Energy at the Mine Mouth

The dream of transforming coal into cheaply transportable electrical energy right at the mine mouth has fired engineering imaginations for years. But rare is the mine located near enough to a water supply for feeding a steam turbine to turn a generator, and many are the low-grade deposits that have remained untapped because it has become too expensive to mine the coal and ship it to distant markets. Now the U.S. Department of the Interior has made a modest $680,500 bet that Physicist Meredith Gourdine, 36, has found a promising answer to the dilemma.

With his Government grant, Gourdine plans to conduct further research on a novel generator that he already has working in small models. With no moving parts, without any need for water, and with only low-grade coal for energy, the New Jersey inventor's "electrogasdynamic" generator can, and does, produce electricity. The problem now is to make the EGD system work on a large scale and with greater efficiency.

It Should Work. Heart of the Gourdine generator is a pressurized furnace that spews a stream of hot gas and fly ash down a narrow tube. At the mouth of the tube, the bits of ash pass a "corona discharge" electrode, a needlepointed piece of metal that carries so high an electrical potential that it sprays the surrounding space with a supply of positive ions. Picked up by the passing ash as it is boosted along by the hot gas, those ions move down the tube creating, in effect, an electric current. The electrical resistance that develops is overcome by the energy of the moving gas, and a collector electrode picks the positive ions off the fly ash at the end of the tube. The electrical circuit is completed when ions flow from the collector electrode, down a transmission line, and back to the corona discharge electrode where they began their trip.

The high voltage produced by Gourdine's generator is ideal for transmitting electricity over long lines with minimum loss of power. The small current, says the inventor, can be compensated by having many small EGD tubes connected in parallel with each other. Theoretically, it should work. To turn theory into practice may be something else again.

A New Specialty. But Gourdine is a persistent man. After earning his doctorate in engineering science at Caltech in 1960, he worked as a physicist in private industry for four years, vainly attempting to interest his employers in developing a practical EGD generator. In 1964, after failing to sell his idea, he rounded up a handful of fellow scientists, raised $200,000 and founded his own company--Gourdine Systems, Inc. He is already producing laboratory EGD generators for use in college and high school demonstrations, and has licensed Foster Wheeler Corp.--an industrial boiler manufacturer--to build EGD generators for industry.

The award of the Interior Department contract brings Physicist Gourdine back into the public eye. In 1952, while still a physics student at Cornell, "Flash" Gourdine went to the Olympic Games at Helsinki and won a silver medal in the broad jump.

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