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?"

@mattcarter8030

6 ай бұрын

Pretty interesting application of science just for boiling water

@dbillionaer

6 ай бұрын

Hot rock boil water spin turbine

@gusmotorsports

6 ай бұрын

Lol, we can burn trash to boil water.

@mikehorrocks2909

6 ай бұрын

@@gusmotorsportsbut with more pollution.🤪

@7777Robo

6 ай бұрын

I agree. It is a primitive approach. Problem is, that otherway using and transferring energy need more research and tgat cost money. Easy way is to boil water and use technology, which we already know. Progress is going slow.

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.

@johnq.public2621

6 ай бұрын

Please define these particular "defects". Thanks.

@billg3645

6 ай бұрын

Incredibly interesting work you were involved in.

@AtlantisArch

6 ай бұрын

I knew the video was hidding some things and going all clickbait, even if done better than other trolls videos out there. thankfully there is comments of insightfull people. Regards

@user-hh6ex9md4w

5 ай бұрын

Thank you for sharing your experience and insights regarding TPV development. Material defects can indeed pose challenges in achieving optimal efficiency. Speaking of energy storage, have you heard about the Segway Portable PowerStation Cube Series? It's a versatile power station that offers massive capacity, fast recharging, and comprehensive protections. It could be a great addition to outdoor gear or home backup power needs. Happy camping and quality family time!

@inteallsviktigt

Ай бұрын

Well to be fair, the difference in technological advancement a decades ago with today is quite significant In the 90s 500-600nm was used for processors, today we use 3nm.

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.

@clitisswood7330

6 ай бұрын

Freedumb measures should be phased out totally in this kind of videos. They just add confusion ! If you give the two t° in C and F, which one will you remember ? People who are not familiar with metric are not educated and don't watch anyway !

@FirstLastOne

6 ай бұрын

@@clitisswood7330 Just try to wrap your head around the stubbornness needed to hold onto working harder to do the same job. Fractions, damn yanks love their fractions yet claim the metric system is too hard to work with. Yeah working a bunch of measurements down to a common denominator to be able to add them up versus a decimal point... fractions, what the point of those? Highway signs with distances in fractions "Main Street Exit 2-1/4 miles" Do American cars have odometers with fractions?

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.

@ruirodtube

6 ай бұрын

Electrochemical nuclear cell. Interesting. Thank you for sharing.

@thomaswomack3888

5 ай бұрын

this is an interesting concept what kind of scalability would this have and could an entire power station like the old reactors used by power companies be built? And at what cost? Sounds like efficiency is way up there, if the cost is at all reasonable why isnt this already being done by some forward thinking company?

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.

@sznikers

6 ай бұрын

It doesn't look like there are any high pressures or other high strength requirements. Why not just build that box (looks small container size on vid) from ceramic materials with only TPV and heater being other. If TPV or walls needs active cooling to withstand conditions use that waste heat for central heating purposes.

@Deontjie

6 ай бұрын

100 times cheaper? Can I buy one today for two times cheaper? If not, then this is all just hype.

@markiv2942

6 ай бұрын

@@Deontjie it isn't even hype, it's click bait from Ben the Clown.

@falseprogress

6 ай бұрын

Energy density is literally a HUGE problem with wind & solar sprawl on open space. Wind power has already spoiled millions of acres of views around the world, along with invading bird & bat flyways. It's just too big to be "green," and it's all built with fossil fuels.

@rogerphelps9939

6 ай бұрын

Total nonsense.@@falseprogress

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.

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...

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.

@_Hal9000

6 ай бұрын

Indeed.

@texanplayer7651

6 ай бұрын

Thermal plants could reach near 100% efficiency if they transferred their heat directly into our homes with water through insulated pipes. 60 to 70% of our energy use is purely heat for our homes and for our showers, meaning that we could already have at the very least achieve that level of energy efficiency if we built the correct infrastructure, no super high tech solar panels or extra energy sources required. For the remaining 30 percentage points of energy that we consume mostly as electricity, we could easily make half of it come from rooftop solar, wind farms and hydro. Honestly at this point it is a waste to even consider thermal plants for electricity production in the first place.

