Think I am going to try it. Currently, I use a generator and heat exchanger to heat my water and pump the gas into algae ponds… if I ran the gas through a media bed first which also contained a liquid circulation system i could add a preheating system to my hot water system. Thanks for your info.
I live in Saskatoon and I have built a thermal battery using a 55 gallon drum, 300lbs of bees wax, 600ft of pex pipe, and a custom copper heat exchanger which I plan to install in my garage in conjunction with an infloor heat loop. I am currently in test phase and results are promising. I will update you on further progress. Great channel by the way!
@@karltest1314 I like the idea of sand, but how can you take 100C solar heated water and heat the sand to higher than 100C for long term seasonal storage? Something my brain has been trying to work on.
The lower temperatures of the dirt batteries may be used to run a Stirling Hot Air engine. They have such engines for electric production on the markets. It works off the difference in the temperature, the greater the difference the better the efficacy.
FYI. If you use cheap, rough sand in an insulated container (say, a 2 by 2 by 2-meter concrete and perlite sunk box into the ground), you can heat it to over 500 degrees C using solar energy and cheap resistance heaters. You store that heat while the sun shines (or the wind blows if you have a turbine). And then attach an old-school boiler to power radiant flooring or radiators, and use a heat exchanger for hot water on demand. It's quite efficient and super cheap.
@@jacknissen6040Though now that I think about it, it'd be wise to consult an engineer or HVAC contractor about boiler sizing. No sense in blowing yourself up to get inexpensive heat. And from my understanding, a blown boiler is wicked dangerous. :-)
There was a simple device some time ago that you could run a FM radio by rotating a generator. The inventor said he was also going to make a system of storing energy by weights and ropes. Just lift the weights to a certain height hanging on a rope and slowly let it come down via some gears and wheels and generate electricity, the same way a cookoclock
I have thoughts like that. I envision a tower with weighted 55 gallon barrel. Lifted with your car/truck/tractor. Drops with some gearing that would spin a shaft to run a car generator and make electricity or charge your battery banks.
As for the spinning method of storage, most of us use it everyday. It's used in the flywheel of an automobile engine it gives us a more steady movement instead of a jerky movement where we would get thousands if bursts of acceleration and deceleration, the flywheel resists the acceleration and the corresponding deceleration just enough to smooth out the motion. That is an energy battery at work.
flywheels are also used by power plants in a battery capacity! IIRC some substations or generation stations keep a giant flywheel spinning and tap into it if there is extra strain on the grid. or something like that
Flywheel energy storage has been around a long time. Also gravity batteries are old technology that can be very useful and helpful if you have a place that it can be used.
@@Tennouseijin yes, heard of them too. I think the way they were "charged" was a large spring coil being wound up. I guess, a wind-up toy is an energy battery (anyone old enough to remember those?)
Centrifical energy storage has been around about 100 years now. There was a bus system in Switzerland in the early 1900s that used this energy to propel the buses in between their stops. At the bus stop they would charge up the centrifuge mechanism and then continue to the next stop.
I used a gyrobus to go to school as a child. The carefully balanced flywheel was powered directly by a generator, which was powered from the trolley at the stop. The kinetic energy of the flywheel through the same generator produced an electric current that was enough to pass 2-3 stops without stopping (as a child I did not count km). It is a thing that is relatively loss-making, but trolleys did not have to be built along the entire route and in difficult terrain. He won the purpose at a time when electricity was cheap. Some hospitals still use kinetic storage tanks to cover small power outages or to compensate for fluctuations in the network. Domestic production of such equipment is not useful.
@@SimpleTek No. Gyrobuses were canceled. Somewhere it runs like a rarity, similar to the steam locomotive in the tourist season. Instead of gyrobuses, electric buses with batteries or trolleybuses have been running for a long time. In hospitals, kinetic tanks are used to bridge small outages, for example for 30 s before diesel generators start up. Kinetic reservoirs are most often used to compensate for anomalies in the distribution network, because many medical devices depend on a stable source, such as dialysis devices, monitoring units, etc. People don't really do that. But research institutes are still researching it - a flywheel in a deep vacuum on a magnetic cushion and generating electricity through superconductors. So far, it lives only on grants and tabloids. Not everything is transparently honest. :)
I lost heating over Christmas and New year - as the house was absolutely cold there was temperature difference of 5°C between the floor and air below the floorboards Over the years the 'dirt' below had retained heat. So it is possible to have a base heat source by pumping extra heat below the floorboards as an energy storage device
I live in austria. We have pump storage powerplants where 2 lakes, one up a mountain and one at the foot act as a gravital battery. When the electrical grid needs power they release water from the mountain to generate electricity. During cheap hours (when grid is full of solar power) they use electricity to pump the water back up to the mountain.
Battery doesnt have to be electrical, it simply means a collection of cells. We use the term "tank battery" out here in west Texas to refer to the 4 to 10 tank setups near wells.
Phase change tiles (wall and ceilings) are commercially available. I saw an example in a Ceres Greenhouse in Boulder Colorado. In this application, Ceres used a commercially available reflective white tile along the north wall to both reflect light back across the greenhouse and act as a battery. Different chemical mixes in the gel solutions preset the range of temperatures for the phase changes.
I've seen a video about something similar, but more like soft gel mats like what you put into a cool box. Amazing stuff. It can store a huge amount of cold or heat (with a preset, according to use) in a very small volume. They had thin mats which you could put under the floor, around your wood burner - whatever, and use it as a heat battery that would radiate back later in the way a masonry stove does, but with less bulk and weight. I can't remember the capacity compared to stone/concrete, but it was substantially higher. I saw it done in a tiny house.
Compost heaps release heat as they break down. A large well-designed insulated heap with a PEX pipe coiled through its centre can provide decent low-grade heat. It's odd to think of plants as batteries, but they do convert sunlight into chemical energy some of which is released as heat after they die and decompose.
Any kind of heat storage (dirt, molten salt, etc) lives and dies based on how well you can insulate your container. A pile of dirt should be surrounded by a bunch of foam panels for a thermal break. That's how proper heated concrete floors are made. There are also huge adiabatic losses involved in storing a hot medium; lots of the energy stored in your air compressor is the heat created when you squeeze the air down, and then it cools off and loses that energy and contracts, thus losing pressure even without any leaks. Gravity storage is very low density, but it works so well because of the extreme volumes used for the battery. Entire mountaintop lakes. We should be building them as fast as we can. These differ from hydroelectric dams because in the latter there's no pumping water back uphill when electricity is cheap. A hydro dam just slows or stops production, but it doesn't "recharge" so it's not really a battery. I think the most interesting concept is cryogenic storage. It actually uses properties of both phase change and adiabatic change to GAIN efficiency. Chill air until it condenses into various component gases, let it warm back up to ambient, and you have even more pressure than you started with. It's also both reasonably safe and very compact, so you can store a few MWh within a city lot close to where energy is needed. If I were to become an engineer developing some next-gen solution, this is the one I would go with.
Wow! Thank you for the inspiration! I started making a pop can solar heater but stopped wanting to make it where I could use some of the heat captured at nighttime, using a much smaller space (instead of a whole wall) than the dirt packed tires used in earthships. So many ideas on how to incorporate sand with the principles of soda can heaters have been flooding thru my head. I will let you know those ideas I like enough to try and what results I arrive at! I love inspiration like you give! 🖖🏼💫
I found by zapping a closed loop coil thats insulated locks in voltage, where its still magnetized without the keeper, this is quite interesting approach, was thinking this earlier then found this confirmation from 14 yrs ago... i wonder what trying both does, will it be too much and burn up, gotta find that sweet spot between the ampacity and voltsge capacity with output...
One of the thoughts I've been kicking around is using a lift to store energy. If you had maybe several hundred pounds of weight that you lifted with something like a motor puller using solar and then, once the sun goes down, the weight is released and powers a generator for night-time energy. I haven't worked on the actual design, but it seems plausible.
