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I think this kind of technology has enormous potential to improve human life. Bad weather is a huge, chronic problem that makes almost everyones' life substanti

I think this kind of technology has enormous potential to improve human life. Bad weather is a huge, chronic problem that makes almost everyones' life substantially worse. Just the other day my aunt broke her wrist after slipping on a patch of ice. One question though: why do they need a special high-tech material to do this? Why can't they just bubble warm air through cold water in the summer and vice-versa in the winter? Water has very large heat capacity, 400x that of air by volume.

vtange 10y ago
Well, isn't that what happens in oceans already? That is why coastal cities are more temperate and experience more moderate swings than inland cities. I'd imagine there's not enough water to do this inland..
- d_burfoot 10y ago
  That's true for west coast cities, but not for east coast cities like Boston and New York, which experience terrible temperature extremes. How much water do we need? I wouldn't try to affect large regions, just specific urban areas. The water doesn't actually have to go anywhere, it just sits around storing heat. All we have to do is bubble a lot of air through it. As a nice side benefit, this should clean the air. (This is my version of the Reber Plan).
  - ars 10y ago
    It's true for Boston and NY as well. Those cities have milder weather than the cities inland of them.
  - dpark 10y ago
    Are you proposing that we capture heat this way to warm houses (in which case it's a terribly ineffective and inefficient system) or to actually raise the outside temperature? If you're proposing the latter, there's just no way. Water might store 400 times as much heat per unit as air, but there's an absurd amount of air hovering around a town and an enormous area that air mixes with constantly.
- schiffern 10y ago
  As others have pointed out, there's no need to store heat for six months. But you bring up a common enough viewpoint, one that I think bears re-examining: >I'd imagine there's not enough water to do this inland.. We quite often forget that there's no physical limitation on the amount of water available inland. Water is constantly flowing from the oceans onto land, being recycled (mainly by trees pushing it back up into the airstream), and flowing back out and mixing with the ocean. So the amount of water per square meter of land is limited by only two variables: * The rate at which fresh water falls on land (liters/hectare/year) * The time it takes that water to flow to the ocean (years). The amount of water available on land (liters/hectare) is simply these two quantities divided by each-other. The flow is fundamentally limited by the energy balance of the sun, so there's not much we can do there. But the time is entirely determined by our ability to design infrastructure and land use patterns that store water on the land in useful catchments instead of draining it off rapidly. Farm-scale dams are one visible way of doing that, but it's much cheaper to store water in the ground via infiltration systems. The amount of water is inversely proportional to the amount of time it takes water to flow back to the ocean after it falls. So if we want to "wet up" the landscape, we should make it follow a loooong path with a lot of passive friction and storage buffers. Just to show my math here, in the USA on average there's 715 mm of rainfall per year, which works out to 19,000 gallons for the average 100 m^2 house footprint. And next year you get that much water again. In extremely arid areas like California it would even be possible to use salt water for thermal storage.
glibgil 10y ago
It's not high-tech. It is low-tech. NaOH is lye. Anything in the 50% NaOH solution that is not water is there to make it viscous, but not get it wet
- lisivka 10y ago
  High-tech, by definition, is tech which can make high profit, i.e. c1 sand into $500 processor. Sand is not low-tech or high-tech by itself. PS. Quote from Wikipedia for downvoters: High tech is often viewed as high risk, but offering the opportunity for high profits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_tech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_tech
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Definition: "Technology that is at the cutting edge". Fact: Chemically produced lye dates back to at least 1791 with the Leblanc process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leblanc_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leblanc_process
    - lisivka 10y ago
      Fact: green energy/renewable energy/energy saving technologies are cutting edge now. Fact: your processor is made from sand which was discovered by first human ever.
      - astrodust 10y ago
        Yes, it's a little known fact that Babylonians were casting huge perfectly pure silicon crystals. They were also pioneers in x-ray lithography! Processors are made from sand in the same way people are made from carbon. You're skipping a few important steps.
        lisivka 10y ago
        Skipped steps are called "high-tech".
ridgeguy 10y ago
NaOH is a super cheap, common chemical. It's the principal ingredient in Drano and similar plumbing cleanout products. High concentrations of NaOH in water are strongly basic. It will corrode many oxide-based ceramics (like toilet bowls) and aluminum, but it's no problem for most other common metals and plastics.
- scotty79 10y ago
  > It will corrode many oxide-based ceramics (like toilet bowls) and aluminum. ...and human flash quite rapidly. So if your NaOH radiator leaks you might get sprayed with meat dissolving viscous liquid.
  - thmsths 10y ago
    And trying to rinse it with water (which is probably the first thing that anyone would do) will only make things worse.
    - philipkglass 10y ago
      No, if the sodium hydroxide is already in solution then diluting with copious water is one of the best ways to deal with a splash on skin. You're right that adding water makes the problem worse if you have e.g. a spill of prills to clean up.
  - ulrikrasmussen 10y ago
    I think practical applications would transfer the heat to pure water in a heat exchanger instead of delivering the NaOH directly to the radiator. In a well insulated system, the losses should be minimal
ars 10y ago
Because you would have to insulate the water. This instead stores the heat as stable, chemical, energy.