@MrNickelzero

6 ай бұрын

@@texanplayer7651 I agree that transferring waste heat to homes could improve efficiency, but not much more. It's only viable in the vicinity of the plant, getting it further away it's just not economically viable. A power plant doesn't work that way, there's a set amount of heat that has to be expelled in order to work, if you cannot predict the rate of heat expelled, you cannot design a thermal plant, you could throttle the power plant, depending on which kind it is, but that would mean less energy produced and the efficiency goes down a whole lot, all power plants are design to function at capacity to reach its highest efficiency. If we only depend on solar and wind it is just not stable enough to have a reliable grid. Would you be able to live without a stable grid? Would you find it acceptable when you switch on the lights and it doesn't turn on? It is a huge ordeal to get the grid back up when there's a blackout (overloaded grid) with just solar, wind and hydro would be almost impossible to turn the grid back up. There's a solution to that, and is that you can be off grid, so you wont depend on the stability of a grid, but that means that you wont have the stability of a grid. If we add hydro into the equation, it could help, but to produce electricity, it still needs electricity (I know, it's electricity inception) Critical infrastructure depends on it, like hospitals and industries. There are processes that cannot be stopped willy nilly. Power demands are not constant. There's a excess of energy on daytime, electricity produced by solar when its not needed is wasted. Power plants cannot be turn on and off by flipping a switch, it takes time, some can take up to a week before it can inject electricity to the grid, specially in the case of coal plants. It would be nice if there's a "free" energy source, but there isn't. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against solar and wind, it's just the availability and reliability is just not there yet, and I doubt it will ever be. Germany is one of the leading country with solar and wind, and They will face a huge ordeal this coming winter. They are already turning on coal plants to meet the energy demands, which is far worse than any other thermal plant, They are evolving, just backwards in the climate change issue. In order to depend on hydro, it depends on the geographic conditions and it takes time and money to build one. There's a paper about the viability of a dam in the Suez canal, It would take around 100 years to build and another 100 years before It can become operational, It could provide the future energy demands of the whole Earth and more, but is it worth it? Maybe, but there's no way We will ever know. There are consequences to the dam, expect environmental and marine life damages, not to mention the amount of pollution created in order to build the dam. There's no easy and simple solution, We are pretty good at predicting power demands, one way to reduce pollution is just to use less energy, but are You willing to use less heat on the winter and less AC on summer? It's just not as simple as saying no to new thermal power plants. Besides, every time We build a new plant to replace the old one, efficiency and pollution gets improved. There's a US company that is researching small nuclear reactors that can replace old coal burners but still use the rest of the plant to produce the same amount of electricity. They just replace the heat source.

@philliprobinson7724

5 ай бұрын

Hi MrNickelzero. That takes the cake, I also hope we don't drop our toast jam-side down. Cheers, P.R.

Thanks. Not many people can explain complicated technology in such a fluid and understandable manor.

@markiv2942

6 ай бұрын

Ben has no f clue tho.

@ashleyobrien4937

6 ай бұрын

er, are you new to YT or something ?

Very good job. Thank you. Graphite and energy seem to go together in many ways.

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.

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. 😊

@christopherleubner6633

4 ай бұрын

These are a different technology but you could add a third junction to the device using the lead telluride material to get another 0.2V per cell. These photovaltics use quantum effects similar to solar panels to work, the top layer is InGaAs2, absorbing at 800 to 1000nm, and Ge metal that absorbs 900 to 1300nm. Adding the telluride layer would work at true thermal spectrum of 2600 to 10,600nm by a different mechanism.

Lol I never heard of a sand battery, but I made one as a pre heater for my home water heater tank.

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!

@jameshughes3014

6 ай бұрын

I can't answer all your questions but I think I can answer a few. They don't store heat, they just convert heat from something like molten metal or salt or something. Its the metal or salt that stores the heat, these cells just convert that to electricity. so there's no watt hours per cell. it completely depends on how much heat you can store in your salt or what ever. I don't think these are intended for sunlight, and probably wouldn't work. They need extreme temperatures. What ever you are storing heat in is going to be large, and very heavy and need a big expensive container. Even a lead acid battery would probably be more power dense if you're just trying to store electricity. The advantage here, if I understand correctly is that we may be able to use these in power plants, instead of using steam generators.. which would make power plants more efficient, cheaper to build and maybe even last longer. Also, if your intention is to primarily store heat for later use , (maybe for dryers, ovens, water heaters, etc) adding these to that system allows you to easily pull a little electricity out of it as well. But a system like that wouldn't be hot enough for these cells probably, so would only get a small efficiency when converting to electric. For something like offgrid power for a single home, i'd still probably go with a low temperature difference stirling engine connected to a sand battery, in addition to regular solar panels.

