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I find it interesting that we're still using water to transfer the energy. Has there been much research into finding better ways to create electricity than stre
by TheCraiggers 13y ago
I find it interesting that we're still using water to transfer the energy. Has there been much research into finding better ways to create electricity than stream => turbine? Is there anything interesting happening in this area?
It just seems to me that the process of turning water to steam to impart kinetic energy to a turbine is incredibly wasteful, and all we seem to be researching are fancier turbines. I would love to be shown otherwise.
- jessriedel 13y agoMy understanding is that converting heat to steam to turbine power is actually extremey efficient. I wish I had a cite for you, but I don't.
- comicjk 13y agoIt is not all that wasteful; the water is recondensed from the steam so that when you boil it again it is already quite hot. This process is 1/2 to 2/3 as efficient as the theoretical maximum efficiency of any possible device, (hot temp - cold temp)/(hot temp). The difference is mostly materials science - we don't have any materials strong enough and heat-resistant enough to operate the cycle at thousands of degrees. But people are certainly working on it. There is more in universities and in labs than is dreamed of on Hacker News.
- baq 13y agowater has certain nice properties: cheap, not toxic and very high heat capacity. there are probably more, but i'm not a powerplant engineer.
- mapt 13y agoEven if one does use advanced coolant cycles of some sort, water is extremely effective as a coolant. It has one of the highest volumetric heat capacities of any pumpable liquid at low temperatures, a very low viscosity and manageable reactivity, and a very low-temperature, high-energy phase transition that we understand well for higher temperature applications, which does not even require exotic pressure conditions to achieve. Water is likely to show up at some stage of the cycle in any complex thermodynamic infrastructural engineering.
- krschultz 13y agoIt's actually really efficient, so much so that I think an interesting question is scaling that technology down rather than making a new technology to replace it. There are a lot of interesting technology advances related to better manufacturing processes & material science for turbine blades. The closer we can get to the "ideal" shape, the higher performance the turbine. Single crystal turbine blades are an incredible feat.
- pjc50 13y agoSteam turbines are the most efficient way of turning heat into mechanical and electrical energy. You can get a slight efficiency boost at tremendous cost by changing the working fluid to something lighter, but nobody bothers with that. There's some interesting research in using fuel cells to extract energy from natural gas and oil, which potentially could be more efficient. This doesn't work for coal, though.