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260,236 Views • Oct 26, 2023 • Click to toggle off description
Are we about to witness the next wave of solar energy production and storage? Combining the latest Thermophotovoltaic tech from MIT and the thermal storage efficiency of modern sand batteries could we make energy 100x cheaper without major infrastructure upgrades? In the era of lofty start-up promises I wanted to find out more!
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00:00 How to Turn Heat into Electricity
00:38 A New Approach To Thermal Batteries
1:56 How Does a Thermophotovoltaic cell work?
3:53 Ad read
4:59 Storing Energy as Heat - The Sand Battery
6:20 Downsides of Sand Batteries
7:16 How Thermophotovoltaics Might Revolutionise Thermal Storage
9:04 Introducing Antora Energy
11:34 The future of Thermophotovoltaic cells
#solar #battery #breakthrough
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Views : 260,236
Genre: Science & Technology
Date of upload: Oct 26, 2023 ^^
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YouTube Comments - 439 Comments
Top Comments of this video!! :3
We were trying to develop TPV's for the nuclear navy a couple of decades ago. The idea being it would be more efficient to turn the spectrum of radiation coming off of the reactor directly to electricity and avoiding the turbine, the same theory as here. Many different combinations of III-V materials and different layer combinations to decrease strain between the layers, were tried. The problem we faced, which ultimately killed the project, was primarily the inability to fabricate a combination of III-V layers with low defects. I don't believe you mentioned it in your video, but another issue that must be dealt with is recombination of the generated carriers before they are collected. You have to be able to collect those carriers generated in the absorbing layer across the junction before they recombine. Recombination rate is proportional to the number of defects, and is also higher in III-V material because it is direct bandgap, unfortunately. So, too many defects can bring your project to ruin, which is essentially what brought an end to our attempts. The quality of the material caused efficiency to drop far below theoretical efficiencies. I sincerely hope the MIT folks are able to solve these material issues.
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Thanks for the increased use of metric! At 8:38: 10,000ft² = 929m², so about 1000m². Interestingly then we now know the scale factor from the original 1cm² panel: 1000/(.01²) = 1,000,000, which gives us a much better direct sense of the scale.
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One reason why the high temperature TPV cells are so attractive is because they can be much more energy dense because the radiation at those temperatures is much higher. You get the same energy from a much smaller area compared to the low temperature ones, that also means they are cheaper in terms of material cost. So the lower you go on temperature, the more expensive the TPV panels become.
In the original paper that claims 40% efficiency for high temperatures, they claim their panel is the first TPV that is actually commercially viable, since the lower temperature ones would be way too expensive on material cost.
So if 2000°C to 2400°C systems are the only ones where the panels are economically viable and the entire system would be too expensive because of the high temperatures, and also the low temperature systems are too expensive because of the panels, then we seem to need some more research to actually make these systems commercially viable.
Neither the high nor low temperature systems seem to be commercially viable at this point.
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Pit Thermal Energy Storage is really interesting, it is being used a lot in Denmark for seasonal heat storage, saving up heat during the summer and using it during the winter.
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I often speculate on a type of nuclear reactor called an electrochemical nuclear cell. Current nuclear reactors heat water to spin a turbine which is only about 30% efficient as well. In an electrochemical nuclear cell, a molten salt of beryllium fluoride, lithium fluoride and zirconium fluoride at a ratio of roughly 2:1:1 respectively separate into distinct, stable phases with slightly different densities and compositions which is used to form self assembling liquid cells with differing charges. This type of molten salt reactor is a single fluid molten salt reactor that uses thorium as fuel that is bred by a neutron source. In this case that neutron source is due to the electrostatic confinement of deuterium. A trick taken from fusion for cleaner fission. This eliminates the need for uranium and all its downstream decay products. As thorium ions begin to fission on the side of the cell closest to the neutron source, the charge of the decay products from thorium travel from cell to cell, creating an electric current that can be obtained from the reactor using a simple anode and cathode setup similar to an electrochemical battery. Electrochemical batteries can be an upward of 90% efficient. Markedly more efficient than boiling water. This setup can also be designed to be more compact as well as relatively solid state, with the exception of the liquid molten salt. Meaning they can run a long time with little to no maintenance and could be useful for mobile or portable applications. The cell itself only reaches a maximum temperature of about 1000 degrees.