Would this be useful in Nuclear power plant?

@DrBenMiles

6 ай бұрын

Absolutely, in theory, it could be used anywhere heat energy is turned into electricity

@SciFiFactory

6 ай бұрын

Wouldn't that be too hot for the fuel rods? Or can the heat be amplified somehow? How hot do coal and gas plants get?

I could see a mixture that is dialed-up for real time panels and car batteries, and other panels dialed-up for sand batteries and grid tie.

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.

@MyrKnof

6 ай бұрын

Not that comfortable a margin at all. The properties of metals change over a wide range of temperatures. Even the famed Hastelloy-N would be way softer at that temperature.

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.

Dr Miles, this was very interesting, but please, where did you get that cool Einstein T-Shirt???

How about using a good old woodstove and drain some heat via golden solar panels to a battery, maybe spinning up a flywheel. From the flywheel you can tap electricity when you need. 😊. One step further lo living offgrid?

Seems very promising especially if its combined with a closed loop system that can hold many stacks.

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.

Since photonic energy is directly proportional to frequency (e=hmu) then why does your initial graph around 1:20 show a curve?

The blue in a candle flame is the top of the paraffin burning directly, vs. just above that ,where the wick becomes a second burning zone. I expect a good grade for a creative guess.

@tomholroyd7519

6 күн бұрын

But the blue part is hotter, right?

Please do a video on LPP Fusion's FF2B Dense Plasma Focus Fusion device. It is an experimental Solid State Fusion Electricity Generator that doesn't need a steam turbine to generate electricity in the proposed final form when using Hydrogen-Boron (pB11) aneutronic (No radioactive waste) fuel.

good to put on the back of PV cells for cooling, for the lower-temp ones

HTF do they keep the gold substrate from instantly turning to a puddle the moment it's exposed to those kinds of temps?

As these work more efficiently at high temperatures, is there potential for them to be used with combustion engines, to recover some of the waste heat from hot exhaust gases? Especially in a hybrid

@leifhietala8074

6 ай бұрын

I used to wonder about that vis-a-vis thermoelectric devices, just plate the whole exhaust system with them. At eight percent efficiency (best case scenario) it wouldn't be worth the trouble; at fifteen percent it probably is. At forty percent, that'd be massive. The very best IC gas engine I know of right now is about 40% efficient converting fuel energy to motion; with about 60% of the energy wasted as heat that's pretty terrible. If you could achieve the 40% on the wasted 60%, that would take your IC up to 64% total efficiency - actually achieving the ideal Carnot limit. would be front page headline news. It would make a base Jeep Wrangler thriftier than a current Toyota Camry, and boost a Prius' fuel economy from its current 54 to over 80mpg. In fact the gains on the Wrangler might be higher; its heat efficiency is not great so there's more waste heat to recapture and a bigger boost to be enjoyed there. The Prius is the model with the high heat efficiency already.

@jamesphillips2285

6 ай бұрын

Remember the lithium batteries mentioned with their 90% round trip efficiency? Electric cars are simply cheaper for short, and likely medium distance, trips.

they need a one way reflector, above, so they can bounce the photons up and down between the collecting layers.

What is the highest possible temperature for heat pumps?

I'm still not understanding the size. How much is that in big macs?

What about Ambri's grid storage batteries?

The blue part of a candle flame is is from the combustion of carbon monoxide and not directly to do with temperature.

could you make a video on TRBs (thermally regenerative batteries)

What are the materials that make up the thermo-voltaic panels, aside from the gold mentioned? And how easy are they to source at scale?

@JasonKaler

6 ай бұрын

Gallium antimonide. - should be available at the scale they need and the good news is that it doesn't cost as much as gold.

Excellent video! 🎉😊

What about sterling engines to convert the sand battery into electricity. Like the ones used in molten aluminium very similar heat range if not the same

Could they be used to capture extra energy from the waste energy from sources such as nuclear power stations?

7:47 This reminds me of using 100 percent sulfuric acid mixing with water. The heat generated is extraordinary. Then you use a membrane to separate the two liquids and the process all over again.