It is necessary to remember the law of conservation. If you pull out, for example, a lead block or a concrete panel up to 6 m high, which can handle, for example, a 20W electric motor with slow gear, which is powered by a solar panel for 6 hours (1 hour = 1 meter), you can calculate with simple mathematics that you accumulated 20Wx6h = 120Wh . We do not have to deal with the weight of the lead block or concrete panel, because you accumulate 20W per hour, ie a total of 120Wh. If you turned on the kettle in the evening, which normally has a power input of 2kW, the panel or lead would have to fall at almost a free fall speed in order to generate the necessary power to brew coffee. As you probably intuitively suspect, it would only work for a short time (during the rapid descent of the panel or lead block to the ground). The kettle would only receive its power for a moment, so the water in the kettle would still be cold. This simple math is lacking in idealized cases on video, giving vain hope to amateurs. Molten salt or huge underground infrastructure is really not for amateurs with limited investment and the appropriate building permit. Even a person with his own land will not go to a dubious business with little efficiency. If I can advise, it is better to have a suitably dimensioned solar field on the roof of the house, a suitable regulator and batteries if we want to directly accumulate electricity. You will definitely make this coffee in the evening. :)
@@SimpleTek Don't take it personally. It is necessary to distinguish between the "idea" and the presentation of something that experimental institutes or companies can afford, which will drown taxes in an eco-project with many contracted experts. For an amateur, this is not realistic in terms of both investment and efficiency and associated returns. We who work with photovoltaics can afford the investment, because these installations actually work and, depending on the situation, show a surplus that must be processed so as not to reduce the immediate and commonly used power in the home and not overheat the panels from untapped power. This is a real accumulation of energy, which is obtained essentially for free and everyone can achieve it, even on a small scale. There are other ways, but they require their infrastructure, control and service. If it was as simple as it is talked about, it would be used, which it is not.
Your doing great one day your going to fall upon the ears of a genius kid and give him or her just the right enthusiasm and outta the box thinking they will invent something new to help the world out as I said good job for inspiring people to think for themselves
There was an engineer who built a house in Colorado that used a type of molten salt as a stationary heat storage inside an "attached greenhouse type structure" attached to the southern bottom part of his house. Through the day, the sun would shine on the sealed black cylinders holding the molten salt causing it to turn from solid to liquid as it absorbed energy. After the sun went down, the cylinders would radiate the heat in that room and then a little bump of extra heat when the molten salt phase changed from liquid to solid as it crossed that threshold. I remember he had it set up so he could open a vent to use or bypass that room depending on whether he needed more heat at night. He also built a large timber wall on the south side with lot of windows to be thermal mass for the sun's heating. Same setup there with ventilation allows more control over using or bypassing that extra heat. Oh, it's been a really long time since I've read about that house. Such interesting ideas before these ideas were more common.
Strange that you haven't heard of "spinning" energy storage before. It's just a flywheel and it's used in every internal combustion engine. We've been using these for centuries! Modern flywheels for grid level energy storage prioritize rotation speed for efficiency reasons and are probably out of reach for hobbyists because they typically use magnetic levitation bearings to avoid losses. No physical bearings can withstand 100,000RPM.
Can’t find the video for you but in Australia they use salt ponds in the desert. The artesian water they use comes up very brackish so they filter out all the salts and dump the salt in A wet salt pond which becomes extremely hot during the day is a black lining at the bottom, but I don’t know what that is. It could be used instead of the vacuum water heaters.
Early industrial welders used Heavy Motor Generator sets. 440Vac in, 80VDC out at 3000 amps. Several tons of windings spinning 10 thousand RPM. They were used as Sonar power supplies too, which lends all kinds of questions to gyroscopic affects on the system.
I looked into using water as storage to produce electricity, but the sheer volume of water necessary was staggering. If you already have a stream/river that is falling then it may be feasible, but to build something, even a pond, was impractical. Compressed air seemed viable on a small scale, but it's like constantly trying to manage a bomb. Molten salt, even with all of the extreme temps, almost seems manageable on a DIY scale. High pressures should only exist where you convert to steam. Phase Change materials seems promising, but finding the perfect material factoring... the cost of the materials, the energy capacity and the phase temperature is very difficult. I've recently looked at paraffin, PVC and sucrose as potential candidates. Water is hard to beat in most storage areas... very high heat capacity, extremely cheap, fluidity over a wide temp range! I think there's a reason the Earth uses water as a phase changing thermal battery.
how do you pump heat "battery" into the ground.. ? doesnt it just dissipate? how do you insulate? what percentage effeciency is it? how long will your "battery " stay charged?
Hello... Just FYI... The reason why batteries are defines as such is for historical reason as electrical battery were the first of such conceptualization... As our understanding of science & energy grew, the term became colloquially broader by adding what "type" of energy you were "storing" (i.e: Thermal Battery, Electrical battery, Kinetic Battery, etc.) However, in the industry today, they tend to use "Energy Storage System" instead of battery in order to minimize confusion AND reduce the limitation on what constitute an energy storage "entity"...
YES! GREAT video! I build windmills, both kinds (HAWT & VAWT). THEY COMPRESS AIR. I use their STORED compressed air in a variety of self-designed and self-built engines to do work.
WOW Unbelievable: More than 98% of electricity generated in Manitoba comes from clean and renewable sources such as hydroelectricity and wind. Manitoba currently produces a surplus of hydro-sourced energy, and exports about half of the electricity it generates.
thanks for the great, inspiring video. you introduced 6 very interesting storage systems. only 1 is not a viable one: compressed air. in industries it is considered the most expensive form of energy due to loads of heat losses. you might want to replace that in your video with a gravity battery: drop a heavy weight on a long cable into an old mine shaft... there is room for all of these systems. we should handle this theme like we should out nutrition: we are omnivore.
Actually, I am using 4 of 18-wheeler propane tanks (250PSI @ 50,000 gal) for the pontoons in a livaboard barge. I can use wind solar and waves to compress air... pretty inefficiently, but for free and continuously top off these air batteries. Thst air will 😂do all kinds of things from electricity to propulsion. It's cheap and easy to get the equipment... you just don't want to pay the power company for the air. 40hp Referidgerator trailer diesel engines with massive 3 cyl "air compressors" attached from the factory (for the refrigerator loop). All running on cleaned waste oil... almost free and pushing a generator, distilling fresh water, HVAC heat and water at the same time during the air top off phase of operation. You know ... on cold still Feb days in the rust belt. Almost 10k# of compressed air.. . Zero emissions.
Never heard the wax thermal storage, immediately makes me think about trying wax/sand mixes, makes it much less problematic than containing high moisture content sand.
That made me think of an ingenious set up of a solar vacuum tube running in floor lines with water, with another, closed loop line that would remain only in the floor itself with parafin wax running through it. During the day the solar tubes would heat the parafin wax into a liquid, which would be surrounded in sand in the floor of a greenhouse. So that both the sand and the wax would be heated throughout the day. I believe this would be an EXTREMELY efficient system. With the proper depth this could actually mimic a tropical region much better than many existing passive greenhouse designs. Especially in colder regions like northern Canada.
@@whosonfirst1309 I used to have packets of those hand warmers when I was a kid, I loved watching it crystalize. I had put that as an option for a potentally high end unit, the ability to bring it close to the temp needed, then just finish the process with a microwave.
I grew some salt crystals years ago which would boil water at 60 degrees F under a 100 watt heat bulb. The top of the Crystal got hot and the water below next to freezing. It seems that water boils when it’s ability to dissipate energy is inhibited, I.e. a vacuum or conversely high pressure. Heat doesn’t seem to be the primary requirement so far as phase change is concerned. Phase change seems to be more dependent on external forces than internal.
Combine thermal with steam setting a collector tank ground level and one 15 to 30 feet below ground insulating both. Use a boiler to heat water or even salt water keeping this in a closed loop. Set up a turbine generator to cover energy as the falls back to the lower tanks one as catch Can and the other as b boiler. This might actually require 4 tanks for storing different temperatures of water. Add your candle above the boiler with a forced air help moister issues. Thanks for the ideas.
Use it in (under) a greenhouse as an insulation to minimize the heat losses and also to use the inevitable heat losses to keep the greenhouse warm. Use heat pumps to get any extra heat in the greenhouse back in the water loop. Plant the sugar beets or sugar cane in the greenhouse and turn them into alcohol using the same heat you have in you water loop for the distillation. Burn the alcohol when necessary in order to warm up the water/produce the electricity. Replace the water in the water loop with the alcohol as it is able to vaporize under lower temperatures. Which means the same circulation with less energy input and less energy loss. Actually, I think alcohol is one of the coolest energy batteries ever. Drinking it is a waste.
