Water works

Motivated by a burning desire to improve the lives of the world’s poorest people, Cambridge University engineer Dr Tom Smith has reinvented a 200-year-old technology that could both irrigate crops in the developing world and lead to new energy-saving heating systems here in the West.

An enthusiastic young researcher driven by a healthy combination of idealism and commercial nous, Smith believes that low-cost heat-powered engines using expanding and contracting gases or liquids in place of moving parts could be used to heat and pump fluids in a variety of applications. He hopes to tap in to the commercial potential of the idea through his spin-out company Thermofluidics.

Smith explained to The Engineer that his devices are like analogue electronic oscillators but built from fluid components. ‘We aim to build capacitors from tanks of liquid or compressible gases, resistors from throttling valves and inductors from long coils of liquid and we get amplification from temperature differences,’ he said.