Dan Granett grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from U.C.L.A., and
for most of his adult life has had some form of inventing and
prototyping shop. He has built many special machines including engine
operated fans that suck up and kill bugs from strawberry plants
as alternative to pesticides, glass crushers, hydraulic pallet
dissassemblers, etching presses for artists, a catalytic/deuterium
fusion chamber, centrifugal caster, vacuum former, etc.
In the 80's he was a partner in The Media
Center, designing and building sets,special effects and stunt rigs for
the movie industry, including the in-flight fight scene on the cargo
net in the James Bond film 'The Living Daylights'.
Dan spent
3 years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena designing and building
apparatus for experiments in coal desulfurization and microgravity
materials science.
Between 1985 and 1987, Dan was coinventor of 3 NASA patents:
1. US4645442 Shell forming apparatus This is a coaxial
double spinning nozzle assembly for encapsulating one material with
another. Originally studied for possible means of placing deuterium in
small packages for feeding the SHIVA Fusion Laser at the Livermore Lab.
A similar method was later used to encapsulate oil-eating bacteria in beeswax
for successful remediation of oil spills. The beeswax was impervious to
the water and only released its contents on contact with the oil.
2. US4549435 Vibrating-chamber levitation systems
3. US4520656 Gravity enhanced acoustic levitation method and apparatus
Both
of these relate to the manipulation of objects in microgravity by sound
waves and were used in several Space Shuttle flights in "containerless
processing" experiments. (An oven melted a glass sample while it was
positioned away from the wall by intense acoustic standing waves in 3
axes.)
In 1996 Dan set up the nonprofit
organization SANTA CRUZ RESEARCH INSTITUTE for the hands on
dissemination of Alternate Energy and Renewable Resource concepts
for local area citizens and particularly school children.
His own experiences as a child with the wonderful 'shock' of
enlightenment that
comes from suddenly perceiving how something in nature or physics
works, led to sharing it with others. He feels if young people
have these experiences, it will help steer their educational paths
toward improving their local environment and by extension their world.
During
this period the directors of SCRI decided to develop a low tech power
source for electrical generation and irrigation pumping for small
villages around the world. They chose a candidate - the bladeless
or smooth disk turbine invented by Nikola Tesla in 1913. He
had claimed high efficiency for this. A working model was built
and tested on compressed air, powering a generator and 4KW of
halogen lights. This success has led to a current project:
adapting the turbine to run on biowaste, which is abundant throughout
the developing world. The turbine has one moving part, can run on dirty, abrasive fuels with
nearly no maintenance other than keeping the bearings lubricated.
SCRI has moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and is now working with the AlgaeFuel team.