A company that I cant remember the name of stores energy in blocks of cement and uses cranes to lift these blocks and lowers the blocks later to produce kinetic energy. The blocks can also store the energy indefinitely until needed and its around 80% + efficient.
Other battery tech … 1) torsion spring batteries (commercially available). 2) lifted weights (basically the same idea as pumped water gravity batteries but using blocks of concrete). 3) Other mechanical systems, like a bow and arrow and rubber band toy airplane which are scaled up. 4) metal block heat sinks.
An alternative form of pumped-hydro system is to start at sea-level and dig a reservoir that is below sea-level. You generate energy as the sea-water fills the reservoir, and store it by pumping it back out again. It is relatively inexpensive to dig a hole, the United States has 12,000 miles of coast-lines, and our largest population centers happen to be along the coasts.
Watching other videos about using geothermal to heat and cool a house, I haven't heard anybody else say anything about insulating the inground thermal loop section, making it sound like you had to rely solely on ground temperature. I'd thought about ways to make it easier to service the system, by putting it in a sort of box, but wondered if that would inhibit the functionality of the system. Thank you so much for adding to my understanding by talking about insulation!
Geothermal actually uses the low grade heat of the ground, so insulation would be pointless. The heat is concentrates into higher heat with a heat pump. Heat batteries store higher heat from another source in an insulated container to prevent the heat being lost into the surrounding space or material until needed. Storage in the ground is out of the way, and the ground has a relatively stable temperature.
For gravity, they have electric motors pulling heavy loaded train segments up a incline. As power is produced in excess, the electric motor will pull those segments up the hill. When that electricity is needed, the motor will lower the weight down the hill using regenerative braking and will generate electricity by doing so. The spinning you talked about, I’ve heard it called “wheel” power and it was used in the early 1900s as a energy storage device. Same concept, excess power spin the wheel, when you need power, regen from that wheel. The best part is the lack of degrading inside of that system except for the contact surface, aka wheel bearings.
Also called a flywheel. Think that is the better search term if anyone is interested in researching on the web. Usually done in a vacuum to eliminate atmospheric friction also called drag.
@@sjhorton1184 yes sir, sorry I should have updated my comment. It’s some pretty cool energy storage and doesn’t have the west like lithium or lead acid. But suffers more from short term loss. So a daily cycle is a better application there then trying to store it up for weeks or months.
I am planning on a greenhouse addition of 42 x 200 to my gardencenter and have been trying to get info on how to use sand as a heat battery. Any ideas where I can get tried and true info?
current climate changes will most likely shut down most of the hydro dams of the western states in the not so distant future ; those states need to increase the number of geothermal plants for new energy source and they need to come up with a VERY efficient method of turning sea water into drinking water
Nicely explained. Flywheels are way beyond research. Satellites, for example, have been using them for energy storage for decades. There are also numerous commercial applications as emergency backup power systems.
I don't think satellites use flywheels as energy storage. They use flywheels in the guise of "reaction wheels". These spin up and the counter-rotational force moves the satellite around an axis through it's center of mass. As they require no fuel, they are weight and energy efficient means to rotate satellites. The Hubble Telescope uses them to stay pointed at a target patch of sky and scan across the sky in very precise arcs. These are also components that fail over time and generally have redundant backups. They save energy, not store it; a rotating mass for energy storage would force the satellite to rotate in the opposite direction.
Thx for video. I’m wondering if you have seen an example of sand battery extracting steam from water and generating electricity. Could such an idea be scaled up to use with a coal fire power station. Best Charles
Ceres greenhouses has a these phase change salt material that you screw to the back wall of your greenhouse that absorbs the sun's heat during the day and turns to a liquid inside and then radiates the heat out through the night as it solidifies.
Has any one tried using the high heat of parabolic solar with sand battery for residential use. I'm not sure about the size but maybe an old 275 gallon oil tank some spray foam, 2 air loops, One continuous loop for heating sand and one open loop to blow through the house or transfer with a flat plate heat exchanger to hydro heat?
Actually, the water will go all the way to 100°C before the temperature stops. Then it takes an enormous amount of energy to transition from 100° water to 100° steam. After that, the temperature of the steam can go higher if removed away from the water and exposed to a hotter source of heat.
Wherever you use heat to heat your home you should always make good use of the free thermal dynamics of heat convection that accompany it. Using that same heat to cool your house for free. Heat never fails to rise, leaving a void, which you can use to suck cooler air in through long underground conduits. Sand batteries work best above gound. The lower you dig, the cooler it is & that's constant.
I'm a bit surprised you didn't get more into pumped hydro storage. It's the largest grid-level battery in use right now. I appreciate the overview! I've come to realize that energy is actually really important to developing and flourishing as humans!
So the parifin wax idea seems pretty cool, however parifin is around $1.73 a pound. It takes approximately 459lb of water to fill a 55 gallon drum. I don't know the weight density of parifin but it's still with a few pounds of water to fill a 55 gallon drum which is almost 800 bucks per drum.
maglev flywheel on a stick, vertical, rotary energy storage, with a coil disc between, you have a self-supporting bearing motor-generator, and if its dc motor and generator, its a two-way flywheel dynamo mass spinning disc, value mass over speed, for easy and long lasting, and simple to less-service needing battery storage, you can spin it faster to make it smaller with same storage of energy, ½Jw^2
@@SimpleTek design equation (for energy density, for flywheel energy storage): S=pi^2 * r^2 * f^2 (^2 = power of two, r = radius of the disc, tall or flat, pi = 3.14159, f=spin revolution frequency per second, S=J/kg)
@@SimpleTek examples: f=3.3kHz (for 200krpm), r=1m, giving 110MJ/kg, 1MJ=0.278kWh, or, about 30kWh/kg. example 2: f=333Hz (for 20krpm), r=10m (wider disc), giving the same energy density, 110MJ/kg (same as hydrogen energy density), or about 30kWh/kg.
@@SimpleTek you can always add 100x more mass if spinning down 1/10 the frequency, or add the same amoung in radius than you removed from the spin frequency, so either 30kWh/100kg (=300Wh/kg) or r=100m (flat really wide radius disc, a large solar capture area mass spin disc), f=33Hz (for 2000rpm, like in a conventional engine rpm), giving . example: r=100m (area of pi*r^2=31400m^2, or 31MW of solar power area, if 1kW/m^2), giving the same 110MJ/kg
btw, the centifugal force design equation for the disc is: a_rad = 4*(pi^2)*(f^2)*r, so the larger disc, relatively, the less the centrifugal force tearing it apart, almost the same as the energy density equation, (f^2)*r instead of (f^2)*(r^2), so increasing the radius gives less worry about the flywheel breaking apart, but still, it should handle a large centrifugal force, of an order of millions, like in the 200krpm jet turbine at approx r=1m, f=3.3kHz, a_rad = 44.7M-g, for the jet turbine
Yes, but sand has a lot of air spaces that make it a poor thermal mass unless huge quantities are involved. A big, open top pot of water will collect and store much more. You might want to look at rocket mass heaters also.
Expodentially is a funny word, but it's not a real world. I enjoy these videos and get a lot from them and so many of them have 'expodentially' in them.
The craziest way to explain the amount of energy in phase change materials that I've heard is this one; if you have a bucket of water at 0° c that's liquid (not ice everything's gone through the phase change and it's just about starting to heat up}, and next to it you have a bucket of water that's 0° Celsius that's solid (ice), the amount of energy required to change the solid to liquid would cause the other bucket to become 60° c, and the ice bucket would be water at 0° c
You mentioned that insulation is a cheat with low grade heat storage. It does not stop the loss, but merely slows it down. But here's that same cheat on steroids. Do it in layers, which will slow down the heat loss even more, since lower differences causes slower transfer. At the center, have your molten salt. After it raises the core temp as much as it can, then take it past the first insulation barrier to the second layer of storage. Repeat until you reach the outermost layer. For taking heat out, reverse the direction, going toward the core only until you have the heat you need. For low grade heating, like for living spaces, you only need to tap the outer layers. For hot water, you'll need to go in a few more layers. For steam power, you need about as much heat as you can get. You can also capture some low grade heat from your compressed air, since compressing gasses concentrates heat, which is wasted if not captured. Also, steam takes very little effort to move upward. If you generate your steam at a very low place, then you can run your turbine and condense it back to water at a very high place. Then you can use gravity to generate more power from the same water as it flows back down to its starting point.
