IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Five Square Miles of Solar Heater - Dick LaRosa

My last post used the idea that an air parcel moving at 5 mph over a 5 mile long solar heater would be heated for an hour. This might be enough to allow the moist San Francisco Bay air to rise up through the temperature inversion and be transported to where it might produce some useful rain in the summer months and early fall. The 5 mile length would be aligned with the frequently-observed west-to-east wind direction. A 1 mile solar absorber width would allow an air parcel that deviates from the west-to-east direction to remain over the absorber and be heated for an hour. The 5 mile length would be broken into 3 segments of 1.67 miles each, separated by two navigation channels 0.33 miles wide. The total length is 5.67 miles. A 5 mph air parcel would still be heated for an hour, but there would a slightly reduced tolerance to angular deviation from an exact west-to-east direction.

The three rafts might be moored in San Francisco Bay near the airport at San Bruno, but away from the coast so that near-shore activities are not impacted. When drawn to scale on a map, the solar absorber looks pretty small and might be tolerated. Raft segments about 9.5 ft wide by 150 ft long would be deployed from reels on workboats with their length oriented west-to-east. (Maybe north-south might have advantages, but it is too early to know.) We don't want any gaps between the raft segments, so we need a means of stitching them together side-to-side. This might be done by an operator on a cart that uses four cylinders as wheels that ride on top of the raft. The cylinders might be 3 ft diameter by 4 ft length to provide enough buoyancy to keep the rafts from being pushed too deep. The cylinders would slide on their respective shafts so that the raft segments could be pulled toward or pushed away from each other. The operator would then insert clips (which have yet to be invented) into receptacles along the edges of the raft segments. (More invention needed.)

With this tentative layout and deployment description, my next step may be to make better performance predictions. The rafts will work all day long, day after day, so the performance should be better than what I calculated for a few hours on a summer afternoon. Here's hoping.

Benefits from a Solar-Heated Raft - Dick LaRosa

The Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers leave their respective valleys via the Carquinez Strait, which flows into the San Pablo Bay. This is the north end of the San Francisco Bay, which extends southeast to Palo Alto. Near the middle of this bay, the Golden Gate passage connects to the Pacific Ocean. These geographic features form a low spot in the coastal mountain ranges, allowing the passage of marine traffic between the Pacific and docking facilities along the Carquinez Strait and the strait leading to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard.

During summer, the ocean current flowing south along the coast upwells cold water which cools the sea breeze passing through the Golden Gate. There is a high pressure area over the western pacific caused by descending air which is warmed by compression. The warm air overlies the cool sea breeze, forming a temperature inversion. The warmer upper air is not dense enough to provide buoyancy for the cool surface air to rise up through the temperature inversion. This traps morning fog, which interferes with airport operations. This is particularly bad at San Francisco International Airport, which has high traffic. Also, polluted air cannot pass through the temperature inversion and disperse. Oil refineries along the Carquinez Strait process 778,000 barrels of crude oil per day, 39% of California's capacity. These have atmospheric distillation towers which must produce air pollution. I don't know how much yet. There are docking facilities for tankers along the Carquinez Strait, adding to the air pollution. The Mare Island Naval Shipyard and other facilities also add to the pollution.

I was originally interested in solar-heated evaporator rafts to increase atmospheric moisture, but then realized that there was sufficient moisture in the air in the bay region. The evaporator rafts could be deployed upside down so that the solar heated surface would be dry and reach a higher temperature. Some preliminary calculations have indicated that the moist bay air can be heated sufficiently to allow it to convect up through the temperature inversion, and then keep rising to a sufficient altitude to condense and produce rain. The most frequent wind direction is from west to east, so the rain would fall inland where it is needed. This is an enormous undertaking. I was forced to consider an active raft length of 5 miles, so that an air parcel moving at 5 mph could be heated for an hour. The raft can be separated into sections with passages for marine traffic. A likely location is at the San Francisco International Airport, where the bay is wide in the west-east direction.

Wood would be the primary construction material, with plates strung together with synthetic fiber ropes. In previous blog posts I have described how wires would be fastened to the wood sections and bent in a mass assembly operation to captivate the ropes that allow completed raft sections to be wound on reels that are transported and deployed by specialized work boats. It will be a long haul to get from my imagination to reality, but the benefits of rainfall, airport fog removal, and air pollution reduction should help to get other people interested in considering this application of solar energy.

What Are We Missing? - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I'm no sociologist and I have no training in psychology, psychiatry or any other mental health profession but still, I do notice some things now and then.

With all of the terrible stuff going on globally, nationally and locally, I have noticed that there are two things missing from the popular music of our present day. We are not hearing any more instrumental recordings and we are not hearing anything intended to make us laugh.

Have we become all that jaded?

