The Lily Impeller: Nature-based design inspires game-changing efficiencies

http://www.mnn.com/leaderboard/stories/the-lily-impeller-nature-based-design-inspires-game-changing-efficiencies?hpt=hp_bn18

by Sami Grover, mnn.com
March 11th 2013

“I grew up on the beach in Australia,” says inventor Jay Harman. “I spent most of my time underwater trying to spear fish. I noticed that if I grabbed on to seaweeds to stabilize myself while swimming, they’d just break off in my hand. And yet they stay attached by themselves just fine – even in the wildest of storms. Even though the movement looks chaotic, they all change their shape to a particular pattern – a spiral formation. Those same spirals are literally everywhere in nature.”

This initial insight eventually led Harman to develop radical, energy-saving technologies which, he claims, may one day fundamentally change how humans do almost everything — from generating energy through purifying our water to cooling our homes.

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“There is no such thing as a straight line in nature. All gases and liquids move in a spiral formation because that’s the path of least resistance. There’s virtually no drag. Because all living things go through a fluid phase in their development, we take on those shapes too. And yet human beings still insist on making things in a straight line.”

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What if we could reverse engineer a whirlpool, I thought, what if we could get the correct geometries? But no one could do that at the time. Because a vortex like that is constantly moving around, it becomes incredibly complicated to pin down. It took me twenty years to figure out how to freeze a whirlpool/ But when I did, it allowed us to see that all movement of fluids can be described with one algorithm with four variables.”

Harman’s discovery led him to develop the Lily Impeller, a spiral- or vortex-shaped propeller that moves water by mimicking the patterns it would naturally move in anyway.


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While it was originally conceived as a propeller for boats, Harman’s own company — Pax Water Technologies — brought the Impeller to market as a means for utilities to mix the water in their storage tanks.

“That impeller – which we barely changed from the frozen whirlpool shape we started with – now sits in over 500 water storage tanks around the world. This tiny little device – not more than 6 inches high – can circulate hundreds of millions of gallons of water for the same amount of energy it takes to light up a light bulb. Because the water isn’t stagnating, utilities are using 85 percent less disinfecting chemicals, and they’re mixing the water with 80 percent less energy than they would otherwise need.”

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“Most of the energy we use is used to overcome friction. It’s perfectly possible for us to almost eliminate that friction using the same strategies that have evolved over millennia. And that’s just one example of how we can use the design power of nature to overcome the challenges we face.”