Hello!
Okay, a little bit of backstory. My uncle was arguing that you could siphon water from one part of the sea to another part to generate electricity if they fell on turbines on the other end. He used a siphoning example , as in siphoning gas from a car on anything else really, on how it would work. He also mentioned that because of earth curvature that it would have about a 10m fall.
I immediately saw some faulty things but don’t really have the background to be so sure about it. What I mostly opposed was the fact that it wouldn’t be a fall if the pipe followed the earths curvature . The sea to pipe height would be the same at both ends and therefore not work because there is no fall in height. Even though one end would be 10m lower but that’s only relative to each other not an actual different height.
So who is actually right here?
In: Physics
The average area level is zero – in fact it is so average that we use it as the reference point to work out altitude.
To create a siphon, you need a difference in height – when measured above sea level, so to siphon the sea into the sea, you would be effectively trying to siphon from one pool of water into the same pool of water.
It is also worth remembering that the sea is one continuous body of water, so any water will naturally move to the lowest point on its own – the water won’t flow down your siphon, because it could just flow around it anyway…
The place I can see a confusion appearing to make his idea sounds plausible is the fact that the earth isn’t perfectly spherical. So the distance between the centre of the earth and sea level will vary between the poles and the equator. This measurement isn’t relevant in this case though, as the spin of the earth causes this, and centripetal force will hold the water at the equator rather than letting it flow ‘down’ to the poles.
A broadly related idea that we are considering is capturing energy from tidal forces – the sea level does vary over the planet in a continual cycle based on the moon causing the tides. Because we know it regularly flows back and forth it is possible to do things like placing turbines or other devices to generate energy from where there will be notable tidal flows – this hasn’t been developed to three level of mass usage yet, but is something being considered as we push towards green energy sources.
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