I think you might have misunderstood me. I was not criticizing, not in the least. I was merely pointing out that some of the things you mentioned could be combined, to even greater advantage.
Could include thermo-chemical heat storage. Material such as zeolite releases latent heat by the addition of water, recharged by dehydrating with heat. Zeolite for heat storage is an active topic for R&D.
In my opinion, the best and most interesting option has been the wax as an afordable phase change energy accumulator. It is quite easy to built since it has not pressure, corrosion or leakeages issues as all others
Oooh, how about for a 'desalination transportation' operation, via the ocean traveling, as the super train could collect the dew drops formed from the solar array to the sides (but they might get blinded if they look outside their windows... lol) - An elongated dome like tunnel, but wide enough to collect and store the heat and opposite temps... plus distilled water and salt/brine. Recycling the things we don't need could help. Woooh! for many helping hands! Lol
For storing energy in a rotating mass, you really want it in an almost-vacuum and with magnetic bearings to minimise energy decay, and generate and recover the energy electrically to avoid rotating bearing seals being necessary - unless it's for very short periods of time such as in an engine flywheel.
the spinning concept u mention I have been interested in for some time and know as flywheel, used in many industry especially 19 to early 20 century, prob beyond in both directions, there a lot of videos on here, many indian made, would be great for someone with knowhow to strip the myth from the factual on these free energy devices, thnk u and well done, fututre is mechanical, basic, long lasting easy to fix life gravity and maybe flywheel and others too.
Another way to store thermal energy as heat is in a thermos bottle . Partially fill with water and boil. If it doesn't explode use it to run a steam engine.
The first stored energy is wood. Another interesting way of storing energy is algae production. Squeeze the oil out of it. I do think about make a greater use of the Stirling engine. As soon there is a difference in temperature, you theoretically can get energy out of it via a Stirling engine. What are the limiting factors for it, and why do we not see it in common use? If you look at the coldest village on earth, Yakutsk, where the temperature gets as low as -70°C. Drilling a hole into the ground you probably get zero degrees C not to deep. (Maybe 10 or 20 meter beneath, what do I know). And there you have it! Good conditions for a Stirling engine!
had not thought about paraffin as a way to store heat. Imagine for those who wish to using it as a store of heat on a wood fired stove would be amazing
Great video. Curious about ur thoughts on this. Using pelton wheel in hydro electric and using compressed air as a battery. Would a pelton also be the most suitable design for air?
The Gyro buses. The subject that has had this topic of using momentum baised Mechanical batteries being researched again. Man in the 1950's tried to have electric buses that were powered from storing energy from gyro scopes/flywheels.
Coconut oil can also be a phase - change thermal battery. I've seen some experiments from Egypt that looked promising for daytime cooling night time heating. + I believe that some of the Mars rovers use paraffin wax as part of their small scale nuclear reactors. I think electricity might be created using peltier pads and cooling fins. (Plz also remember safety, hot wax and oil can burn. "Spinning" flywheels, and centrifuges can be very dangerous.)
@@SimpleTek No, I don’t want look you up, I like the information you bring and the way it is explained. I know the level of energy required to produce such good videos. P.S. If I made some mistakes, I apologised. English is not my first language, may be, it is why I am more concerned by the definitions, to have a better understanding of the subject…. 😎
Technically I believe a "Battery" really means "A collection of". Usualy a car battery is a collection of cells. The name battery is also used when talking about canons. You have a gun battery when you have multiple canons. It is only because we have gotten used to talking about electric storrage in batteries that we now think about that first. I believe your heading should have been "7 Simple Alternative Energy Storage Systems". Just for being pedantic.
What do you think about this low grade solar boosted geothermal system?
@@ElectronicMusicUnderground some
@@ElectronicMusicUnderground very cool
Think I am going to try it. Currently, I use a generator and heat exchanger to heat my water and pump the gas into algae ponds… if I ran the gas through a media bed first which also contained a liquid circulation system i could add a preheating system to my hot water system. Thanks for your info.
@@TheWaterH3rO I hope it works for you!!!
I am building or digging my own system on 5 acres in Northern Nevada. When the ground thaws.
I live in Saskatoon and I have built a thermal battery using a 55 gallon drum, 300lbs of bees wax, 600ft of pex pipe, and a custom copper heat exchanger which I plan to install in my garage in conjunction with an infloor heat loop. I am currently in test phase and results are promising. I will update you on further progress.
Great channel by the way!
That’s awesome!
Cannot wait to hear how it goes for you.
How’s the bees wax working for ya?!. And what made you pick this?
@@josephspruill1212 Likely because the heat capacity of beeswax is insane.
@@karltest1314 I like the idea of sand, but how can you take 100C solar heated water and heat the sand to higher than 100C for long term seasonal storage? Something my brain has been trying to work on.
Just a brief note. You are the first person that has given me an explanation as to the value of giving a like to a video
That made my day!
The lower temperatures of the dirt batteries may be used to run a Stirling Hot Air engine. They have such engines for electric production on the markets. It works off the difference in the temperature, the greater the difference the better the efficacy.
Very interesting idea!!! Thank you for the comment!!!!
Too cool,;)
FYI. If you use cheap, rough sand in an insulated container (say, a 2 by 2 by 2-meter concrete and perlite sunk box into the ground), you can heat it to over 500 degrees C using solar energy and cheap resistance heaters. You store that heat while the sun shines (or the wind blows if you have a turbine). And then attach an old-school boiler to power radiant flooring or radiators, and use a heat exchanger for hot water on demand. It's quite efficient and super cheap.
Great idea
Had similar idea, similar size too, 2.5m cube gives 15,625 m3 capacity!
@@jacknissen6040 great minds think alike
@@jacknissen6040Though now that I think about it, it'd be wise to consult an engineer or HVAC contractor about boiler sizing. No sense in blowing yourself up to get inexpensive heat. And from my understanding, a blown boiler is wicked dangerous. :-)
There was a simple device some time ago that you could run a FM radio by rotating a generator. The inventor said he was also going to make a system of storing energy by weights and ropes. Just lift the weights to a certain height hanging on a rope and slowly let it come down via some gears and wheels and generate electricity, the same way a cookoclock
Very cool
I have thoughts like that. I envision a tower with weighted 55 gallon barrel. Lifted with your car/truck/tractor. Drops with some gearing that would spin a shaft to run a car generator and make electricity or charge your battery banks.
As for the spinning method of storage, most of us use it everyday. It's used in the flywheel of an automobile engine it gives us a more steady movement instead of a jerky movement where we would get thousands if bursts of acceleration and deceleration, the flywheel resists the acceleration and the corresponding deceleration just enough to smooth out the motion. That is an energy battery at work.
Nice!
flywheels are also used by power plants in a battery capacity! IIRC some substations or generation stations keep a giant flywheel spinning and tap into it if there is extra strain on the grid. or something like that
Flywheel energy storage has been around a long time. Also gravity batteries are old technology that can be very useful and helpful if you have a place that it can be used.
Some time ago, there have even been buses that relied on flywheels (recharged at bus stops). Supposedly they could go ~6 km on a full charge.
@@Tennouseijin yes, heard of them too. I think the way they were "charged" was a large spring coil being wound up. I guess, a wind-up toy is an energy battery (anyone old enough to remember those?)
Centrifical energy storage has been around about 100 years now. There was a bus system in Switzerland in the early 1900s that used this energy to propel the buses in between their stops. At the bus stop they would charge up the centrifuge mechanism and then continue to the next stop.
omg that's awesome!!!!! Thank you for sharing
I used a gyrobus to go to school as a child. The carefully balanced flywheel was powered directly by a generator, which was powered from the trolley at the stop. The kinetic energy of the flywheel through the same generator produced an electric current that was enough to pass 2-3 stops without stopping (as a child I did not count km). It is a thing that is relatively loss-making, but trolleys did not have to be built along the entire route and in difficult terrain. He won the purpose at a time when electricity was cheap. Some hospitals still use kinetic storage tanks to cover small power outages or to compensate for fluctuations in the network. Domestic production of such equipment is not useful.