Some examples of instrumentals that come to mind are Pipeline by The Chantays, Walk Don't Run by The Ventures, Tequila by The Champs, Oh-Oh by The Nutty Squirrels, Keem-O-Sabe by The Electric Indian, Telstar by The Tornadoes, Last Date by Floyd Cramer, Music Box Dancer by Frank Mills, No Matter What Shape Your Stomach Is In by The T-Bones, The Happy Organ by Dave (Baby) Cortez, Music To Watch Girls By by The Bob Crewe Generation, Classical Gas by Mason Williams and others.

Among the songs that were intended to make you laugh were Witch Doctor by David Seville, Mama Look A Boo Boo by Harry Belafonte, Splish Splash by Bobby Darin, Purple People Eater by Sheb Wooley, Beep-Beep ~ The Little Nash Rambler by The Playmates, Little Queenie by Chuck Berry, Calypso Blues by Nat King Cole and others.

Some of these songs were performed by other artists too and no slights are intended to any of them, I assure you. Some of them were really good too, at least so I think.

Of course, the satires by Stan Freberg and by Allan Sherman were pure masterpieces!

Maybe the most recent laugh stuff came from Shania Twain. I'm thinking of Man I Feel Like A Woman, Any Man of Mine and perhaps That Don't Impress Me Much, but since her last recordings were made, I don't think we've been treated by any singer to even a good chuckle.

There are numerous links to each of the songs listed above on-line if you'd care to plug their titles perhaps into Google or into YouTube and then maybe, just maybe, listening to some of them might make you feel just a little bit cheerier, maybe just a little bit more relaxed.

Just a thought.

By the way, getting this file to pass muster with the Spell Check was an interesting experience!

Waxed Produce - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Here's a sign I came across the other day. It's a local grocery store's intendedly comforting notice to customers that their produce items are waxed but contain no animal products. My wife tells me these signs are commonplace, but somehow I never noticed one before.

I suppose the sign is intended to reassure vegetarians and perhaps to reassure those who keep kosher that their dietary wishes are being honored, but I am not comforted in the slightest.

The list of "Food-Grade" substances includes "Petroleum" products. As I understand, all petroleum products are hydrocarbons and that all of them are carcinogenic to greater or lesser degrees so while these waxes are apparently protective of fruits and vegetables from a varitey of assaults from such things as some insects, from loss of moisture and so on, I have my doubts that casual washing at the kitchen sink will fully get rid of them and I don't want them in my digestive tract.

Of course, there's no way to achieve 100% protection, but my personal way to deal with this is that if I eat an apple or a pear, I peel off the skin first, not just do a brief rinse under running water. If Im going to steam some string beans (read that as geeen beans or wax beans if you prefer), I give each individual bean an energetic rubdown while rising each one off at the sink. You get the idea.

When I was living in Nashua, New Hampshire four-plus decades ago, I rented a room from an elderly woman who used to order her produce from a local fruit and vegetable market a few blocks away. I was astonished to find out that she never washed any of those fruits or vegetables ever. She either cooked them up for dinner or ate them fresh just as they were right from the store.

She never had any problem, but still ......

25 Miles Per Hour, A Strategic Mistake - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

New York City has now instituted a default speed limit reduction from thirty miles per hour down to twenty-five miles per hour, supposedly in the interest of pedestrian traffic safety. I can only see this as a misguided move driven (no pun intended) by capitulation to mass hysteria and to political opportunism.

The greatest threats to pedestrian safety are not the normal drivers on city streets, but the abnormal drivers like the one in Brooklyn who did seventy miles per hour southbound on Flatbush Avenue and crashed into a street corner at the intersection with Avenue U with resultant pedestrian loss of life.

At the date of this writing, what is left of a memorial wreath that was placed there as a result of that event is still in place.

Abnormal drivers who would do seventy are not going to be swayed by the lowering of a limit number from thirty to twenty-five.

Every time I drive these days, I see extreme speeding as above, astonishing red light violations, illegal turns of all kinds, drivers crossing over median dividers and grass barriers on the parkways, cars with deliberately obscured license plates or no license plates at all and most importantly as related to pedestrian safety, cars that charge through or around the corners of intersections with no regard to the presence of pedestrians trying to cross the street.

Within my personal memory, I have only ONCE seen a police response in New York City to any of this last list of offenses and only ONCE did I ever see a police response take place where I live in Nassau County.    

Instead of seeing to the proper police enforcement of municipal traffic laws that are already on the books, New York State's Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City's Mayor Bill de Blasio have chosen with great fanfare to change a number and to then bask in undeserved admiration for having attended to the safety and general welfare of the public.

The sadness of that governmental folly is palpable.

The future losses of life that will occur as a result of that governmental folly are tragic.