begin in 2012, at Nissan's manufacturing facility in Smyrna Tenn. Cost will be less than a conventional gasoline car because the battery pack is RENTED. Presumably in buying a LEAF on monthly payments, the battery pack RENTAL will be included.

White Roofs - Dick LaRosa

Replacing a dark solar-absorbing roof with a white more-reflective roof is a way of combating global warming. A similar benefit is achieved by installing a white roof on new construction. The Royal Society considered white paint on roofs and decided this was expensive and not very effective.

My personal experience with white residential roofs may be relevant. We bought our house in 1954, when I thought that air conditioners were for wimps and I could cool the house "naturally". It had good-quality shingles covered with black slate flakes - not the round particles that we have now. I painted the house and garage roofs with white latex paint. I could feel the roof boards from inside and easily distinguish between the painted and unpainted areas. The roof lasted a long time because of the temperature reduction. It was eventually covered with 3-tab "polar white" shingles, and recently, the front slope of this house and the complete roof of another house were replaced with random-tab, fiber-reinforced, "fox hollow gray". Note the nicer-sounding name, but they are pretty white.

We used to see more white roofs. They are pretty stark, and many have been replaced by warmer, softer colors that people prefer. The opinions of roofers and the manufacturers' ads have also had an influence. People have good aesthetic judgment and their freedom to exercise it is enhanced by the availability of air conditioners. However, the usual newspapers and other media do not bombard these people with news about drought and famine. People have lots of other things to worry about. Furthermore, the connection between their choice of roof color and the reduction of global warming, or the possibility of reducing drought and famine, is not obvious to them. Let me try to explain the connection.

The capture of CO2 at power plants and geologic sequestration of CO2 have significant problems leading to delays in implementation. These technologies will introduce inefficiencies that will require extra fossil fuel consumption. My previous two posts indicate that reflectors floating on the ocean will not be able to remove a 4 w/m2 excess input caused by increased CO2. We can try terrestrial, tropospheric, or stratospheric reflection of sunlight. The latter two can be achieved by introducing more aerosol particles. Research indicates that drought may be caused by too many aerosol particles, which act as cloud condensation nuclei. This leads to water droplets that are too small to coalesce and precipitate.

We now have severe drought accompanied by famine in many places. We cannot afford to ignore any possibility of improving our situation. We might even get to like white roofs. They don't cost more.

Bird Droppings on Reflectors - Dick LaRosa

After writing the post on geoengineering the climate with rafts of floating reflector panels, and reading Carl Schwab's story about the Cardion "ForTheBirds" Radar, I went to sleep. I woke up thinking about the radar and the birds, and then I had this vision of birds pooping on those shiny reflectors. In the original post, I casually put some performance-degrading factors on a "To Do" list, but this one requires some attention right now.

We need to know the reflectivity of the surface covered with these droppings, the expected areas covered by droppings of different species, the locations that might be frequently "visited" by birds, the lifetime and reflectivity degradation over time, and whether waves breaking over the reflectors might clean them. It will be quite a job to get answers to these questions.

Here's another item for the "To Do" list. Large mammals could get entangled in the mooring ropes, or get trapped under large rafts when they need to surface. I don't think large fish would have the same problem because they don't need to come up for air. Evaporator rafts will also encounter this problem. We may have to provide escape paths.

Without all these performance-degrading problems, we need to cover 1/66 of the Earth's surface with reflectors to compensate for a CO2 concentration of 600 ppm in the atmosphere. The message I am getting is that we better not allow the atmospheric CO2 concentration to reach 600 ppm.

Do Hybrids Pay In Cab Service?--Carl Schwab

Do Hybrids Pay In Cab Service?

Taxi-cabs are livery vehicles and, as such, have frequent starts and stops. It would seem they are a natural for hybrid vehicles.

In May of 2007 Mayor Bloomberg of NYC initiated a 5-year plan to convert the taxi services in NYC to hybrid vehicles.

His stated requirement was the hybrid vehicle must deliver at least 25 mpg both LOCAL and TRIP. He claimed his advisors had convinced him that the operator of the cab would save $10,000 in fuel charges per year.

Has it worked; if so how well?

The most common standard cab vehicle is the Ford Crown Victoria. The averaged mileage in livery service ranges from 10 to 15 mpg.

So far the hybrids used have been the Toyota Prius, Toyota Highlander and Ford Escape.