@@DL-kc8fc and yet people still do it
@@SimpleTek No. Gyrobuses were canceled. Somewhere it runs like a rarity, similar to the steam locomotive in the tourist season. Instead of gyrobuses, electric buses with batteries or trolleybuses have been running for a long time. In hospitals, kinetic tanks are used to bridge small outages, for example for 30 s before diesel generators start up. Kinetic reservoirs are most often used to compensate for anomalies in the distribution network, because many medical devices depend on a stable source, such as dialysis devices, monitoring units, etc. People don't really do that. But research institutes are still researching it - a flywheel in a deep vacuum on a magnetic cushion and generating electricity through superconductors. So far, it lives only on grants and tabloids. Not everything is transparently honest. :)
I lost heating over Christmas and New year - as the house was absolutely cold there was temperature difference of 5°C between the floor and air below the floorboards
Over the years the 'dirt' below had retained heat. So it is possible to have a base heat source by pumping extra heat below the floorboards as an energy storage device
Nice
I live in austria. We have pump storage powerplants where 2 lakes, one up a mountain and one at the foot act as a gravital battery. When the electrical grid needs power they release water from the mountain to generate electricity. During cheap hours (when grid is full of solar power) they use electricity to pump the water back up to the mountain.
@@olafschermann1592 fantastic water battery
Battery doesnt have to be electrical, it simply means a collection of cells. We use the term "tank battery" out here in west Texas to refer to the 4 to 10 tank setups near wells.
Phase change tiles (wall and ceilings) are commercially available. I saw an example in a Ceres Greenhouse in Boulder Colorado. In this application, Ceres used a commercially available reflective white tile along the north wall to both reflect light back across the greenhouse and act as a battery. Different chemical mixes in the gel solutions preset the range of temperatures for the phase changes.
Very interesting, I haven’t seen that yet! Curious how they do it
I've seen a video about something similar, but more like soft gel mats like what you put into a cool box. Amazing stuff. It can store a huge amount of cold or heat (with a preset, according to use) in a very small volume. They had thin mats which you could put under the floor, around your wood burner - whatever, and use it as a heat battery that would radiate back later in the way a masonry stove does, but with less bulk and weight. I can't remember the capacity compared to stone/concrete, but it was substantially higher. I saw it done in a tiny house.
Compost heaps release heat as they break down. A large well-designed insulated heap with a PEX pipe coiled through its centre can provide decent low-grade heat. It's odd to think of plants as batteries, but they do convert sunlight into chemical energy some of which is released as heat after they die and decompose.
Great info, I have a video in my archives on that
Any kind of heat storage (dirt, molten salt, etc) lives and dies based on how well you can insulate your container. A pile of dirt should be surrounded by a bunch of foam panels for a thermal break. That's how proper heated concrete floors are made. There are also huge adiabatic losses involved in storing a hot medium; lots of the energy stored in your air compressor is the heat created when you squeeze the air down, and then it cools off and loses that energy and contracts, thus losing pressure even without any leaks.
Gravity storage is very low density, but it works so well because of the extreme volumes used for the battery. Entire mountaintop lakes. We should be building them as fast as we can. These differ from hydroelectric dams because in the latter there's no pumping water back uphill when electricity is cheap. A hydro dam just slows or stops production, but it doesn't "recharge" so it's not really a battery.
I think the most interesting concept is cryogenic storage. It actually uses properties of both phase change and adiabatic change to GAIN efficiency. Chill air until it condenses into various component gases, let it warm back up to ambient, and you have even more pressure than you started with. It's also both reasonably safe and very compact, so you can store a few MWh within a city lot close to where energy is needed. If I were to become an engineer developing some next-gen solution, this is the one I would go with.
Cool
Compressed air using a Trompe does not produce heat. Look into this as it appears to hold great promise and is very underdevoloped.
@@sjhorton1184 thank you
Actually a reservoir is a battery as it does recharge in the form of rain falling at higher elevations completing the cycle.
@@lesliegurley8362 quite apart from the fact that non rechargeable batteries are still sold by the millions ;)
Wow! Thank you for the inspiration! I started making a pop can solar heater but stopped wanting to make it where I could use some of the heat captured at nighttime, using a much smaller space (instead of a whole wall) than the dirt packed tires used in earthships.
So many ideas on how to incorporate sand with the principles of soda can heaters have been flooding thru my head. I will let you know those ideas I like enough to try and what results I arrive at!
I love inspiration like you give! 🖖🏼💫
Thank you soo much for the kind words
I found by zapping a closed loop coil thats insulated locks in voltage, where its still magnetized without the keeper, this is quite interesting approach, was thinking this earlier then found this confirmation from 14 yrs ago... i wonder what trying both does, will it be too much and burn up, gotta find that sweet spot between the ampacity and voltsge capacity with output...
@@JChic-dh1pz interesting
One of the thoughts I've been kicking around is using a lift to store energy. If you had maybe several hundred pounds of weight that you lifted with something like a motor puller using solar and then, once the sun goes down, the weight is released and powers a generator for night-time energy. I haven't worked on the actual design, but it seems plausible.
I like it
It is necessary to remember the law of conservation. If you pull out, for example, a lead block or a concrete panel up to 6 m high, which can handle, for example, a 20W electric motor with slow gear, which is powered by a solar panel for 6 hours (1 hour = 1 meter), you can calculate with simple mathematics that you accumulated 20Wx6h = 120Wh . We do not have to deal with the weight of the lead block or concrete panel, because you accumulate 20W per hour, ie a total of 120Wh. If you turned on the kettle in the evening, which normally has a power input of 2kW, the panel or lead would have to fall at almost a free fall speed in order to generate the necessary power to brew coffee. As you probably intuitively suspect, it would only work for a short time (during the rapid descent of the panel or lead block to the ground). The kettle would only receive its power for a moment, so the water in the kettle would still be cold. This simple math is lacking in idealized cases on video, giving vain hope to amateurs. Molten salt or huge underground infrastructure is really not for amateurs with limited investment and the appropriate building permit. Even a person with his own land will not go to a dubious business with little efficiency. If I can advise, it is better to have a suitably dimensioned solar field on the roof of the house, a suitable regulator and batteries if we want to directly accumulate electricity. You will definitely make this coffee in the evening. :)
@@DL-kc8fc nothing ventured nothing gained
@@SimpleTek Don't take it personally. It is necessary to distinguish between the "idea" and the presentation of something that experimental institutes or companies can afford, which will drown taxes in an eco-project with many contracted experts. For an amateur, this is not realistic in terms of both investment and efficiency and associated returns. We who work with photovoltaics can afford the investment, because these installations actually work and, depending on the situation, show a surplus that must be processed so as not to reduce the immediate and commonly used power in the home and not overheat the panels from untapped power. This is a real accumulation of energy, which is obtained essentially for free and everyone can achieve it, even on a small scale. There are other ways, but they require their infrastructure, control and service. If it was as simple as it is talked about, it would be used, which it is not.
@@DL-kc8fc As it is with EVERY storage option, so my suggestion is no different than everything else out there.
Your doing great one day your going to fall upon the ears of a genius kid and give him or her just the right enthusiasm and outta the box thinking they will invent something new to help the world out as I said good job for inspiring people to think for themselves
Thank you do much for the kind words and inspiration!!!!
There was an engineer who built a house in Colorado that used a type of molten salt as a stationary heat storage inside an "attached greenhouse type structure" attached to the southern bottom part of his house. Through the day, the sun would shine on the sealed black cylinders holding the molten salt causing it to turn from solid to liquid as it absorbed energy. After the sun went down, the cylinders would radiate the heat in that room and then a little bump of extra heat when the molten salt phase changed from liquid to solid as it crossed that threshold. I remember he had it set up so he could open a vent to use or bypass that room depending on whether he needed more heat at night. He also built a large timber wall on the south side with lot of windows to be thermal mass for the sun's heating. Same setup there with ventilation allows more control over using or bypassing that extra heat.