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.

Have you checked out ESS TECH LLC. Of Wilsonville Oregon making an iron, salt water battery system?

Hi just for the sake of sharing information that may lead to some progress in the future. The Canon printing corporation makes a film for their high-speed printers that I experimented with to make a capacitor and I thought that I was experiencing a dielectric memory but come to find out it would recharge by the heat from my hands. To further test this I put it near the heat shrink machine and got about 1 volt out of it. May not sound like much but it worked. Problem with the film is that it degrades in the light. I have a video of it that I took at the time.

I think it's more than 8 month old news. I talked to one of the author on youtube, he said unfortunately that the temperature of concentrated solar was too low, which I found weird since it can go very high. Those 40% are at 1800°C so... Yes it could be a game changer.

would be cool to see a double dyson sphere around a star. The first sphere around the sun say a quarter of the way out to mercury just radiating much cooler than the sun and then another super large one at jupiter orbit with thermophotovoltaics. Wonder if having them out at jupiter they would be super cold and the efficiency might increase.

Hmm...you just mentioned something that got me thinking: Normal photovoltaics don't reflect the light back to the Sun. What if they did? I mean, it would not affect the star, but is there a possibility that it might increase the amount of energy sent out into space and thus cooling the planet just a smidge? That's what snow does, right?

@justinw1765

6 ай бұрын

There are already radiant-sky/space cooling systems in the works. Unfortunately, some of them use expensive materials like hafnium oxide and silver.

@longgolf5530

3 ай бұрын

It's not needed. Global warming is a scam and a hoax.

We need more bandgaps!!!!

9:51 Very convincing!

The heat of Earth’s interior comes from two main sources, each contributing about 50% of the heat. One of those is the frictional heat left over from the collisions of large and small particles that created Earth in the first place, plus the subsequent frictional heat of redistribution of material within Earth by gravitational forces (e.g., sinking of iron to form the core). The other source is radioactivity, specifically the spontaneous radioactive decay of the isotopes 235U, 238U, 40K, and 232Th, which are primarily present in the mantle.

I think the solution is a combination of both of these technologies. Combining sand with its high capacity potential for low costs and fed into lithium, or super caps

so with this and nuclear reactors. how long to make it small for phones?

so basically a thermocouple , heat equals voltage. 3m has a patent on one that was used on a train where the thermocouple was wound around a exhaust manofold and produced enough voltage to charge a battery . this was in the 70s

Would be fantastic in combination with molten silicon. Very high energy density.

All major cities and even most small settlements in Finland already have a district heating network. That has been the case since at least 1960s. So the sand battery kind of devices do not incur a cost of building the grid infrastructure. There are multiple reasons for having these networks. First one is that there is a big need for heating as the winters are cold. Burning stuff in cities is bad for the air quality. And having a central system allows for having very high efficiency heating that also can use multiple energy sources, making the price fluctuations for individual house holds much less. The district heating network can use whatever is optimal at a given time and has been integrated to the grid.

I Like your T-Shirt very much Where did you buy it

@DrBenMiles

6 ай бұрын

Thanks! I made it. Links in the description 😉

So, how do these IRPCs compare to Seebeck devices? RTGs have been quite successful in space applications. However currently the only long term heat source has been from radioactive materials. Now, "heat batteries", could be applied hence the question. I'm thankful that I have an American thermostat (Fahrenheit) in my home. That way I can enjoy the higher resolution of temperature setting, 1C ~1.9F. So, if I want to change the temperature setting in the UK I have settle for almost a two degree change instead of 1 degree. Mo energy for a ~2 degree change instead of a 1F change. Hahaha. Keep in mind it wasn't that long ago when you guys were using imperial measurements.

A side benefit, if you are able to engineer high heat electronic/mechanical systems is the technology would also give us the ability to send a long term probe to Venus.

