This seems to have some interesting potential.
We live in a rural area. It’s often occurred to me that we have a significant overabundance of heat in the summer. If there was only some significant way to capture it and store it for 6-12 months, we could then heat the house for free all winter.
Earth tubes are one way, but it’s not all that efficient and the extensive excavation is expensive. Heating groundwater is even more expensive. If you use water tanks, you’ll lose a lot of the heat in the meantime. You could convert water to hydrogen, but hydrogen’s hard to keep in a container and would require high pressures to not require acres of storage.
Seems like by comparison, iron powder has a lot of advantages. You could use solar all summer to convert the rust back into iron and all you’d need to do is store it in a sealed container. I’d guess it would last indefinitely. I’m guessing you only have to powder it once at the start of the cycle and then the conversion process keeps it that way. It’s pretty dense and not all that hazardous to keep around. Right now, iron is barely worth scrapping because the price is so low. If you had an abundance of heat available, making electricity isn’t all that difficult even on a small scale.
Sure seems a lot easier than cutting, hauling, splitting, stacking and burning wood.
Of course, the devil is in the details...
[[Sure seems a lot easier than cutting, hauling, splitting, stacking and burning wood.]]
Huh? Have you tried cutting hauling and splitting iron=-? lol
i know ya said poweder- but i just thought it funny- got a visual of splitting iron lol
Guessing the process need not be at an elevated temperature, with high and difficult to use delta T?
Perhaps a slower controlled burn over a large area?
A Trombe wall on one side of your house and a sealed iron combustion wall on the other?
Such as; buying and operating a iron fired boiler and turbine-generator. I doubt that anyone makes one. And of course you need an industrial water treatment system for your feed water. And you will need a High Pressure Boiler Operator’s license to run your system.
Of course you also need the equipment to reduce your iron oxide back in to iron.
You probably also need a mill system that operates in a vacuum to turn your iron back in to a powder. It is very likely to clump up during the regeneration process.
Yes, the devil is in the details.
This entire idea is a solution looking for a problem.
CO2 is not a pollutant.