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> Tesla has been applying their "first principles" physics-based optimizations in this area. I dunno; what you quote sounds like what any reasonable process en

> Tesla has been applying their "first principles" physics-based optimizations in this area. I dunno; what you quote sounds like what any reasonable process engineer would do to optimize this process. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about it. For one, you can't "conserve the latent heat of evaporation"; you can of course do heat recovery between the two ends, but again this is not groundbreaking tech. In fact, it was first patented by Edward Green in 1845 under the name "Economizer", which has a nice Wikipedia article about it. And I'm pretty sure the old Panasonic factory isn't just venting solvent into the atmosphere; that would be illegal essentially everywhere, and it would be a huge waste of money. Also not convinced they are comparing apples to apples with the 80% figure; obviously a lot of the power consumption here is heat for the drying air, and the old Panasonic factory is not located in a desert with an annual average outside temp. of 19 C (66 F). I'm pretty sure they're using heat pumps (or maybe also just heat exchangers) to exploit the high outside temperature in Nevada to get that decreased power usage. Which is not stupid, but it's also not a Tesla-exclusive revolutionary idea.

schiffern 10y ago
>I dunno; what you quote sounds like what any reasonable process engineer would do to optimize this process I thought the same thing, but of course hindsight is 20/20. The surprising part (if the Tesla employee is to be believed) is that Panasonic hadn't done it before. I didn't want to get bogged down in gory thermodynamic details, but it sounds like you know what I meant. The latent heat from the oven is conserved by recycling it back into the process air, rather than being wasted by releasing it into the environment and losing it from the system. Latent heat is necessarily transferred in any liquid-gas phase change -- you canna change the laws of physics! A good solvent recovery system will use the latent heat to re-heat the process air as it exits the recovery system. Ideally there's a sequence of heat pumps, with the first evaporator rejecting heat to the last condenser. This creates what's essentially an active countercurrent heat exchanger. Since the main function of the oven is to evaporate the solvent, we should expect the condenser will add the same amount of thermal power (as sensible heat) into the return air as the oven dryer is losing (as latent heat). So the system only has to make up for the heat lost through the oven and duct insulation, not the evaporation process extracting heat from the oven. Fortunately any heat pump produces waste heat. >it's also not a Tesla-exclusive revolutionary idea People expecting any "Tesla-exlusive" idea are going to be disappointed. There's nothing magical about Tesla, and there's no special laws of physics that apply only to them. A good idea is a good idea.

schiffern 10y ago

>I dunno; what you quote sounds like what any reasonable process engineer would do to optimize this process I thought the same thing, but of course hindsight is 20/20. The surprising part (if the Tesla employee is to be believed) is that Panasonic hadn't done it before. I didn't want to get bogged down in gory thermodynamic details, but it sounds like you know what I meant. The latent heat from the oven is conserved by recycling it back into the process air, rather than being wasted by releasing it into the environment and losing it from the system. Latent heat is necessarily transferred in any liquid-gas phase change -- you canna change the laws of physics! A good solvent recovery system will use the latent heat to re-heat the process air as it exits the recovery system. Ideally there's a sequence of heat pumps, with the first evaporator rejecting heat to the last condenser. This creates what's essentially an active countercurrent heat exchanger. Since the main function of the oven is to evaporate the solvent, we should expect the condenser will add the same amount of thermal power (as sensible heat) into the return air as the oven dryer is losing (as latent heat). So the system only has to make up for the heat lost through the oven and duct insulation, not the evaporation process extracting heat from the oven. Fortunately any heat pump produces waste heat. >it's also not a Tesla-exclusive revolutionary idea People expecting any "Tesla-exlusive" idea are going to be disappointed. There's nothing magical about Tesla, and there's no special laws of physics that apply only to them. A good idea is a good idea.