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It's in da' sand ...


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Is it just me, or should the term "battery" be restricted just to something that stores or produces electricity?

 

This thing described is a THERMAL STORE.  Yes, a big night storage heater.  It may be heated by electric resistance heating, but the stored energy is taken out as hot water not as electricity, so I believe the term "battery" is wrong for this.

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27 minutes ago, ProDave said:

Is it just me, or should the term "battery" be restricted just to something that stores or produces electricity?

Artillery battery?

 

It is not the medium that the energy is stored in (I used granite chips for my dissertation), it is the insulation methods that is the interesting bit (I used polystyrene).

 

Sand has a conductivity of 0.25 W/m.K and a SHC of 830 kJ/kg.K

Granite has a conductivity of 3.2 W/m.K and a SHC of 790 kJ/kg.K

Polystyrene has a conductivity of 0.12 W/m.K and a SHC of 1100 kJ/kg.K

 

 

To quote from the BBC article.

 

"One of the big challenges now is whether the technology can be scaled up to really make a difference - and will the developers be able to use it to get electricity out as well as heat?"

 

Too right.

Edited by SteamyTea
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39 minutes ago, ProDave said:

Is it just me, or should the term "battery" be restricted just to something that stores or produces electricity?

 

I doubt you're the only one who thinks this, but I disagree. "Battery" has a long history of use in relation to thermal storage.

 

Chemical storage devices of the type you're referring to are only called batteries because they're formed from a battery of cells.

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21 minutes ago, pocster said:

Definitely a project for @Onoff 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

 

Old news, I proposed something similar using the "stays hot forever" McDonald's apple pie filling, some time ago. Again the multinationals made me an offer to keep the thing quite...or it might have been someone just suggested I keep quiet...

 

 

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Just now, Onoff said:

scalding steam

Latent heat of fusion.  It gives up many times the normal amount of stored energy.

 

Now, if only there was a cheap, easily available, material that could phase change at relatively low temperatures, say 100°C, and then could take extra energy up to say, 10 bar.  Could pipe that though an engine easily enough I would have thought.

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