Dear Dr. Ben, thank you for the interesting video. I am just confused that the SOLAR-PHOTO-THERMAL energy systems remains me so strong on the PELTIERS UNITS, which are known and used for more than 100 years

It is truly amazing that MIT researchers have developed such a super solar cell. The question, however, is what they will use to generate this heat at a reasonable cost. Padre Himalaya proved 119 years ago that solar energy can be concentrated with his solar furnace that generated above 4000°C. For this he received two gold medals and the grand prize at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

I bought 20 230Ah Lifepo4 cells for £2300 in 2022, of which I use 16 for 14kWh storage. That's around £0.07 per kWh if my maths is correct. They should last 10 years, my old 7kWh lead acid battery lasted 8 years and still functions at lower capacity. So spread that cost over >3500 days and I pay nothing for power. I run a whole house: washing machine, freezer, water pumps, microwave etc., plus an extensive hobby/craft woodworking shop with several large induction motors. I even weld with a mig for short runs when needed. I have never dropped below 40% soc at the end of a day and the battery recovers to full within a couple of days of average sunshine, even in winter from just 3kW of solar. $400/kWh sounds very wrong and I would like to see those numbers.

This would really simplify compact fusion reactors. Minimal external subsystems, just... hydrogen istopes go in, electricity and heat come out (and minimal waste isotopes).

The problem with those thermo-photovoltaics is acquiring the Gold. Gold is extremely expensive and hard to come by so putting a sheet of it about the quarter of a size of a football field is probably horrifyingly expensive.

Has anyone thought about using parabolic reflectors to concentrate the suns rays on these panels? If i'm understanding this correctly, higher temperatures make these more efficient.

@JasonKaler

6 ай бұрын

you're going to need a lens that's about a square meter in size to focus enough sunlight onto a postage stamp size panel. normal pv panels will generate about the same power over that area

We achieve close to 60% through use of Brayton Cycle in modern Cogeneration Power plant and combine it with Rankine Cycle for huge increase in overall plant efficiencies.

For home scale, sand batteries are usable. You just need a smaller one. Smaller is actually cheaper and more convenient too.

I just had an interesting idea. I will explain it in what I hope is the easiest form to understand. Imagine you have some sort of engine like a two cylinder engine running off biogas. Imagine that the thing has windows that are transparent to the IR. The fact that the TPV cell reflects IR that is too low energy to use doesn't mean that it must reflect it back as the source. It could be angled so that it reflects IR that came from the cylinder near top dead center into the one near bottom dead center. This would put the thermal energy into the cylinder before it is compressed and ignited. Thus the energy will come out of that cylinder when it is ignited and it will come out as higher energy photons. The efficiency of an ICE engine is not all that great so this may lead to an engine with a greater total efficiency because some of the output comes in the form of electrical power.

@kensmith5694

6 ай бұрын

@@fleetingfacet Its on my list but it will be a while. There are several in the cue before it.

When I heard gold layer, my immediate thought is how much are these panels going to cost? At least they should be highly desirable for recycling if there is a large quantity of gold involved.

These cells are made of gallium indium arsenide coated over germanium. You end up with about 2V and about 200 to 500mA per square centimeter. They are basically solar cells tuned for near IR at 800 to 1300nm.

Li Ion Batteries are on average at around 130$/kWh right now decreasing every year. But like always, we need the right solution for eaxh use case and for grid storage cheaper options are available.

Super interesting

These things are not limited by the Carnot limit, right? I think that is the best part, because it can be improved upon

@simontillson482

5 ай бұрын

Unfortunately, they are. You have to keep the TPV way cooler than the emitter, or you get nothing. That cooling doesn’t come free either. It costs energy to keep it cool, so you have to subtract that from any true efficiency calculation. MIT unfortunately didn’t include this in their calculations..

@filipDcve

5 ай бұрын

@@simontillson482 I understand what you're trying to say, but... If the theoretical efficiency can reach 100%, the closer you get to that, you have less heating of the TPV, meaning you need less cooling... right? P.S. Thanks for pointing out the detail about the paper.

Non of this really matters until we improve the efficiency of building and home construction. You could reduce the consumption requirements with current technologies that passively do what we brute force with electricity.

Thanks!

@DrBenMiles

6 ай бұрын

Hey! You're welcome! Thanks for the support!

Getting closure to an efficient water heating system

At 40% efficiency, 10 joules of thermal energy yields 4 joules of electrical energy. A heat pump can use that to move 12 - 15 joules of thermal energy back into the system. Seems like an opportunity in there somewhere 🤔 😏

@jamesphillips2285

6 ай бұрын

Heat pumps become less and less efficient the larger the temperature gradient becomes. Even though modern heat pumps still get reasonable efficiency with a 40 degree Celsius gradient: I still likely need a ground-source heatpump where I live.

