The news from TF1 talked about the idea in December:
http://www.ushuaia.com/videos-photos/vi ... 84938.html
And here is an article of the day in the echos:
http://www.lesechos.fr/entreprises-sect ... r=RSS-2113
Conveying an iceberg from Greenland to the Canaries to provide drinking water and 100% renewable air conditioning: the slightly crazy project carried out for 35 years by a French engineer was modeled numerically for the first time. And surprise: it could work!
An iceberg stowed, like an offshore platform, not far from the Canaries after crossing the Atlantic in less than five months. It is still only a virtual image, the fruit of a 3D simulation of this trip. But the obstinate Georges Mougin does not despair of seeing it one day.
"An iceberg presents a double interest", underlines the engineer who dreams of such a transfer since 1975 but faces a number of scientific uncertainties.
"An iceberg transferred to low latitude becomes a source of energy, either for cooling existing plants or for supplying ETM-type plants (thermal energy from the seas, a technique which makes it possible to produce electricity by using the difference in temperature). between surface water and cold water from the depths), ”he explains.
The cold water resulting from melting "then makes it possible to air-condition large areas" before being used as fresh water for domestic consumption. Enough to justify such a transfer to arid regions such as the Canaries, Portugal or Morocco.
Icebergs, which detach from the glaciers of the poles, are made up of fresh water, unlike ice floes made up of frozen seawater.
Forced to wait since the 80s, the engineer has relaunched his project for a few years thanks to advances in oceanography which today allow detailed knowledge of ocean currents.
The engineer's idea is not to tow the icebergs, monsters weighing several million tons, but to take advantage of their "natural drift" through the oceans by guiding them with a tug.
This "intuition", the company Dassault Systèmes accepted to "model" with advanced software usually used by manufacturers to design their products. "We put the most modern tools in our hands to see if our project is possible or not," explains the project director at Dassault Systèmes, Cédric Simard.
All the stages were thus simulated in 3D, from the choice of the ideal iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, in Canada, to its arrival in the Canaries, including a crossing in the weather conditions of a typical year.
For this digital simulation, told in a documentary to be broadcast soon on the Thalassa program on France 3, the choice fell on an iceberg of 7 million tonnes, called "tabular", that is to say flat and therefore unlikely to turn over or break when crossing.
Georges Mougin plans to "dress" the iceberg with a "skirt" made of a synthetic textile used on certain glaciers to slow down the melting. This "skirt" would be applied with a seine, a gigantic net used for tuna fishing.
This process creates an insulating "water mattress" around the iceberg, according to the calculations validated by this simulation.
Thus adorned, the iceberg would arrive in the Canaries in 141 days having lost "only" a third of its mass. It would still be able to supply water to a city of some 50.000 inhabitants for a year.
Georges Mougin, reinforced by this virtual success, now promises a "first static experience in a bay of Newfoundland to verify the validity of the protection" with his company WPI. Maybe in the spring of 2012.