TideAir Rare Gas Platform
A site-scale marine-energy architecture for atmospheric rare-gas production and regional neon reserves
Invention state
Current evidence state: HYPOTHESIS
What exists now: a founder-authored intake concept; three earlier visual system studies; a corrected modular-edge, centralized-core architecture; atmospheric and tidal first-order bounds; a complete invention paper; and three publication plates that explicitly separate the mechanism from the unproven performance.
What does not yet exist: a selected site, practical marine-resource assessment, ASU vendor design, rare-gas recovery simulation, environmental review, pilot, qualified neon product, or economic result.
<figure> <img src="/diagrams/p30-tideair-distributed-neon/P30-F01.svg" alt="Corrected TideAir system boundary connecting a site-scale marine-energy plant to a separate atmospheric gas refinery and rare-gas finishing train." /> <figcaption>Corrected TideAir system boundary. Conceptual; not a construction drawing.</figcaption> </figure>The invention
TideAir couples two independently engineerable systems: a site-scale tidal, current, wave, hydro, or hybrid power campus; and a conventional atmospheric gas refinery. The marine side supplies a forecastable power bus. The refinery side processes immense air volumes into oxygen, nitrogen, argon, and a crude neon-bearing fraction that a dedicated purification train upgrades and stores.
The invention is not direct seawater-to-neon conversion. Seawater remains outside the product-air boundary. Buoyancy shafts and hydraulic pistons may serve as power-take-off or buffering components, but the corrected design requires generation on the scale of a tidal-current array, lagoon, barrage, hydro installation, or equivalent energy campus.
Why it belongs in the Inventions register
TideAir is more spatial and mechanical than the institute's software-centered research programs. Its primary artifacts are system plates, physical boundaries, sizing equations, product flows, and site architectures. The Inventions register gives this work a durable home without pretending that a compelling image is experimental evidence.
The same register can hold future vehicle, architectural, energy, robotics, habitat, and industrial-system concepts. Every entry must state what is depicted, what is physically supported, what remains hypothetical, and what observation would kill the design.
Corrected physical bounds
<figure> <img src="/diagrams/p30-tideair-distributed-neon/P30-F02.svg" alt="Neon concentration mass-balance plate showing a 150,000 cubic meter per hour air stream, 18.18 parts per million neon, and a 2.727 cubic meter per hour theoretical ceiling." /> <figcaption>The atmospheric concentration sets a hard ceiling; recovery and uptime determine product output.</figcaption> </figure>A 150,000 m³/h air stream contains approximately 2.73 m³/h of pure-neon equivalent when all volumes use the same basis. That number is not finished neon. It must be multiplied by plant availability and total recovery through enrichment, transfer, purification, quality control, and storage.
<figure> <img src="/diagrams/p30-tideair-distributed-neon/P30-F03.svg" alt="Tidal power scaling plate comparing a small shaft, a square-kilometer basin, and an industrial air separation unit power reference." /> <figcaption>The power source must be site-scale. Small shafts remain pilot mechanisms.</figcaption> </figure>Product logic
TideAir should not be financed as a neon-only machine. Oxygen, nitrogen, and argon provide the bulk-gas business. Neon is the strategic co-product. Krypton and xenon become expansion products only where the ASU scale and process configuration justify them.
Program expansion
The broader program is Distributed Neon Geologies: different regions build qualified production and reserve pathways around the natural or industrial advantage they actually possess—tide, hydro, nuclear baseload, curtailed renewables, existing ASUs, helium-processing side streams, or storage infrastructure.
Publication boundary
The complete concept, corrected physics, source record, limitations, environmental constraints, evaluation program, and kill criteria are published in P30 - TideAir and Distributed Neon Geologies.