Oh, it's been a really long time since I've read about that house. Such interesting ideas before these ideas were more common.
That sounds awesome! Thank you for sharing
Strange that you haven't heard of "spinning" energy storage before. It's just a flywheel and it's used in every internal combustion engine. We've been using these for centuries!
Modern flywheels for grid level energy storage prioritize rotation speed for efficiency reasons and are probably out of reach for hobbyists because they typically use magnetic levitation bearings to avoid losses. No physical bearings can withstand 100,000RPM.
Seems like an awesome technology
The bearings in my turbo work fine at well beyond 100,000 RPM
Can’t find the video for you but in Australia they use salt ponds in the desert. The artesian water they use comes up very brackish so they filter out all the salts and dump the salt in A wet salt pond which becomes extremely hot during the day is a black lining at the bottom, but I don’t know what that is. It could be used instead of the vacuum water heaters.
@@Master-AGN that’s awesome
Early industrial welders used Heavy Motor Generator sets. 440Vac in, 80VDC out at 3000 amps. Several tons of windings spinning 10 thousand RPM. They were used as Sonar power supplies too, which lends all kinds of questions to gyroscopic affects on the system.
Interesting
I looked into using water as storage to produce electricity, but the sheer volume of water necessary was staggering. If you already have a stream/river that is falling then it may be feasible, but to build something, even a pond, was impractical.
Compressed air seemed viable on a small scale, but it's like constantly trying to manage a bomb.
Molten salt, even with all of the extreme temps, almost seems manageable on a DIY scale. High pressures should only exist where you convert to steam.
Phase Change materials seems promising, but finding the perfect material factoring... the cost of the materials, the energy capacity and the phase temperature is very difficult. I've recently looked at paraffin, PVC and sucrose as potential candidates.
Water is hard to beat in most storage areas... very high heat capacity, extremely cheap, fluidity over a wide temp range! I think there's a reason the Earth uses water as a phase changing thermal battery.
Well said
Ice storage based heating systems are commercially available in Europe. Freezing point is no problem with a heat exchanger.
heat exchangers are great but very costly - you can do almost anything with enough money, the key is to do it affordably!
how do you pump heat "battery" into the ground.. ? doesnt it just dissipate? how do you insulate? what percentage effeciency is it? how long will your "battery " stay charged?
heat moves slowly through the ground, thus it can store heat
Hello... Just FYI...
The reason why batteries are defines as such is for historical reason as electrical battery were the first of such conceptualization...
As our understanding of science & energy grew, the term became colloquially broader by adding what "type" of energy you were "storing" (i.e: Thermal Battery, Electrical battery, Kinetic Battery, etc.)
However, in the industry today, they tend to use "Energy Storage System" instead of battery in order to minimize confusion AND reduce the limitation on what constitute an energy storage "entity"...
ok
YES!
GREAT video!
I build windmills, both kinds (HAWT & VAWT).
THEY COMPRESS AIR.
I use their STORED compressed air in a variety of self-designed and self-built engines to do work.
That’s awesome
I need an alternative means of storage for my off grid AC. I have 24Kw of NiFe storage but they no like my AC system.
There are options on my channel
WOW Unbelievable: More than 98% of electricity generated in Manitoba comes from clean and renewable sources such as hydroelectricity and wind. Manitoba currently produces a surplus of hydro-sourced energy, and exports about half of the electricity it generates.
Been like that for decades here in Manitoba, we’re very lucky with ample hydro available
Phase change heating: the old steam radiator.
?
thanks for the great, inspiring video. you introduced 6 very interesting storage systems.
only 1 is not a viable one: compressed air. in industries it is considered the most expensive form of energy due to loads of heat losses. you might want to replace that in your video with a gravity battery: drop a heavy weight on a long cable into an old mine shaft...
there is room for all of these systems. we should handle this theme like we should out nutrition: we are omnivore.
Thank you
Actually, I am using 4 of 18-wheeler propane tanks (250PSI @ 50,000 gal) for the pontoons in a livaboard barge. I can use wind solar and waves to compress air... pretty inefficiently, but for free and continuously top off these air batteries. Thst air will 😂do all kinds of things from electricity to propulsion.
It's cheap and easy to get the equipment... you just don't want to pay the power company for the air.
40hp Referidgerator trailer diesel engines with massive 3 cyl "air compressors" attached from the factory (for the refrigerator loop). All running on cleaned waste oil... almost free and pushing a generator, distilling fresh water, HVAC heat and water at the same time during the air top off phase of operation. You know ... on cold still Feb days in the rust belt.
Almost 10k# of compressed air.. . Zero emissions.
Never heard the wax thermal storage, immediately makes me think about trying wax/sand mixes, makes it much less problematic than containing high moisture content sand.
Ohhhh, intriguing concept!
That made me think of an ingenious set up of a solar vacuum tube running in floor lines with water, with another, closed loop line that would remain only in the floor itself with parafin wax running through it. During the day the solar tubes would heat the parafin wax into a liquid, which would be surrounded in sand in the floor of a greenhouse. So that both the sand and the wax would be heated throughout the day. I believe this would be an EXTREMELY efficient system. With the proper depth this could actually mimic a tropical region much better than many existing passive greenhouse designs. Especially in colder regions like northern Canada.
You should look into Glauber salt.
@@whosonfirst1309 I used to have packets of those hand warmers when I was a kid, I loved watching it crystalize. I had put that as an option for a potentally high end unit, the ability to bring it close to the temp needed, then just finish the process with a microwave.
@@joeblundell299 please look up chrisleblay. Very interesting.
I grew some salt crystals years ago which would boil water at 60 degrees F under a 100 watt heat bulb. The top of the Crystal got hot and the water below next to freezing. It seems that water boils when it’s ability to dissipate energy is inhibited, I.e. a vacuum or conversely high pressure. Heat doesn’t seem to be the primary requirement so far as phase change is concerned. Phase change seems to be more dependent on external forces than internal.
Very cool
You always explain things so well for us novices ty
Thank you sooo much for the kind words
this one explains more what I was looking for! thanks!
you're welcome
Therefore, a grandfather clock has a mechanical battery, stored energy as mass in a weight.
true
All clocks used a mechanical battery
Combine thermal with steam setting a collector tank ground level and one 15 to 30 feet below ground insulating both. Use a boiler to heat water or even salt water keeping this in a closed loop. Set up a turbine generator to cover energy as the falls back to the lower tanks one as catch Can and the other as b boiler. This might actually require 4 tanks for storing different temperatures of water. Add your candle above the boiler with a forced air help moister issues. Thanks for the ideas.
cool
Use it in (under) a greenhouse as an insulation to minimize the heat losses and also to use the inevitable heat losses to keep the greenhouse warm.
Use heat pumps to get any extra heat in the greenhouse back in the water loop.
Plant the sugar beets or sugar cane in the greenhouse and turn them into alcohol using the same heat you have in you water loop for the distillation.
Burn the alcohol when necessary in order to warm up the water/produce the electricity.
Replace the water in the water loop with the alcohol as it is able to vaporize under lower temperatures. Which means the same circulation with less energy input and less energy loss.
Actually, I think alcohol is one of the coolest energy batteries ever. Drinking it is a waste.
@@peterk.6093 ok
About phase change, have you heard of sodium acetate and other chimicaly stored energies that can be stored for cold season? (seasonal storage)
No but it sounds interesting!!!!!
A company that I cant remember the name of stores energy in blocks of cement and uses cranes to lift these blocks and lowers the blocks later to produce kinetic energy. The blocks can also store the energy indefinitely until needed and its around 80% + efficient.
Wow
brick battery from rondo energy for exemple ? may be you heard about it since
No, please provide a link, very interested
Other battery tech … 1) torsion spring batteries (commercially available). 2) lifted weights (basically the same idea as pumped water gravity batteries but using blocks of concrete). 3) Other mechanical systems, like a bow and arrow and rubber band toy airplane which are scaled up. 4) metal block heat sinks.
thank y!!!ou
have you ever used an air compressor, or filled a tank? takes a relatively large amount of power/energy to fill a tank .
