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That might be a good use of solar actually. Smelt the aluminum right at the site, which might have poor grid connectivity. Generate your own power ultra cheap
by codecamper 9y ago
That might be a good use of solar actually. Smelt the aluminum right at the site, which might have poor grid connectivity. Generate your own power ultra cheap & use it directly for smelting. Save on raw material transport costs. It would be interesting to see a cost / benefit analysis here.
- mercutio2 9y agoEfficient aluminum smelting requires reliable, continuous power for weeks at a time. Photovoltaics are cheap, but the diurnal variation makes them singularly inappropriate for aluminum smelting.
- SEJeff 9y agoAnd could the economics eventually work of photovoltiacs + battery storage ala a tesla powerpack?
- codecamper 9y agoWhy does it need to be continuous?
- mercutio2 9y agoIn a nutshell, allowing the aluminum to solidify gums the batch process up catastrophically. Friends who used to work at aluminum plants were surprisingly happy when the plant was snowed in: it was more economical to keep workers onsite running rotating understaffed shifts at triple pay for the duration than to let the pots solidify. From the Wikipedia page on aluminum smelting: An aluminium smelter consists of a large number of cells (pots) in which the electrolysis takes place. [...] Smelting is run as a batch process, with the aluminium metal deposited at the bottom of the pots and periodically siphoned off. [...] However power must not be interrupted for more than 4-5 hours, since the pots have to be repaired at significant cost if the liquid metal solidifies. In addition to Wikipedia, there’s a surprisingly good explanation here: https://www.ega.ae/en/operations/smelters/production-process/aluminium-smelting/ https://www.ega.ae/en/operations/smelters/production-process...