BTW the service life of a cab is 2-3 years.

Assuming the cab is driven 500 miles in a 24-hour day (3 shifts) and that it is in service 26 days per month; in a year the cab will accumulate 156,000 miles. Assuming 15 mpg then the cab uses 10,400 gallons of fuel per year.

For the Ford Escape driving the same 156,000 per year, at 30mpg it will use 5200 gallons of fuel. This is a savings of ½ or 5200 gallons per year. At $2.00 per gallon, this is the $10,000 the mayor referred to.

Besides the fuel used, how do the hybrids perform? General comment is that service work is more expensive. Breakdowns are actually less (compared to the Ford Crown Victoria). This could be attributed to more care by the hybrid drivers.

So the hybrids can literally "--pay for themselves", in cab service.
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Serendipity.

Geoengineering - Dick LaRosa

The Royal Society has just published a report entitled "Geoengineering the Climate - Science, Governance and Uncertainty". It considers many means of reducing the solar heating of the Earth, including white reflecting roofs and injecting aerosols into the stratosphere and troposphere. The idea of rafts of floating reflector panels should be included in this study, but I could find no specific mention of it, although the report referred to a proprietary scheme involving the ocean that could not be disclosed. I have been suggesting these floating reflectors for some time, so now that geoengineering the climate is getting attention, it is important to estimate the required area of floating reflectors.

There have been estimates that increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere from 300 ppm to 600 ppm would increase the heating of the Earth by approximately 4 W/m2 (4 W/sq meter) averaged over the surface of the Earth during a full year. 300 ppm is the concentration that we should have, and 600 ppm is where we are headed with China and India rapidly increasing their use of fossil fuels. The Earth's surface area is 5.09E14 m2, so we want to reflect 2.03E15 W of incident solar power back out to space. If we put the reflectors in the stratosphere, the reflected power will not be intercepted by clouds. If we put the reflectors on Earth, we must increase the reflector area to compensate for the reflected power intercepted by clouds. I can see some complications in figuring the penalty to be paid for this interception, so for a preliminary estimate I will ignore the cloud interception. Let it be the first entry in a long list of performance penalties that must be evaluated and overcome.

NIMBY versus BANANA By Carl Schwab

NIMBY versus BANANA

The two acronyms, NIMBY and BANANA, respectively stand for "Not In My Back Yard" and "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything". And as such they sort of describe the attitude of local people whenever there is construction of some kind of facility such as an electrical power plant or such similar facility.
 
Specifically what had happened, I attended a public meeting to which the public was invited to
be briefed about the salient points of a proposed, gas-fired, 300 MW electrical power generating facility in Kings Park. Early into the presentation it was evident that a group was there representing themselves as "concerned citizens", but who, in fact, simply wanted to disrupt the meeting. Later I decided they were BANANAs.

From what I have learned researching about CH4 and CO2, what is being proposed is right and reasonable. It makes use of land that is now used for casting cement forms and storage of
sand piles for the town. Not particularly pretty. The proposed station will use substantial amounts of water and the builders have agreed to use aquifer water tainted by nitrogen off flow; remove the nitrogen and return the water after use to the aquifer, potable quality.

Further the builders have proposed planting trees to obscure the facility from the two roads that
pass nearby. Sound levels will be brought to residential levels. Gas-fired turbines will be used
and have their sound energy focused skyward sufficiently you can carry normal conversation within
100 feet.

The meeting lasted about 3 hours and at the end, in my own mind, I developed a distinction
between NIMBYs and BANANAs that I will share. The NIMBYs are people that do live in the near proximity of the site and as such, are susceptible to propagandizing by various political interests. The BANANAs are 21st century Luddites and seem opposed to ANYTHING, ANYWHERE with or without reason. It was the LUDDITES that simply wanted to disrupt the meeting or so it seemed to me.

Near the end of the question and answer session I suggested the possibility that those living near
the site i.e. the NIMBYs be offered electrical power at a "deeply discounted" rate for say 5 years. The immediate reaction from the BANANA group was that was illegal. When pressed to what was illegal they could cite nothing but assured they would find it by the next public briefing and debunk the very idea.

So there you have it -- that's a BANANA and that's a NIMBY. Some bribery should flip most of the NIMBYs -- not sure what it will take to flip a BANANA. 