No but it’s a good idea
An alternative form of pumped-hydro system is to start at sea-level and dig a reservoir that is below sea-level. You generate energy as the sea-water fills the reservoir, and store it by pumping it back out again. It is relatively inexpensive to dig a hole, the United States has 12,000 miles of coast-lines, and our largest population centers happen to be along the coasts.
Good idea
Watching other videos about using geothermal to heat and cool a house, I haven't heard anybody else say anything about insulating the inground thermal loop section, making it sound like you had to rely solely on ground temperature. I'd thought about ways to make it easier to service the system, by putting it in a sort of box, but wondered if that would inhibit the functionality of the system. Thank you so much for adding to my understanding by talking about insulation!
Glad I could help
Insulating in ground has been done
@@jacknissen6040 yeah but he hadn’t heard of it!
Geothermal actually uses the low grade heat of the ground, so insulation would be pointless. The heat is concentrates into higher heat with a heat pump. Heat batteries store higher heat from another source in an insulated container to prevent the heat being lost into the surrounding space or material until needed. Storage in the ground is out of the way, and the ground has a relatively stable temperature.
For gravity, they have electric motors pulling heavy loaded train segments up a incline. As power is produced in excess, the electric motor will pull those segments up the hill. When that electricity is needed, the motor will lower the weight down the hill using regenerative braking and will generate electricity by doing so.
The spinning you talked about, I’ve heard it called “wheel” power and it was used in the early 1900s as a energy storage device. Same concept, excess power spin the wheel, when you need power, regen from that wheel. The best part is the lack of degrading inside of that system except for the contact surface, aka wheel bearings.
sweet
Also called a flywheel. Think that is the better search term if anyone is interested in researching on the web. Usually done in a vacuum to eliminate atmospheric friction also called drag.
@@sjhorton1184 yes sir, sorry I should have updated my comment. It’s some pretty cool energy storage and doesn’t have the west like lithium or lead acid. But suffers more from short term loss. So a daily cycle is a better application there then trying to store it up for weeks or months.
I am planning on a greenhouse addition of 42 x 200 to my gardencenter and have been trying to get info on how to use sand as a heat battery. Any ideas where I can get tried and true info?
I have ore videos in my archives
Google it for information.
hay simple tek ive been thinking about magnifing glasses in front of porcelin with copper pipes around the porcelin
Interesting
current climate changes will most likely shut down most of the hydro dams of the western states in the not so
distant future ; those states need to increase the number of geothermal plants for new energy source and
they need to come up with a VERY efficient method of turning sea water into drinking water
Probably true
Nicely explained. Flywheels are way beyond research. Satellites, for example, have been using them for energy storage for decades. There are also numerous commercial applications as emergency backup power systems.
Thank you for the kind words and information!!!
I don't think satellites use flywheels as energy storage. They use flywheels in the guise of "reaction wheels". These spin up and the counter-rotational force moves the satellite around an axis through it's center of mass. As they require no fuel, they are weight and energy efficient means to rotate satellites. The Hubble Telescope uses them to stay pointed at a target patch of sky and scan across the sky in very precise arcs. These are also components that fail over time and generally have redundant backups. They save energy, not store it; a rotating mass for energy storage would force the satellite to rotate in the opposite direction.
@@Tanstaaflitis interesting
Thx for video. I’m wondering if you have seen an example of sand battery extracting steam from water and generating electricity. Could such an idea be scaled up to use with a coal fire power station. Best Charles
@@charleshowroyd1786 yes
Ceres greenhouses has a these phase change salt material that you screw to the back wall of your greenhouse that absorbs the sun's heat during the day and turns to a liquid inside and then radiates the heat out through the night as it solidifies.
Ceres makes great stuff
petroleum jelly is a phase change material. a European company called CRODA sell phase change gel packs
Has any one tried using the high heat of parabolic solar with sand battery for residential use. I'm not sure about the size but maybe an old 275 gallon oil tank some spray foam, 2 air loops, One continuous loop for heating sand and one open loop to blow through the house or transfer with a flat plate heat exchanger to hydro heat?
Interesting idea!!!!
Hello, thank you for your explanation. Could you please explain the principle of a sand battery and how it can store thermal energy?
Actually, the water will go all the way to 100°C before the temperature stops. Then it takes an enormous amount of energy to transition from 100° water to 100° steam. After that, the temperature of the steam can go higher if removed away from the water and exposed to a hotter source of heat.
Well said
Wherever you use heat to heat your home you should always make good use of the free thermal dynamics of heat convection that accompany it. Using that same heat to cool your house for free. Heat never fails to rise, leaving a void, which you can use to suck cooler air in through long underground conduits. Sand batteries work best above gound. The lower you dig, the cooler it is & that's constant.
@@CindySorenson-r4m well said
I'm a bit surprised you didn't get more into pumped hydro storage. It's the largest grid-level battery in use right now.
I appreciate the overview! I've come to realize that energy is actually really important to developing and flourishing as humans!
Thank you, I did mention hydro dams…
So the parifin wax idea seems pretty cool, however parifin is around $1.73 a pound. It takes approximately 459lb of water to fill a 55 gallon drum. I don't know the weight density of parifin but it's still with a few pounds of water to fill a 55 gallon drum which is almost 800 bucks per drum.
True, it is costly compared to just water
What about absorption thermal energy storage using some of very hygroscopic salts (like e.g. calcium chloride or other) and water?
interesting idea!
Sergey Yurko (Сергей Юрко) videos are very very impressive!
Sergei is awesome. I pray for his safety in Ukraine.
Just found you great programs thank you...
Thank you for the kind words
If I thought you were s***** I would've wrote that too...
Sand Battery, from Finlandia. Heat 500 grds C
Sweet
Would a 2000 gallon sistern fillers with sand to create a sand battery large enough to provide heat for a 1000 sq.ft. house for heat in central ill
I don’t know, there’s a lot more variables than that.
Do not put paraffin on a wood stove. Most are capable of heat greater than the flash point of wax - keep the fire on the inside of the stove.
Good advise
What about vermiculite as an insulator for a dirt battery ?
It works but you need something to contain it
Awesome ideas man
Thank you for the kind words!
You just unlock the power of the pyramid......🙂thank you
You’re welcome
😀 You have some great ideas 👍
Thank you for the kind words
@@SimpleTek 👍
maglev flywheel on a stick, vertical, rotary energy storage, with a coil disc between, you have a self-supporting bearing motor-generator, and if its dc motor and generator, its a two-way flywheel dynamo mass spinning disc, value mass over speed, for easy and long lasting, and simple to less-service needing battery storage, you can spin it faster to make it smaller with same storage of energy, ½Jw^2
Interesting idea
@@SimpleTek design equation (for energy density, for flywheel energy storage): S=pi^2 * r^2 * f^2 (^2 = power of two, r = radius of the disc, tall or flat, pi = 3.14159, f=spin revolution frequency per second, S=J/kg)
@@SimpleTek examples: f=3.3kHz (for 200krpm), r=1m, giving 110MJ/kg, 1MJ=0.278kWh, or, about 30kWh/kg.
example 2: f=333Hz (for 20krpm), r=10m (wider disc), giving the same energy density, 110MJ/kg (same as hydrogen energy density), or about 30kWh/kg.
@@SimpleTek you can always add 100x more mass if spinning down 1/10 the frequency, or add the same amoung in radius than you removed from the spin frequency, so either 30kWh/100kg (=300Wh/kg) or r=100m (flat really wide radius disc, a large solar capture area mass spin disc), f=33Hz (for 2000rpm, like in a conventional engine rpm), giving .
example: r=100m (area of pi*r^2=31400m^2, or 31MW of solar power area, if 1kW/m^2), giving the same 110MJ/kg
btw, the centifugal force design equation for the disc is: a_rad = 4*(pi^2)*(f^2)*r, so the larger disc, relatively, the less the centrifugal force tearing it apart, almost the same as the energy density equation, (f^2)*r instead of (f^2)*(r^2), so increasing the radius gives less worry about the flywheel breaking apart, but still, it should handle a large centrifugal force, of an order of millions, like in the 200krpm jet turbine at approx r=1m, f=3.3kHz, a_rad = 44.7M-g, for the jet turbine
Does a metal bucket of sand. Have ANY thermal mass to it. If left on top of a pot belly stove?
it should
Yes, but sand has a lot of air spaces that make it a poor thermal mass unless huge quantities are involved. A big, open top pot of water will collect and store much more. You might want to look at rocket mass heaters also.
