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The invention is generating electricity and interest but may now be developed in Europe, writes Andrew Trounson
IT is the telephone call that every inventor dreads, the news that someone else has beaten you to it.
And for Melbourne barrister Paul Kouris, who has aspired to harness the generating power of water vortices, it seemed 30 years of dreaming, 10 years of work and more than $350,000 spent on patents and development would all be for nothing.
When Kouris's collaborating engineer David Sattler called him last Monday to say he had stumbled on news that a small power project in Austria was successfully generating hydro-electricity from a turbine driven by a water vortex, Kouris saw his life dream heading down the proverbial plug hole.
Indeed the project in the Austrian town of Obergrafendorf had, ever since November last year, been successfully providing enough electricity to the local grid to power 10 households.
"I rang my patent attorney and I was just beside myself, I was just panicking," says Kouris, 51.
But the good news for Kouris was that his Austrian patent application for Kouris Centri Turbine (KCT) predates that of the Austrian developers by five years, potentially giving him priority over the intellectual property.
The bad news for Australia is that the technology could now well be developed in Europe rather than here. Kouris, who has for years been fighting a losing battle against indifference at home, believes the Austrian project goes a long way to vindicating his ideas.
Certainly the Austrians appear to have shown that vortex force is sufficient to generate electricity and can be practically harnessed. The Austrian project involves small concrete dams or tanks built on the side of a river with a vortex in the middle driving a turbine.
"It proves that the KCT can be a stand-alone unit making electricity when the topography isn't suitable for traditional hydro power," says Kouris.
But the scientific mainstream remains largely sceptical that vortices can be used to extract additional energy from a body of water beyond that of the traditional gravity fall of the water.
According to traditional physics, using a vortex to drive a turbine would simply take away from the energy derived from the fall of the water. Hydro-electric...