Sunday 7 October 2012

Storing electrical energy in liquid air.



Turning air into liquid may offer a solution to one of the great challenges in engineering - how to store energy. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers says liquid air can compete with batteries and hydrogen to store excess energy generated from renewables.  IMechE says "wrong-time" electricity generated by wind farms at night can be used to chill air to a cryogenic state at a distant location. When demand increases, the air can be warmed to drive a turbine.

Engineers say the process to produce "right-time" electricity can achieve an efficiency of up to 70%. IMechE is holding a conference today to discuss new ideas on how using "cryo-power" can benefit the low-carbon economy. 

The technology was originally developed by Peter Dearman, a garage inventor in Hertfordshire, to power vehicles. A new firm, Highview Power Storage, was created to transfer Mr Dearman's technology to a system that can store energy to be used on the power grid. The process, part-funded by the government, has now been trialled for two years at the back of a power station in Slough, Buckinghamshire.

You can see a video of the engine at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOImbv_xcT8

I've posted about this because this technology for storing electrical energy might also be applicable to electricity generated by Bessler's wheel.

JC

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10 comments:

  1. Sounds like just another highly inefficient "dream scheme" for storing energy / mass to me.

    Let's see now. IMechE claims that the process loses AT LEAST 30% of the energy / mass that was used to liquify the air to cryogenic temperatures. Who knows how much more will be lost as it is pumped to the location of a turbine to drive it. Let's be generous and say that the highly insulated piping that would be required for that only loses another 10%. Okay, the turbine is finally getting the warmed up and then highly pressurized air and is churning out kilowatts of electrical power. Then that power has to be sent out to various communities for use.

    I've read estimates that for every kilowatt being extracted from a home's electrical outlets, about 1 kilowatt is being lost in the transmission lines due to heating and EM emissions! That means that of the original 100% of the energy / mass used to liquify the air at the start of the process we'll only have, AT MOST, 0.7 x 0.9 x 0.5 = 31.5% remaining AFTER all of the various losses due to waste are subtracted.

    Thus, this process AT BEST would only be able to deliver about 1/3 of the energy / mass used to originally compress the air and you are considering using something like this to store the energy / mass that might be outputted from a Bessler wheel type generator which would already be struggling to crank out commercially usable amounts of power due to the inherent inefficiency with which it extracts the energy / mass content of its own weights? There are far more efficient ways to approach this problem of storing energy / mass until it is needed.

    The most efficient way would be to generate it as locally as possible and then use it to charge up a giant capacitor which could be buried underground. There is no need to use cryogenic temperatures and just maintaining those temperatures introduces yet another energy / mass wasting step into the process.

    Keep things simple and they will work.

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  2. Energy can be stored in a spring . Think of a giant spring 12 foot high by 5 foot wide with the diameter of 6 inches for the metal in it . The amount of energy you could store in that .
    A bessler wheel could compress it as it is running . It might only compress it by a few inches per hour , but you would get the energy stored very efficiently .

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  3. You could in fact store the energy as the weight of your house by using the wheel to jack your house up and when you want to use the energy simply let the house fall and as it falls it spins a flywheel connected to an electrical generator .

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    Replies
    1. One could use the energy / mass outputted by a Bessler wheel powered generator to actually lift the entire building containing the generators and use that to store the output as gravitational energy / mass. I think I'd prefer that to my house rising and falling throughout the day!

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  4. One could use the energy / mass outputted by a Bessler wheel powered generator to actually lift the entire building containing the generators and use that to store the output as gravitational energy / mass. I think I'd prefer that to my house rising and falling throughout the day!

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  5. Air is not the way to go,..too wasteful..The most efficient and compact to date is the Litium battery suplimented by high value storage capacitors.
    They could be used in conjuction with the Bessler wheel.

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  6. How about a giant flywheel. Efficient and simple.

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  7. How about a giant flywheel. Efficient and simple.

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  8. efficient simple and dangerous i don't think a huge flywheel is the answer

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  9. The article was up to the point and described the information very effectively. Thanks to blog author for wonderful and informative post.
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    ReplyDelete

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