Can electricity be generated from impounded (stored) water? Yes, says Chalasani Veerabhadra Rao, a resident of Nuzvid in Krishna district. He is not an engineer, but he says that the mechanical efficiency of a turbine can be made more then 100 per cent using the Archimedes principle of levers. Add Bernoulli’s principle to the pot and you have a turbine that acts like a “perpetual motion machine” (PMM) type III.
In layman’s terms, once Mr. Rao’s turbine reaches an optimum speed it produces more electricity than what is required to pump the water to keep it running. Water stored in a tank is pumped at a very high speed until the turbine reaches the optimum speed. After the optimum speed is reached the turbine produces power enough to run the pump and even more. The excess power is power generated and can be transmitted.
According to the Law of Thermodynamics, a percentage of energy is lost whenever energy changes form. In hydel power generation potential energy (water pressure) is converted to kinetic energy (electricity). So the mechanical efficiency is never 100 per cent as per the law.
Large modern water turbines operate at mechanical efficiency of greater than 90 per cent, but never greater than 100 per cent as Mr. Rao is claiming. K L University Department of Mechanical Engineering professor Shyam Prasad told The Hindu that man has used water turbines for various purposes, but the principals of Archimedes and Bernoulli have not been used to improve their efficiency.
In the absence of mathematical proof, experiments have to be conducted for ratifying the theory. The big impediment for Mr. Rao to prove his theory experimentally is the prohibitive cost. The heavy duty pumps required to achieve the high velocities are very expensive, with the cost running to nearly Rs. one crore.
If Mr. Rao’s invention works the world will be a different place. Every village can have its own power plant and there will be no question of transmission losses. Ironically, all efforts to get his theory ratified by scientific institutions have failed. There has been no reply to letters he wrote to other organisations to check his theory. He has written to Sam Pitroda too, but there has been no reply, but just an acknowledgement.
Pending application
An application for the patenting of the invention is pending for over a few years. “The government spends so much money on research. A couple of crores is nothing considering the impact of the experiment,” Prof. Shyam Prasad says. The Tech Brief ‘Create the Future Design Contest’ conducted by the publishers of NASA Tech Briefs Magazine has, however, listed Mr. Rao’s invention for all to see and follow up.