Remember back in the day when there were scientist working on using kinetic energy for storage, but found the goal illusive? Solid state heat storage seems so much more reasonable than gyros. Also, far more simple than turbines or Stirling engines for converting the heat into electricity. Okay, there are facilities that can produce the thermovoltaic cells, and what are the raw inputs? Surely, they aren't any poisonous than the ones going into photovoltaics, or are they? Also, is there an idea of the lifespan of these things?

When you say 20% efficient, does that include the reflected light? That energy is not lost and is still useful.

@spicychad55

6 ай бұрын

20% solar panels only able to light directly as energy, they radiate the other 80% of the light rays as heat... they don't necessarily absorb many wavelengths of light. The most powerful solar panels have been collecting up to around 44% efficiency but they "triple junction" cells using expensive materials. Generally only NASA and other big players uses the high efficiency panels.

Would a Sand "Battery" make sense in a place like Denmark where 66% (and rising) of households get their warm water (and floor heating) from district heating?

Just a thought for channels that often have to convert between Celsius and Ferinheight for different viewers. Americans use Celsius for technical subjects. We just don't use it for things that are domestically familiar. Sort of like British people weigh things in Stone. When you are already talking about absurdly large numbers saying a dam weights 40 million stone doesn't really make a number more comprehensible since anything else at that scale isn't going to be measured in stone.

@PaulG.x

6 ай бұрын

British people measure things in Blue Whales Weight = X Blue Whales Area = X x the skin area of a Blue Whale etc. Apparently all British people are intimately familiar with the vital statistics of Blue Whales

I can see this in phones Working together with battery

I think it hasn't beaten (or at least not by 5%) steam turbines, unless we're assuming 100% heat capture & transfer?

What about stirling engines?

What are these made of? I tried ordering some GaAs cells and my post office sent it back because of the As, told me they won't mail arsenic... But they will mail a phone charger made with GaAs, go figure.

heat of flame does not match the output photon bands of the flame compounds, thus the different colors that dont match the black body temp output colors, ie laser pumping photon output colors, excitation output bands. in laser pumping gaseous medium the various energies of photons are not wasted, but are fully used to pump the electrons, unlike the surface of semiconductor solar panels.

@gsestream

6 ай бұрын

energy density of sand at those temps is better than lithium-ion batteries, 300Wh/kg or so, as heat, you compute that. also znso4 rechargeable zinc-air battery (from ore zinc sulfides) is literally dirt cheap. also whatever metal you can directly electroplate out of ore sulfides/sulfate water solutions is fine for a battery, and simple easy to make.

@gsestream

6 ай бұрын

everything becomes free if I dont pay you for anything, so all cost considerations become null and void

Good news 👍😎✊

so looking a few decades into the future and these could extract heat at lower temperatures You could use them in clothing.

Great trend !

Speaking of new ways to drive turbines, other than steam, there's some interesting engineering ongoing with supercritical CO2 driven turbines via Energy Department’s public-private STEP (Supercritical Transformational Electric Power) program, these new turbines that are about 1/10 the size of a conventional steam turbine.

you know if you get a piece if copper or any metal really. if you heat one side and cool the other side the hot side is positive and cold side is negative you dont need expensive tools just any metal and a temp difference.

Things kind of are "green hot". They're just a particular kind of green we have evolved to view as neutral because it's the colour of our sun.

