Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Green energy

Thermo Thursday Green Energy TGIT – Thank Guernsey It’s Thursday

Holy Cow what does Guernsey have to do with thermodynamics? Yes there is a connection and it comes to us from Sweden. Fox News as part of their Unfair and certainly Unbalanced section reports of a dairy in Southwestern Sweden deciding to route warm cows milk through the heating system an 18th Century Castle to help heat the castle and help chill the milk.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,327906,00.html

The diary has 1,100 cows and processes 7,900 gallons of milk a day. Remembering my previous Thermo Thursday about the 140 degree latte, I just had to calculate just how much energy can be recovered from 7,900 gallons a day of cows milk. First I had to establish the body temperature of a cow. It is 101.5 degrees F or about 3 degrees warmer than a human
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/PeiJunChen.shtml

Second I had to establish the specific gravity of cows milk and it is a smidgen more dense than water and has a specific gravity of 1.023
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/AliciaNoelleJones.shtml

Third I had to establish the heat capacity of milk and it is a little lower than water at 0.9 btu/lb degree F
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-capacity-food-d_295.html

Knowing that a gallon of water has a mass of 8.34 pounds and assuming the cows milk will cool to a temperature of 65 degrees F in that castle, I calculated that the 7,900 gallons per day of milk can exchange some 2,214,135 BTUs per day into the air inside the castle. This equates to some 92,255 BTUs per hour. I did locate a web site that shows one how to determine the size of a furnace that is needed to heat a building. This web site shows that in order to heat an uninsulated building that is 100 feet long, 30 feet wide and 14 feet tall with an outside temperature of 10 degrees F, a furnace with a capacity of 183,750 BTUs per hour is needed
http://yankeeserviceco.com/finder.htm

By all of these calculations the warm cow milk could heat a building that is 50 feet long by 30 feet wide by 14 feet tall. So it is quite likely that the Swedish Dairy Farmer will be able to heat his gym. There is no way on God’s Green Earth that he will heat the gym, the work shop and the 50 room accommodation center. To heat all of that he would have to capture the methane emissions form his herd of cows.

Not to be outdone by the engineering skills of the Swedes, the Dutch have introduced a robot to pump gasoline. This brilliant engineer from the low country upon seeing a robot that milks cows came up with the bright idea that he could develop a robot to pump gasoline.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,328907,00.html Well it turns out the robot will cost $100,000 and take a million years to payout compared with self serve. I guess we Americans are smart in having convinced the motorists that pumping your own gasoline is a simple as one two three. Someone should tell the Dutch how this is done.

Well the English who believe the Dutch and the Swedes are inferior have also wasted their time on a nonsensical invention. A bloke for Sussex has come up with a levitating chair that can support the mass of a 250 pound person suspended in a magnetic field. Folks with pacemakers need not apply and remember to remove your wallet as all your credit cards will be rendered inactive
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,328168,00.html

I am truly sorry that this week I have dealt with three village idiots from Europe who each in their own way are trying to be green and innovative. Next week I will do a Finance Friday about lithium a wonder chemical that treats mental disease as well as holds some promise for plug in vehicle batteries.

The word of the day is lubricous or having a smooth quality. This should not be mixed up with ludicrous which is how I would rate the three ideas from Europe that I discussed.

lubricious \loo-BRISH-us\, adjective:1. Lustful; lewd.2. Stimulating or appealing to sexual desire or imagination.3. Having a slippery or smooth quality.
The heroine, through some form of ESP, can hear, and be offended by, the lubricious speculations going on inside the heads of the men she meets.-- Philip French, "More about What Women Want",
The Observer, February 4, 2001
And even if the public ate up every lubricious detail about their leaders, that same public grew offended that the news media would actually pander to their baser impulses.-- Jeff Greenfield, "Film at 11",
New York Times, November 7, 1999
. . .urged women to give up their vanities, their cosmetics, and their high-heeled shoes, and to pile them on . . .bonfires next to lubricious works of art.-- Anthony Grafton, "The Varieties of Millennial Experience",
The New Republic, November 1999
Here was a place where a kind of benign . . . anarchy seemed to rule, a lubricious, frictionless chaos into which one could simply disappear.-- Eugene Robinson, "On the Beach at Ipanema",
Washington Post, August 1, 1999
Lubricious derives from Latin lubricus, "slippery, smooth."
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for lubricious

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