szvsw

23 ms·

271.
by szvsw 2y ago
Emailed you through the email listed on your HN profile
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by szvsw 2y ago
> While we've been looking into this, it can be a bit tricky in a university context to do the engineering leg work required to build something robust... I definitely hear you on this! As a grad student who is one of the only develo
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by szvsw 2y ago
Awesome! Several of my colleagues are working on differentiable physics simulations (mostly FEM type stuff for structural design optimization) so I’m excited to share this with them! They mostly work in Julia. My own experiments with auto-d
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by szvsw 2y ago
By value, I meant, broadly, engineering/environmental value, not financial. Its value as a material from an engineering perspective is that it (a) functions fantastically in compression and with the addition of (usually) rebar, it ca
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by szvsw 2y ago
> It doesn’t matter that you can’t feed power back to the grid (well, maybe you can.. you can convert the light given off the heated block with photovoltaics.. but that won’t be a huge factor). FWIW there are a few other comments in this
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by szvsw 2y ago
Fair fair. Unlike traditional solar thermal though, this can just function as regular node on the electric grid (or even a prosumer) so it is decoupled from the attendant variability. As such they are not quite comparable IMO.
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by szvsw 2y ago
you omitted the immediately following sentence... >They only need to be cheaper than (IMO inevitable) carbon tax penalties plus the cost of these bricks compared to current methods, which is a rapidly falling curve. this clearly indicate
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by szvsw 2y ago
Well like you said the resistive heating is what sets it apart, and still makes it potentially useful as a thermal ESS because of the classic duck curve even if it's not the primary use case. Soak up excess elec during midday as heat i
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by szvsw 2y ago
antora also is a promising thermal pv company - heat up some carbon blocks resistively when clean power supply exceeds demand, then convert back to elec during peak demand or outages via pv panels operating on IR. Hopping container form fa
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by szvsw 2y ago
Using demolished concrete rubble in roads is pretty much the lowest form of recycling possible. Up-cycling it so you can make new cement and ultimately new concrete which can be used structurally at a huge carbon advantage is far more val
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by szvsw 2y ago
Putting old concrete into roads loses almost all of its value and is a pretty atrocious form of downcycling; notice that the linked article is literally about “disposing” of concrete, not re-using it meaningfully. Most of concrete’s primary