@@orcoastgreenman up to 100’C, then the water boils off. The sand can heat to hundreds of degrees
Expodentially is a funny word, but it's not a real world. I enjoy these videos and get a lot from them and so many of them have 'expodentially' in them.
What is a word in one country In one country often isn’t in another. Time to expand your horizons!
@@SimpleTek Did you mean to say 'exponentially'?
Thank you.
I appreciate the kind words
The craziest way to explain the amount of energy in phase change materials that I've heard is this one; if you have a bucket of water at 0° c that's liquid (not ice everything's gone through the phase change and it's just about starting to heat up}, and next to it you have a bucket of water that's 0° Celsius that's solid (ice), the amount of energy required to change the solid to liquid would cause the other bucket to become 60° c, and the ice bucket would be water at 0° c
that's just water though - different materials have different melting and freezing point with different amounts of energy required
thanks so much! can you please describe the 2000 dollar system better? been wanting a greenhouse but we are in upstate ny... sadly!
I think I have a video on it in video archives on this channel
You mentioned that insulation is a cheat with low grade heat storage. It does not stop the loss, but merely slows it down. But here's that same cheat on steroids.
Do it in layers, which will slow down the heat loss even more, since lower differences causes slower transfer. At the center, have your molten salt. After it raises the core temp as much as it can, then take it past the first insulation barrier to the second layer of storage. Repeat until you reach the outermost layer. For taking heat out, reverse the direction, going toward the core only until you have the heat you need. For low grade heating, like for living spaces, you only need to tap the outer layers. For hot water, you'll need to go in a few more layers. For steam power, you need about as much heat as you can get.
You can also capture some low grade heat from your compressed air, since compressing gasses concentrates heat, which is wasted if not captured.
Also, steam takes very little effort to move upward. If you generate your steam at a very low place, then you can run your turbine and condense it back to water at a very high place. Then you can use gravity to generate more power from the same water as it flows back down to its starting point.
You completely misunderstood me
Completely? Then I guess I'm beyond hope. LOL!
@@rafaelshumaker1883 yep! Lol
I think you might have misunderstood me. I was not criticizing, not in the least. I was merely pointing out that some of the things you mentioned could be combined, to even greater advantage.
Could include thermo-chemical heat storage. Material such as zeolite releases latent heat by the addition of water, recharged by dehydrating with heat. Zeolite for heat storage is an active topic for R&D.
Very very cool but sounds complicated and expensive
In my opinion, the best and most interesting option has been the wax as an afordable phase change energy accumulator. It is quite easy to built since it has not pressure, corrosion or leakeages issues as all others
Wax is amazing
Is it flammable and can get quite expensive assuming you get the proper mixture of wax required per application.
You are talking about molten salts as well as phase change. The btu available on the phase change will be huge.
Great point!
Have you looked at Iron Oxide batteries? There are a few videos online on this and seem like good option...
no, interesting!!!!
Oooh, how about for a 'desalination transportation' operation, via the ocean traveling, as the super train could collect the dew drops formed from the solar array to the sides (but they might get blinded if they look outside their windows... lol)
- An elongated dome like tunnel, but wide enough to collect and store the heat and opposite temps... plus distilled water and salt/brine.
Recycling the things we don't need could help. Woooh! for many helping hands! Lol
interesting!
Amazing video, love the paraffin wax idea
Thank you! Cheers!
I like the idea of the William skinner gravity power machine. More of an amplifier then a battery I guess.
Great video keep them coming
Thank you for the kind words
@@SimpleTek Hello from Australia 🇦🇺 by the way .
@@ozzypunk1 cheers from Manitoba!
For storing energy in a rotating mass, you really want it in an almost-vacuum and with magnetic bearings to minimise energy decay, and generate and recover the energy electrically to avoid rotating bearing seals being necessary - unless it's for very short periods of time such as in an engine flywheel.
the spinning concept u mention I have been interested in for some time and know as flywheel, used in many industry especially 19 to early 20 century, prob beyond in both directions, there a lot of videos on here, many indian made, would be great for someone with knowhow to strip the myth from the factual on these free energy devices, thnk u and well done, fututre is mechanical, basic, long lasting easy to fix life gravity and maybe flywheel and others too.
Agreed
Another way to store thermal energy as heat is in a thermos bottle . Partially fill with water and boil. If it doesn't explode use it to run a steam engine.
Interesting
awesome thank you
You’re welcome
The first stored energy is wood. Another interesting way of storing energy is algae production. Squeeze the oil out of it. I do think about make a greater use of the Stirling engine. As soon there is a difference in temperature, you theoretically can get energy out of it via a Stirling engine. What are the limiting factors for it, and why do we not see it in common use? If you look at the coldest village on earth, Yakutsk, where the temperature gets as low as -70°C. Drilling a hole into the ground you probably get zero degrees C not to deep. (Maybe 10 or 20 meter beneath, what do I know). And there you have it! Good conditions for a Stirling engine!
Interesting thank you
go online and visit pellet furnace builder Okofen. they have a Stirling mounted on the furnace to generate 5kw of electricity.
had not thought about paraffin as a way to store heat. Imagine for those who wish to using it as a store of heat on a wood fired stove would be amazing
Cool
seen they want to pump air now into huge mountain chambers to store energy?
ok
I really struggle to imagine how 'molten salt', would be scaled down to domestic deployment. (Hope I'm wrong.) Great vid. Thanks.
Thank you
Take a look at batsand battery. It's made for residential houses.
will do! Thank you. do you have a link?
@@SimpleTek it's not allowed to post links in TH-cam. You need to search for it
Great video. Curious about ur thoughts on this. Using pelton wheel in hydro electric and using compressed air as a battery. Would a pelton also be the most suitable design for air?
I don’t know… maybe?
The Gyro buses. The subject that has had this topic of using momentum baised Mechanical batteries being researched again. Man in the 1950's tried to have electric buses that were powered from storing energy from gyro scopes/flywheels.
very cool historical fact!
Interesting video. However each technology should be examined with the loss of energy both at input and output.
Good point
#6 is a mechanical battery.. or a flywheel, they were very popular in the 1800s
Cool
Coconut oil can also be a phase - change thermal battery. I've seen some experiments from Egypt that looked promising for daytime cooling night time heating. + I believe that some of the Mars rovers use paraffin wax as part of their small scale nuclear reactors. I think electricity might be created using peltier pads and cooling fins. (Plz also remember safety, hot wax and oil can burn. "Spinning" flywheels, and centrifuges can be very dangerous.)
That’s awesome! Thank you for sharing!!!
No. Rover on Mars uses an isotope battery that is not really a battery. A few things in the video are also not batteries, but let's be tolerant. :)
@@DL-kc8fc by Webster’s definition of a battery none of them are, I address that though
@@SimpleTek That is why I call for tolerance. No need to deal with it.
Are talking about flywheel technology, when you were talking about a top?
I don’t understand what you are trying to say?
@@SimpleTek another name for it is a fly wheel
I think earth based batteries can be used to store electrical energy.
I agree but not huge amounts without gigantic size
Thank you
You're welcome
Rather than ‘thermal battery’ can I suggest ‘thermal accumulator’ because ‘battery’ is really a chemical device, just a suggestion
@@pierrelabelle3551 technically you’re correct. Lock me up and throw away the key on my definitional infraction
@@SimpleTek No, I don’t want look you up, I like the information you bring and the way it is explained. I know the level of energy required to produce such good videos. P.S. If I made some mistakes, I apologised. English is not my first language, may be, it is why I am more concerned by the definitions, to have a better understanding of the subject…. 😎
@@pierrelabelle3551 cheers from manitoba, Canada.
(I’m a Viking and we tend to go off without warning or reason)
Technically I believe a "Battery" really means "A collection of". Usualy a car battery is a collection of cells. The name battery is also used when talking about canons. You have a gun battery when you have multiple canons. It is only because we have gotten used to talking about electric storrage in batteries that we now think about that first. I believe your heading should have been "7 Simple Alternative Energy Storage Systems". Just for being pedantic.
Lol nice! Cheers