1:42 1. because blackbody radiation is pretty wide, spectrally speaking. While the sun, for instance, emits primarily in the green spectrum, that blackbody radiation is spectrally wide enough to cover the spectrum so evenly as to appear white to us (especially after factoring in various perceptual things such as our eyes automatically adjusting whitepoint and what not. But even without that, it'd at least appear orangish or bluish at best, and definitely not green) For the red hot parts, we are initially pretty much only seeing the tail of the distribution, and that tail decreases exponentially with higher energy light, so effectively it looks like a very deep red to us. For blue hot, we can actually look at the *infinite* temperature limit: In that limit, fun fact, we actually happen to fall more or less on sky blue. It ends up being more purplish than actual sky blue, but there is a reason for that: The sky gets its color from Rayleigh scattering which by complete coincidence just so happens to have the same sort of wavelength dependent falloff as a blackbody radiator in the infinite temperature limit. So if you had a light source that emits with the constant spectrum (known as "Illuminant E"), the sky would in fact look kinda more purplish. However, the sun is already significantly less bright in the violets than in the greens, so the light that gets scattered away to color the sky simply doesn't have enough violet in it to turn into that same infinite-temperature color. Instead you get something slightly more greenish blue. (Of course, if you actually ever existed anywhere near an infinite temperature blackbody radiator, you'd already be dead, and the universe along with you, but that's neither here nor there. Good thing the sky doesn't glow on its own but simply borrows its light from the sun) 2. Flames are really complicated chemical reactions. In a candle flame, different parts of that flame have the rigth conditions for different reactions taking place depending on temperature, pressure, and available fuel and oxygen. The typical blackbody colored parts are superheated soot which, at room temperature, would basically look black. I think this is also part of why that part of the flame is opaque. If it weren't so hot, you'd be looking at a black cloud of sorts in that region. Meanwhile the blue part is a different kind of flame. That's, iirc, burning hydrogen, and therefore emitting with the absorption and emission (spectrum (same thing in reverse) of hydrogen, which ends up being this blue color. Every atom has a characteristic glow. Some particularly nice-looking ones are commonly used in colorful fireworks for that reason. The reason for this characteristic coloration is, that an atom's electrons can only exist at specific energy levels (quantum mechanics) and if energy is high enough, such as when there is a lot of heat around, electrons can jump into a heightened state (which is where absorption spectra come from) and then fall down into a lowered state, emitting some light of specific wavelengths corresponding to how far the electron fell. For different kinds of atoms, these energy levels look different, leading to a unique spectral fingerprint for every element. For hydrogen it just so happens that some particularly bright emission lines are in the blue part of the spectrum.

Why don't we see 'green' hot? And why was the bottom of the flame blue?

@metal-gods

6 ай бұрын

Blue is hotter.

@electricAB

6 ай бұрын

The blue flame is from the right mix of fuel & oxygen? It’s a more complete burn so it’s hotter. Hottest part of the flame I guess is from heated gas rising? Green flame…. just put a bit of copper in the mix.. ok, that’s not really an answer I’ll admit. Nice video by the way..

@FathDaniel

6 ай бұрын

We don't see green hot because colors are additive, and heat is not an ordered excitation of atom unlike a laser. When you heat a rod it starts emitting IR, then IR + red, then IR + red + green, then IR + red + green + blue. I.e. it goes from invisible to red to yellow to white. As for blue flame it could be just emission of stuff burning in the flame, like adding salts can make flame green or purple or blue.

So heat is not by definition JUST infrared radiation. Heat is the transfer of energy, which occurs 3 different ways, through convection, conduction, and radiation. Heat radiation is given off in infrared wavelengths but can also be given off at any wavelength.

There is a difference between a bunsen burner and a match or candle. IDK what it is. We need another video about the blue in a candle flame now. Somebody stick some temperature probes in a match flame please!! And explain it.

This could be a game changer, but efficiency needs to be much bigger before it becomes a usable system. I imagine putting a device on your gas cooker, heating it for an hour and storing enough electricity for a 4 member family home 48hr use, or even longer. Now just to find a way to generate heat much cheaper. This is where science needs huge jumps in technology.

Surely you mean $400-500/MWh for Li-ion? Additionally, you have compared TPV to 35% efficient rankine cycles (very old sub-critcal technology) - how would it compare when using 'Advanced Ultra Super Critical' technology that excedes 45% efficiency? Would it exceed this rankine cycle too?

Regular solar panels use a layer of silver as a collector and mirror.

Their quote of $5/10kWh; is that per unit stored, or delivered? If they are 25% efficient, then that multiplies it by four, plus needing four times the number of solar panels, or turbines needed to provide that energy, would make them a much more expensive proposal. I don't think round trip efficiency, is nearly as big a deal, as many seem to think, but that is a lot to make up. Maybe the reflected photons, mean it all gets used over and over, until eventually that photon is captured?

Heat -> Electricity? WOW! THAT is GREAT!

And just like all of the other breakthroughs its only 15 to 20 years down the road!

So, there is a lot of heat produced when entering an atmosphere (2,370°F/1,300°C). Couldn't heat shields be converted to thermogenerators. When traveling to Mars, you would want every possible power source. Imagine, for example, starship landing on Mars charges its batteries as it's entering the atmosphere...