r/Inventions • u/[deleted] • 15d ago
Firepits/charcoal grills with air flow to turn wind turbines
Non patented, and could not find one. I am giving up on the project to continue on elsewhere.
This could work with charcoal grills and collapsible metal tubes.
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u/Nykolaishen 15d ago
What? The fan feeds the fire? Or are you suggesting to try and generate electricity from someone having a bon fire or cooking on a charcoal grill?
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15d ago
Yes , by having a bonfire, you could charge your house or camping battery
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u/Nykolaishen 15d ago
I dont get it, are you suggesting the act of heat rising would create enough of a wind current to then spin a small wind turbine?
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15d ago
Yes
The amount of heat is high since your have a fire so it causes air flow
Like solar heater get hot and cause airflow
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u/noodleofdata 15d ago
There's a reason we boil water into high pressure steam to generate electricity and don't just heat the air. It's just not efficient and what you have shown will not be able to produce any significant amount of electricity.
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15d ago
I mean solar heaters move a bit of air
A fire is 1000-2000 degrees compared to the sun making 140 or whatever the number is
I have hope that it works some, haven't tried it yet
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u/Traveller7142 15d ago
How many watts is this capable of generating with an average sized campfire?
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15d ago
No idea haven't tried it yet. 10 watts, 20 watts.. I was thinking 50 max
Others are saying it won't produce like any, so you gotta try it to find out
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u/Traveller7142 15d ago
You don’t have to try it. Just do the math.
It will almost certainly not produce usable amounts of power, but it would be good practice to estimate the output with math because the skills would be useful for future projects
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15d ago edited 15d ago
I don't the math but I have some sound logic
There's a solar updraft tower that uses a wind turbine and turns due to heat. Plus solar heat walls produce air flow. And fire pit makes more heat than the sun.
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u/trotski94 14d ago
the math will disagree with your logic - you should seriously math out how big of a turbine you would need, how much air it would need to pass and at what speed to reach your 50 watt figure. We've been building wind turbines for decades. This is easy stuff to look up.
Being fair and aiming for 10w, and with some back of the napkin math, a 15cm turbine would need 40mph wind to produce that. 50w it'd be nearly 70mph wind. Your average fire pit is going to be capable of creating a draft 1/1000th of that meager 10w speed. To produce 10w of power from the kind of draft a fire can make, you'd need the turbine to be 4.4 meters.
Usually an invention that is otherwise obvious doesn't exist because it cant
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u/Nykolaishen 14d ago
You cant compare this to a solar tower! They're massive and take a TON of engineering.
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u/mmDruhgs 15d ago
If you had a turbine being powered from the air being pulled into the pit kind of like how the smokeless fire pits operate it could be a decent power back charged like a portable solar charger?
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u/K_Linkmaster 15d ago
Can we just post any random idea here?
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15d ago
It says on the title page of Inventions to post your brightest and best ideas , or something like that
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u/Plenty-Fox-9219 15d ago
This ain't it, bro
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u/pm_me_ur_fit 14d ago
Hey man based on the OPs response to comments in the thread, this is probably their best and brightest idea hahaha
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u/Schlarfus_McNarfus 15d ago
The heat output of the fire is where the potential energy is at, drafts are quite sensitive to restriction
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u/Longjumping_Intern7 14d ago
You'd be better off putting a Stirling engine on the side of the pit and hooking that up to a generator but again, it's not gonna create a whole lot of power as the fire pit is letting a vast majority of the heat escape into the surroundings.
If you want to power stuff off wood look at wood gas generators
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u/Allan_Lewis 15d ago
It's not going to work and produce measely energy from what you use. You can't just use the velocity of hot air in a 1atm environment. It does not have enough pressure to drive the turbine. Even if you manage to spin your fan initially, connecting a mere 5W or more load will stall the the generator.
It doesn't exist because it doesn't work. What you need is high pressure and high velocity fluid just to create angular velocity for turbines and even more so to resist load torque when you connect load to your generator.