Preparations for Summit

Our presentation is complete, and we are practicing ceaselessly. We gave a presentation at our school, and received many great questions and suggestions from our teachers and friends alike. The insight has helped better our presentation, and we cannot wait for the Innovation Summit!

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Question about CAD image

Mr. Neubert asked us to describe the CAD image of our MoTGEN. Coincidentally, I was working on a description of the MoTGen for the final presentation when I saw this question. The copper colored layered plates are the heat exchangers. Most visible are the outside cold set which will release the heat to the ocean water. Note: the heat will not affect the ocean temperature, as all of the heat carried in the hydrothermal fluid as it exited the earth was already being dumped into the cold ocean water- our system does not change this. Not as visible are the two inside the dark gray tube, which will pick up heat from the hydrothermal fluid. In the center is the dark gray vent channel, which is situated over the vent and contains the fluid until it has passed both hot heat exchangers. The vent channel will also anchor the MoTGen in place and make a tight seal with the vent so that no heat is lost. Everything (except the heat exchangers) would be covered in insulation, to prevent unwanted heat losses.

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Progress on Presentations

After receiving many questions as to where the image was, we decided to link it here to help out. Enjoy.

On another note, this next week is spring break for us, so we will be taking the time to finalize our new development plan and work on our presentation. We are waiting on some information from our coach, and then we can design our experiment.

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Updates on Plan

After a very good meeting with our coach, we are considering a change of our Phase A plan. Instead of writing the 3 mathematical models for our machine, we will only write two of them; in place of the third, we will construct an experiment to test what we derived in one of our models. The test results would provide us with a measure of the accuracy of our models, and also allow us to finalize one of the parameters of our design that would need to be derived experimentally.

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Recent Questions and Concerns

There has been much concern lately over the environmental impacts of this project, so I wanted to take some time to reassure everyone about a few points. Hydrothermal vents are constantly ejecting hydrothermal fluid, which has temperatures of over 350 degrees C, into the surrounding ocean water, which is at around 2 degrees C. Our unit would transfer heat from the hydrothermal fluid (not the sea water) to the surrounding sea water, causing a portion of water to heat up slightly, and move towards the surface. Once the slightly heated water (the ocean water, not the hydrothermal fluid) passes the top of the chimney on the way up, it joins the plume of hydrothermal fluid.

Because only the energy turned into electricity is actually removed, the overall effect of our unit would be roughly equivalent to the vent naturally being 3.25 degrees colder.

This is because the 13 degree calculated drop in the hydrothermal fluid is due to the 180MW of heat drawn through the machine. Only 45 MW of this becomes electricity, the other 135MW are put out on the cold side as heat and absorbed by the ocean water. Because the heat from the hydrothermal fluid will eventually disperse into the ocean water, on a macroscopic scale, only the energy turned into electricity will be removed from the environment.

Hydrothermal vents are not usually found in isolation, but rather in large fields which often include thousands of vents. These vent fields have the potential to form at any area of geothermal/volcanic activity. Some of the known locations with a high density of hydrothermal vent fields include much of the Ring of Fire, the mid Atlantic Ridge, and in some other isolated areas.

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Potential Returns

Yesterday, I was running some calculations about the costs and revenues that our project would generate once completed. According to our team concept section, the initial investment is $1.15 billion, manufacture and installation for a single MoTGEN is $2 million, each MoTGEN produces 45 megawatts, and the electricity is selling at $.07 per kWh, the industrial average for 2008. With these figures, we calculated that the team of 150 model-sized MoTGENs would produce $4.14 billion a year, and pay off all installation costs up to that point and so break even after about 101 days of operation.

Now, we realize that this may not be accurate. While the MoTGENs require no regular checkups or scheduled maintenance, things do break and malfunction in an unpredictable manner. So, I ran some scenarios of how our system would react to difficulties it could encounter:

Case 1: Once the fleet is installed, the MoTGENs are destroyed by something, say giant clams, at a rate of 2 per month (in reality, it is highly unlikely that units would be ruined at this phenomenal rate, or be destroyed beyond the point of salvage/reparation, or even be attacked by marine fauna). Let us also assume that it takes 2 weeks to return each MoTGEN to full operation, at the cost of the MoTGENs initial price. With these conditions, we can safely assume that at any point in time, there will be only 149 MoTGENs online, and a yearly cost of $48 million for repairs. Under these circumstances, the team would produce $4.06 billion a year, and pay itself off after 103 days.

Case 2: In addition to the damage above, a devastating underwater earthquake damages the powerline once a year, and leaves half of the team (75 generators) offline for a 1.5 months while repairs are happening, which cost $200 million (the chances of an earthquake this bad happening with this regularity is exceedingly low). The team will now produce a profit of $3.6 billion a year, and net its investment cost in about 116 days.

Case 3: Along with all of the damage listed in Case 2, we learn that, for some unknown reason, each MoTGEN is only producing 25 megawatts, almost half of what it should. The team is producing much less salable electricity, and still has all of the calamities expounded on above befalling it. With these things in mind, the team will now generate a net of $1.89 billion a year, enough to fully pay off the installation costs, and all repair costs up to that point in 222 days, less than 8 months.

For comparison, how long do oil platform projects on average take to recoup costs?

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Team Meeting

We had a team meeting today and laid out the time line for the next two weeks. We discussed the subject for our Phase A report, travel arrangements and potential resources. We may need to crunch some more numbers during the next few weeks. It seems like Friday will not be a holiday for us after all.

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Compiling

Now that the first deadline is closing in, we are consolidating all our information about the project and transferring it to written form so that we may begin the Concept reports. Also, we are wondering whether we need to include the equations modeling our machine in the technical report, or whether that's a detail that can wait to be added to later stages. Sigh. I despise Tensor analysis.

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