The tame tornado: A zero cost source of clean renewable energy

Many of us when we visit tropical lands, for business or pleasure, find the atmosphere hard to live in, but very few of us realize that we are living in the midst of a huge fuel storage zone. The fuel exists because the atmosphere is “humid”, which is the term used to describe an atmosphere containing a high percentage of water vapor. The water vapor is created by water absorbing the Sun´s energy, either directly from sunlight or indirectly from vegetation in the jungle. The absorbed energy is captured in the form of latent heat which has caused the water molecules to change phase from liquid to vapor. Those of us who live in the mid southern states of the USA are acutely aware of the enormous amount of destructive energy released by tornadoes, but few have appreciated that it is this very latent heat released from condensing water vapor which provides the destructive power. This paper will discuss the mechanism whereby this energy is released, and outline a technique for harvesting this energy in a controlled environment to provide electromechanical output that could be used for industrial and domestic applications.