Posted on 12/09/2018 8:30:45 AM PST by BenLurkin
MIT engineers have come up with a conceptual design for a system to store renewable energy, such as solar and wind power, and deliver that energy back into an electric grid on demand. The system may be designed to power a small city not just when the sun is up or the wind is high, but around the clock.
The new design stores heat generated by excess electricity from solar or wind power in large tanks of white-hot molten silicon......
(Excerpt) Read more at scitechdaily.com ...
“smarter” than us???
I was thinking at first they could use some of those underground salt storage sites they currently use for oil storage. At those temperatures it would turn to glass and create a great insulation barrier - I’d think....course more likely it’s just erupt as it interacted when it’s first injected.
It’ll be heated using one miniature control rod and two miniature fuel rods. :-)
I agree. MIT may be on the right track with this technology.
They already have one...It’s called a battery...
*But Were Afraid to Ask
Yes, but behemoth tanks of white hot molten silicon will save us from global warming, don’t you see?
voila
Doesn’t seem like a very new idea to store the energy, I’m sure I have seen that method proposed decades ago.
The new design stores heat generated by excess electricity from solar or wind power in large tanks of white-hot molten silicon
That would work for conventional power plants, which we'll need more of, even if we manage to crack the discovery of ambient temperature superconductors. Thanks BenLurkin.
Reminds me of Nat Lamp's "Timothy in ***land" panels, or maybe a Woody Allen movie that I missed..
Isn’t this what an atomic energy plant is? It stores energy originating from the sun in uranium and releases it at prices that are as cheap or cheaper than solar power.
It’s not a bad idea to have reserves for conventional power. It would help with peak demand. The real problem is the lack of e;etrical infrastructure. We need more and better transmission
Henry says the system would require tanks thick and strong enough to insulate the molten liquid within.
“The stuff is glowing white hot on the inside, but what you touch on the outside should be room temperature,” Henry says.
He has proposed that the tanks be made out of graphite. But there are concerns that silicon, at such high temperatures, would react with graphite to produce silicon carbide, which could corrode the tank.
To test this possibility, the team fabricated a miniature graphite tank and filled it with liquid silicon. When the liquid was kept at 3,600 F for about 60 minutes, silicon carbide did form, but instead of corroding the tank, it created a thin, protective liner.
“It sticks to the graphite and forms a protective layer, preventing further reaction,” Henry says. “So you can build this tank out of graphite and it won’t get corroded by the silicon.”
The group also found a way around another challenge: As the system’s tanks would have to be very large, it would be impossible to build them from a single piece of graphite. If they were instead made from multiple pieces, these would have to be sealed in such a way to prevent the molten liquid from leaking out. In their paper, the researchers demonstrated that they could prevent any leaks by screwing pieces of graphite together with carbon fiber bolts and sealing them with grafoil — flexible graphite that acts as a high-temperature sealant.
I do think it'd have to be buried and hardened to avoid an attack creating a huge hot explosion.
What’s new is they’ve developed a way to store heat energy at much higher temperatures than previously possible, which makes the process much more efficient. And are making the bulky part of it out of rock cheap raw materials. There are engineering issues to work out yet, although they appear to have solved some, Some are mentioned up thread. Having your working material turn solid during maintenance is an issue this shares with the liquid salt thorium reactors, whose proponents don’t seem to think of that as a major problem. If the eventual solutions don’t add too much cost this has the potential to scale up better than an other mass energy storage proposed yet. If so there’s bound to be some practical use for it even if greenie dreams are worthless.
“Isn’t this what an atomic energy plant is? It stores energy originating from the sun in uranium...” [WLusvardi, post 33]
No.
Current nuclear power plants use fissionable materials as fuel, suitably packaged and arranged to keep the rate of splitting nuclei above that occurring in nature, but below that which would cause a runaway chain reaction (terminating in a nuclear yield: an “atomic bomb”).
The heat thus generated powers turbines or thermoelectric generators; particles thrown off by the splitting nuclei trigger fission of nearby nuclei, or become waste products.
Radioactive elements are found in nature, but in relatively small quantities and widely dispersed (Two are uranium and thorium). Fissionable isotopes of these elements are rarer yet.
The splitting of nuclei by natural radioactive decay occurs because of physical conditions inside the nucleus of the atom. It is not affected by external chemical composition nor physical conditions such as pressure nor temperature. Sunlight has no impact.
Our sun and other stars produce light and heat (and other outputs such as radio waves, ultraviolet waves, and various subatomic particles) by nuclear fusion: the creation of helium by fusing certain isotopes of hydrogen under high pressures and temperatures. The process is understood theoretically - hence the existence of thermonuclear bombs - but has yet to be accomplished on a humanly useful scale, given current limits on materials and engineering.
“...a solar panel (less than 20% efficiency...) or wind (maybe 50% efficiency) is converted again to heat (more loss), which is later (more loss) converted to mechanical energy (more loss) which is converted back to electrical energy (more loss).” [jdsteel, post 8]
Better get used to disappointment: the efficiency of all combustion engines is less than 100 percent. Much less.
The best steam railroad locomotives boasted an efficiency of 8 percent.
For many years, the gasoline-powered piston engines found in automobiles and airplanes hovered around an efficiency of 21 to 22 percent. Fuel injection technologies and better airflow/combustion chamber design have pushed this to 35 percent, in some commercially feasible installations.
Diesel powerplants for vehicles currently achieve efficiencies of about 45 percent.
Gas turbines have reached efficiencies of 46 percent.
Bear in mind that these efficiencies are attained only under optimum conditions: temperature, load, power setting etc. Change any of the parameters and efficiency decreases, sometimes dramatically.
...but it was decided it was "too friendly," so they came up with this:
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