UTILISATION OF SEA WAVES.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume III, Issue 284, 7 August 1882, Page 4

UTILISATION 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 wave-motion 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 centralpulley 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 air space above and with a pipe below, which extends to a reservoir on shore. The bell, in rising, sucks in air through valves in its tipper surface, and,, in falling, forces the air 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 ensure a rapid flow into the reservoir and involve no excessive heating. In the other scheme, by Professor Wellner, of Brun (an account of which appears in Dingler's Journal), there is fixed along a sea wall a sort of air-trap— a metallic case, open below, now in air, now in water, as the waves beat on it. At the top this communicates through valves and pipes with a reservoir, in which the air is compressed, and the force thus supplied may be directly utilised for some purposes. Herr Wellner brings a pipe from the reservoir to the lower part of the 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 expanding and rising to the surface. The system 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 '** tkp pnjflflu*u^>— 3iS[ith- small waves and compression it is admTße^nrtgii^^ This apparatus the author proposes also to use by way of supplying cooled air for beer-cellars, larders, Ac., in hot climates.