UTILIZATION OF SEA WAVES.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1136, 1 September 1882, Page 4

UTILIZATION OF SEA WAVES.

The recent progress of electric machines has largely directed attention to the economical production of force. The sea, with its tides and surge, offers stores of force little utilised as yet. Two schemes for turning the wavemotion of the sea to good account have lately appeared. M. Victor Gauchez (whose method is described in “La Nature”) would suspend a large float by ropes from a pulley outside of a stone enclosure built a short way from the beach. Within the enclosure is a bell-shaped iron vessel suspended from a central pulley system, connected with the float-pulley. This moves up and down in correspondence with the float, on a block of masonry, which has passages communicating with the airjspace, above and with a pipe below, which extends to a reservoir on shore. The bell, in rising, sucks in air through valves in its upper surface, and, in falling, forces the an* along the passages to the reservoir. The ropes are kept always taut by means of a weight hung in air from a pulley connected with the central system, and the bell has at its lower part a caoutchouc membrane ? connected with the block of masonry. M. Gauchez specifies the dimensions which he thinks would insure a rapid flow into the reservoir and involve no excessive heating. In the other scheme, by Professor Wellner, of Brunn (an account of which appears i in “ Dingier’s Journal,”) there is fixed along a sea wall a sort of air trap— a metallic case, open below, now in air, non* in water, as the waves beat on it. At tho top this communicates through valve and pipes with a reservoir, in which the air is compressed, and the force thus supplied may be directly utilised for some purpose. Herr Wellner brings the pipe from the reservoir to the lower part of an air wheel, which is like an overshot water wheel, immersed in water. The air displaces the water from the cells, and drives the wheel round while expand* ing and rising to the surface, r The sytem works with different degrees of compression, if the air-conducting tube be provided with several valves, so that the air may be admitted to the wheel at different depths, according to the pressure . With small waves and compression it is admitted higher. This apparatus the author ppoposos also to use by wqy of supplying pooled air for beer cellars, larders, etc., in hot climates.—“ Times."