THE FTB-1 (For The Birds) Radar--Carl Schwab

When Cardion Electronics was first organized in late 1960, the first president was Orville M. Dunning. He had an illustrious history including work at Hazeltine and also AIL, Airborne InstrumentLaboratories. His background included both an engineering background and a patent law background as well. Coincidental to all this he was a widely respected amateur ornithologist (birdwatcher) and friends with a Dr. Lanyon, Chief Ornithologist of the American Museum of Natural History.

Apparently in chance conversation, the question of how fast birds could fly in various surroundings came into discussion. Bear in mind that these discussions took place inthe very late '50s and stretched into 1960 when the Cardion idea took form. The use of CW radar to measure speed was relatively well know but no one had considered its use to measure the speed of flight for birds. Dr. Lanyon had very little money, only $1800 as I recall, but we didn't have crushing business so we set out to design a CW radar for the American Museum of Natural History.

This time frame was late 1961 and the stores along Canal Street were chock full of so called "war surplus" of every manner and means thinkable. So from flier sheets it was possible to locate spun lightweight aluminum parabolic reflector about 15 inches in diameter complete with an X-band waveguide antenna feed. These units were apparently production run surplus from the company fabricating the antenna and feeds for some prime contractor. Apparently they were part of an airborne radar. They suited our purposes perfectly.

Coriolis Force Puzzlement - Dick LaRosa

During an e-mail exchange with the lead author of a very good computer modeling study of the Loop Current (LC), I realized that I did not have a valid description of the forces involved in the U-turn at the north-western end of the LC intrusion into the Gulf of Mexico (GoM). I had thought that it involved a lower sea level in the current path, compared to outside. I can't find evidence of this sea level difference in the radar altimetry maps, and I don't think this sea level step is incorporated in the computer model that gave realistic pictures of the LC. A better force candidate might be the Coriolis force which is, no doubt, incorporated in the successful model. Simple calculations show that the Coriolis force is more than sufficient to reverse the momentum of 30 million cubic meters of water per second traveling at an average velocity of 0.74 m/s in a tight U-turn. The surplus Coriolis force piles warm water into the interior of the loop. Hurricanes are intensified if they pass across this deep pool of warm water.

The hill of warm water might be as high as 60 cm in some places, and the horizontal pressure gradient at the surface is in equilibrium with the Coriolis force that is pushing water up the hill. This inward pushing goes on over the entire length of the LC; not just at the U-turn. It seems to me that, especially along the relatively straight parallel sides of the loop, there ought to be a reaction that pushes the loop outward and increases its area. This does not happen. Perhaps if I try to explain the nature and origin of the Coriolis force, we will all learn something, and I will find the answer to why the loop doesn't enlarge.

Miles per Gallon OR Gallons per Mile?-- by Carl Schwab

Miles per Gallon OR Gallons per Mile?

Recently there is increasing interest in Electric Only and PHEV, (plug-in hybrid electric vehicle), and comparing their performance against Hybrid and gas only vehicles.

The time honored yardstick has been mpg or miles per gallon or mpg equivalent.

A serious suggestion is to invert mpg and make gpm or gallons per mile and/or to convert to cost-per-mile, Cpm.

What's the rationale?

Once you have a gpm figure, then if you multiple this by the cost per gallon you directly have Cost per mile or Cpm.

Similarly for Electric Only, if you know the Kwh to charge the pack and you know how many miles the charge will travel the vehicle, then you get a Cost per mile or Cpm for electric.

Example 1: Suppose we have a car that makes 30 mpg; that converts to .0333Gpm. If gas is $2.82 per gallon then Cpm = 033 x 2.82= 9.4 cents/mile..

Example 2: Suppose an electric car goes 80 miles on a charge and the recharge requires 21.2 Kwh. If you are paying $.18 / Kwh, then, Cpm = 4.8 cents/mile.

For the Hybrid such as the PRIUS (without PHEV) conversion to Gpm-to-Cpm makes sense and is easy.

For the VOLT (when it gets here <G>) the conversion is more complex but straightforward. There is an SOC (state-of-charge) so that battery state is known at all times. Remaining point is to provide the computer with fuel usage and Kwh usage from the power company.

For Electric Only the info needed is the Kwh to charge and miles driven. See Example 2 above.

Increasingly in various writings about PHEV etc. you'll see performance comparisons using cents/mile i.e. Cpm.

Once you start thinking in terms of cost-per-mile you get comfortable quickly.