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Funfact:
Low temperature thermo-voltaic elements (also called Peltier devices) have been around for almost a century and are used in remote areas to generate electricity:
So, in places like Siberia, you basicly put your TV on a hot stove to watch tv. 😊
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Most of the modern thermal plants use a combine cycle that can reach 50% efficiency. Yes, the turbines have a lower efficiency, but when it comes to electricity production, you have to take into consideration the total energy output as a whole, the same principle of heating homes could be applied to a power plant, every thermal cycle needs a temperature gradient to function, the wasted heat, even after heat recovery systems can still be used, but it is not economically feasible. So, it is nice to have a new way to harness electricity, but the efficiency are too low to even to be considered, even at 40% efficiency, you still need to transform the electricity in order to be useful, I imagine that it produces DC, you will need at least a inverter and a transformer to be able to inject it to the grid, or in the case of in situ use, all you equipment has to be made to order in order to use the energy produced, it is not as simple as saying yes, we have a new way to harness energy and it is x% more efficient than traditional methods.
But, I'm still hopeful for the future and the technological advancements, I really hope we, as the human race, can reach a point where we can have our cake and eat it too.
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I've seen small scale household sand batteries in Canada used in places where energy prices vary by time of day. You would charge your heater at night when power was cheaper and use it during the day when rates went up. I have no idea how widely it was used though...
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Thank you for the time and effort it took to bring this information to us. Merry Christmas all.
I'm glad someone with the resources is going to make this a viable energy conversion source. Connect the red wire of your volt meter to a penny, the black wire to ground, and heat up the penny. You can get a similar result by putting the penny in lemon water.
I have a lot of problems with thermal energy storage systems, most of all being "Heat Island Effect" from the escaping thermal energy these systems contribute to. The only way to deal with this is insulation with at least an R-95 thermal reflective value.
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Thanks. Not many people can explain complicated technology in such a fluid and understandable manor.
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Very good job. Thank you. Graphite and energy seem to go together in many ways.
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Green-hot does exist, but at this temperature our eyes are saturated across all RGB frequencies and as such it is seen as green.
The colour of a flame is not solely due to thermal emissions, it is also to do with chemical reaction emissions. Think about the ‘burning metal salts’ experiment in chemistry.
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LFTR would operate at 700-1200C, which might allow these TPV cells to operate at their maximum efficiency. Traditional power plants (nuclear, coal or gas) don't get much over 300C. Furthermore LFTR would solve the scalability problem as they are walk-away safe and can be built very small.
Regarding materials: A LFTR's hot side would have to be made from Hastelloy-N anyway, which has a melting point of 1327C. So the reactor could operate up to ~1200C with a comfortable safety margin.
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Apologies if I missed these:
What might be like a range of Watt Hours per cell?
The cells store energy in the form of heat?
How is the energy density compared to a lithium battery?
Is this a technology that we can bolt up on our roofs to replace existing PV?
Thank you!
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I don't normally think of sand as a fluid, but it seems the principles for heating and extracting heat from sand is similar... Using a heat exchanger. You'd think that it's much more difficult to manage sand rather than something like molten sodium since you have to continuously run the medium over the heat exchanger for heat to transfer. I also assume that whatever the efficiency is, is determined by the heat exchanger and not the storage medium.
40% efficiency of these heat photovoltaics is pretty incredible. Recent solar PV panels are implementing the same principle of multiple layers to capture a larger spectrum of energy but more than 2 layers. I imagine details are important and ideal conditions aren't isn't necessarily easy to maintain.
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Would this be useful in Nuclear power plant?
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yeah, capturing energy from the redder end of the visible spectrum and also infra red has not received that much attention simply because the photons do not carry that much energy per quanta. Also, for a lot of areas it makes sense to store and release energy as heat only for home heating, energy interconversion from electricity to heating is wasteful and expensive, thus systems like sand storage might be possibly optimized for more compactness making them more practical in high density living which is always going to be a challenge, for those with more real estate the options are far more plentiful.
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Seems very promising especially if its combined with a closed loop system that can hold many stacks.
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@DaimyoD0
6 months ago
When I first found out as a child that nuclear power plants simply boiled water to run a turbine, just like a steam engine from the 19th century, I immediately said, "Really? That's all it does?"
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