4 ms·
When heating is required, they make much more sense than lithium-ion batteries as they are cheaper, use no critical materials, last longer, and are just as effi
by causi 4y ago
When heating is required, they make much more sense than lithium-ion batteries as they are cheaper, use no critical materials, last longer, and are just as efficient!
What method are they using to extract energy from the bricks that's as efficient as lithium-ion discharging?
- kgermino 4y agoI think “where heating is required” is the key caveat. This is basically going back to the old way of heating homes: When energy is cheap, heat a giant thermal mass. When energy is expensive, leach the heat to other areas where it’s needed. In the old days this would be a giant brick or clay stove that would heat up during the day (when people are awake to tend the fire) and radiate heat to keep the building warm through the night. I’m the modern version it’s likely steam pipes heated by the mass that bring the heat to wherever it’s useful (whether that’s an industrial kiln or a home’s radiators). That cycle can be extremely efficient, but you obviously only get heat, not electricity. It’s probably a good thing to do in some contexts but if I understand it right I’m not sure I’d call it innovative.
- xani_ 4y agoAnd just using a heat pump will have vastly lower total energy usage. It could be interesting in niches like say have some thermal storage (that say gets recharged at peak solar) for heating water on demand instead of draining battery for that, but that's a lot of extra complexity to save on some more batteries
- kgermino 4y agoI suspect heat pumps are the future for domestic heating, but I’m not sure it’s feasible for industrial uses. Very hard to get a heat pump that can make a 1000* difference between the hot and cold side. My comment probably shouldn’t have even mentioned home radiators.
- olivermuty 4y agoIt’s actually starting to perk up on the industrial side as well! https://norwegianscitechnews.com/2021/04/developing-the-worlds-hottest-heat-pump-ever/ https://norwegianscitechnews.com/2021/04/developing-the-worl...
- adwn 4y ago> producing temperatures of up to 180 degrees celcius That's a bit short of the 1000°C that Rondo's system promises, so these approaches are useful for very different applications.
- contravariant 4y agoIt's not that heat pumps aren't capable of making a 1000K temperature difference, but with an ambient temperature of around 300K even the theoretical advantage of using a heat pump instead of straight up heating is just ~40%. It's not nothing, but getting close to the theoretical limit tends to be incredibly annoying when it comes to thermodynamics. Typically it requires doing stuff extremely slowly (so you're always close to thermal equilibrium), which means it's nowhere near fast enough or you need almost perfect insulation etc.
- choeger 4y agoWhy is the ambient temperature important? Isn't it about thermal energy? So wouldn't a heat pump just need to be much larger to work up to 1000 degrees or more? Say, I have a heatpump that heats up water to 100°C at ambient temperature of 10°C. Couldn't I feed that hot water into another heat pump that heats up water to 200°C and so on?
- Freestyler_3 4y agoIf you have the liquids with the properties to handle that you could. To make it easier you would have to halve each next heat pump specs, so that the earlier pump can deliver to both the condensor and the evaporator.
- 4y ago
- dzhiurgis 4y agoIf using heat pump - can you have an additional container to store pressurised refrigerant? Or that only works for cooling?
- Schroedingersat 4y agoNo reason not to combine them. Have a big brick or water thing inside. Heat it while it is sunny with a heat pump. Hell you could even melt a few tons of sodium acetate during summer and use it for december/january
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- largbae 4y agoThis isn't an electricity solution, they are asserting that ~27% of global energy consumption is for industrial heating, which is a more straightforward use case for hot bricks. edit: I misspoke, 27% of greenhouse gas emissions are asserted to be from industrial heating applications, not 27% of energy use.
- dotancohen 4y agoAre lithium-ion batteries typically used for industrial heating? That is what these bricks are being compared to. They are even using the terms "charge" and "discharge", and proposing an end to battery storage.
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- anttisalmela 4y agoWe are going to have lot of intermittent energy production with wind and solar energy. This is a cheap way to convert that to continuous heat for industrial processes, instead of storing it as electricity in expensive batteries.
- xani_ 4y ago...okay ? But how the bricks help ? Like, there is some merit in say heating up the "heat battery" at peak solar power (or just when grid energy is cheapest) then using that to heat directly but... you're still doing it at 100% efficiency while heat pump does that at 200-300% using nothing but ambient temperature to get that efficiency. I guess you could use it as a hybrid solution with heat pump for very cold climates that would normally disqualify heat pumps (heat the brick during the day, use heat pump to get the heat back) but even that is kinda meh.
- luckylion 4y agoThey are talking about "heat" as in "industrial heating", not heating your home. Can heat pumps heat steam up to 1000°C?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]