Electricity from water stream in pipe without moving parts (i.e. turbine)?

Question

I would like to round up ideas for making electricity out of water flowing through a pipe without tubines. There is pressure.

The water has no salt in it. It's just a pressurised water pipe. Pressure is something worth exploiting. And cannot use a turbine or moving parts.

Answer 1

I don't see how you could. All generators of this type usually use some from of permanent magnet which is moved to change the magnetic flux in a coil, which then results in the EMF in the coil. One way you could imagine doing this is dissolve some sort of ferromagnetic compound in the water--this would be a "moving part", but then, so is the water. Wrap a coil around a section of pipe and place magnets aligned at both ends. Have pressure build, release water through the pipe, then allow it to empty again. This will change the magnetic flux through the pipe and result in current through the wire.

Answer 2

Yes .. it seems Uncle Al has reinvented the MHD generator (the reverse of a magnetohydrodynamic propulsion system). See link at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHD_dynamo

Plasma is a whole lot more effective than seawater, though, and this type of system ***won't*** work with fresh water which is much more commonly available for "free" as a power source.

The several proposed means for trapping wave energy (above) all use moving parts at present... the moving parts are more efficient than MHD.

Answer 3

1) Salt water flows forward through electrically insulating pipe.

2) Strong magnetic field perpendicular through pipe(supercon magnet gets you 20 teslas with no further energy input).

3) Collect your current and voltage perpendicular to both with internal electrodes.

Cf: Lorentz force. This runs it in reverse.

Answer 4

I'm not sure how it works, but there is a company in the Minas Basin area of Nova Scotia that is working on a project to harvest the energy of the tides in the Bay of Fundy to generate electricity.

Answer 5

Your proposal is not economomically attractive with present day technology . you should better go for some other plans.