vtange 10y ago

Well, isn't that what happens in oceans already? That is why coastal cities are more temperate and experience more moderate swings than inland cities. I'd imagine there's not enough water to do this inland..

d_burfoot 10y ago
That's true for west coast cities, but not for east coast cities like Boston and New York, which experience terrible temperature extremes. How much water do we need? I wouldn't try to affect large regions, just specific urban areas. The water doesn't actually have to go anywhere, it just sits around storing heat. All we have to do is bubble a lot of air through it. As a nice side benefit, this should clean the air. (This is my version of the Reber Plan).
- ars 10y ago
  It's true for Boston and NY as well. Those cities have milder weather than the cities inland of them.
- dpark 10y ago
  Are you proposing that we capture heat this way to warm houses (in which case it's a terribly ineffective and inefficient system) or to actually raise the outside temperature? If you're proposing the latter, there's just no way. Water might store 400 times as much heat per unit as air, but there's an absurd amount of air hovering around a town and an enormous area that air mixes with constantly.
schiffern 10y ago
As others have pointed out, there's no need to store heat for six months. But you bring up a common enough viewpoint, one that I think bears re-examining: >I'd imagine there's not enough water to do this inland.. We quite often forget that there's no physical limitation on the amount of water available inland. Water is constantly flowing from the oceans onto land, being recycled (mainly by trees pushing it back up into the airstream), and flowing back out and mixing with the ocean. So the amount of water per square meter of land is limited by only two variables: * The rate at which fresh water falls on land (liters/hectare/year) * The time it takes that water to flow to the ocean (years). The amount of water available on land (liters/hectare) is simply these two quantities divided by each-other. The flow is fundamentally limited by the energy balance of the sun, so there's not much we can do there. But the time is entirely determined by our ability to design infrastructure and land use patterns that store water on the land in useful catchments instead of draining it off rapidly. Farm-scale dams are one visible way of doing that, but it's much cheaper to store water in the ground via infiltration systems. The amount of water is inversely proportional to the amount of time it takes water to flow back to the ocean after it falls. So if we want to "wet up" the landscape, we should make it follow a loooong path with a lot of passive friction and storage buffers. Just to show my math here, in the USA on average there's 715 mm of rainfall per year, which works out to 19,000 gallons for the average 100 m^2 house footprint. And next year you get that much water again. In extremely arid areas like California it would even be possible to use salt water for thermal storage.

glibgil 10y ago

It's not high-tech. It is low-tech. NaOH is lye. Anything in the 50% NaOH solution that is not water is there to make it viscous, but not get it wet

lisivka 10y ago
High-tech, by definition, is tech which can make high profit, i.e. c1 sand into $500 processor. Sand is not low-tech or high-tech by itself. PS. Quote from Wikipedia for downvoters: High tech is often viewed as high risk, but offering the opportunity for high profits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_tech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_tech
- astrodust 10y ago
  Definition: "Technology that is at the cutting edge". Fact: Chemically produced lye dates back to at least 1791 with the Leblanc process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leblanc_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leblanc_process
  - lisivka 10y ago
    Fact: green energy/renewable energy/energy saving technologies are cutting edge now. Fact: your processor is made from sand which was discovered by first human ever.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      Yes, it's a little known fact that Babylonians were casting huge perfectly pure silicon crystals. They were also pioneers in x-ray lithography! Processors are made from sand in the same way people are made from carbon. You're skipping a few important steps.
      - lisivka 10y ago
        Skipped steps are called "high-tech".

ridgeguy 10y ago

NaOH is a super cheap, common chemical. It's the principal ingredient in Drano and similar plumbing cleanout products. High concentrations of NaOH in water are strongly basic. It will corrode many oxide-based ceramics (like toilet bowls) and aluminum, but it's no problem for most other common metals and plastics.

scotty79 10y ago
> It will corrode many oxide-based ceramics (like toilet bowls) and aluminum. ...and human flash quite rapidly. So if your NaOH radiator leaks you might get sprayed with meat dissolving viscous liquid.
- thmsths 10y ago
  And trying to rinse it with water (which is probably the first thing that anyone would do) will only make things worse.
  - philipkglass 10y ago
    No, if the sodium hydroxide is already in solution then diluting with copious water is one of the best ways to deal with a splash on skin. You're right that adding water makes the problem worse if you have e.g. a spill of prills to clean up.
- ulrikrasmussen 10y ago
  I think practical applications would transfer the heat to pure water in a heat exchanger instead of delivering the NaOH directly to the radiator. In a well insulated system, the losses should be minimal

ars 10y ago

Because you would have to insulate the water. This instead stores the heat as stable, chemical, energy.