Turning An Old Engine Block and Lava Into A Heat Battery!
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- čas přidán 23. 05. 2024
- How do we decarbonise industrial processes when a heat pump won't do? Processes, like making chemicals, or paper, food processing, beer brewing, textiles - in fact most of the things around you; require temperatures that are much higher than those needed for a hot shower or warm radiator and so currently aren’t well suited to the realm of the trusty heat pump. Fortunately Caldera thinks they may have the solution with their modular heat battery made using old melted down engine blocks and volcanic rocks. Intrigued?! We were too and wanted to meet the team behind this cool, or rather, very hot solution to find out more! @EverythingElectricShow @fullychargedshow
00:00 Introduction
01:12 Caldera Heat Cells - Renewable Energy on Tap
02:07 Beyond Heat Pumps
03:00 Modular Heat Batteries
03:43 Engine blocks and Volcanic Rocks!
04:28 Let's have a go!
06:02 Recycled Aluminium
07:07 High Temp Heat Pumps?!
07:50 Home Energy too?!
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I have to say, that introduction segment was epic. Whoever concocted the idea and directed it is top notch. So is the videography, editing and sound. You can see it throughout the video that this is professionals at work. I'm truly impressed.
@@ChrisWatkinsMedia Totally deserved. Amazing work!
if only there wasn't that dinky muzak going all the time Imogen's talking. 🙁
If only there wasn't that constant dinky muzak playing while Imogen's talking. 🙁
Shades of JJ Abrams lens flare fame.
One of my favourite episodes to date - that is seriously ingenious .. yet so simple in concept. I love the raw material being low-grade engine blocks. Dinosaur tech being fed into the maw of the renewable future!
I’m glad they have moved towards industrial heat - an area which really needs it
The production quality of this and the content for the Everything Electric Show just keeps getting better and better with each one. That opening in slow motion which seamlessly rolls into the piece to camera is just fantastic.
The pacing throughout is fluid and never feels like you’re being overloaded with information. It’s a fine line and the team behind this have made one to be proud of.
4:03 i think that's actually a cylinder head, you can see by the ports on the side. they sit on top of the engine block and support the structures that dictate the intake, ignition, and exhaust. sometimes also injection of fuel.
Imogen is an awesome presenter. 👍
I wonder if there's a possibility to use these for public building heating, like schools and hospitals. If there was a deal to use excess solar from nearby solar farms at super cheap/free rates it could reduce public expenditure on the stuggling sectors like education, and possibly also reduce some of the community objections to solar farms, "in their back yard".
Heating needs, which require quite low temperatures- in the range of 30-60 degrees C- can be efficiently achieved by heat pumps- making 3-5 kW of heat from 1 kW of electricity. The solution in the video is using resistor heating, which makes 1kW of heat from 1kW of electricity. The key selling point is high capacity, high temperature storage, which allows to heat up the storage using low tariff electricity, and use the heat when needed by industrial processes, because the vacuum insulated storage containers holds the heat well.
Industrial processes need heat throughout the year. For most of the year that can come from solar with other sources during the winter. Space heating is mostly only needed during the winter exactly when solar produces virtually nothing. Solar is great for AC in the summer and rubbish for heating in the winter. Thermal storage works fine for a few days but it's no good for seasonal energy shifting as too much leaks out. Space heating should be heat pumps powered by wind turbines.
Good to see where Caldera went & to reveal their energy density + power density solution. Great they're tackling industrial applications but they should still consider commercial & domestic versions for hot water & a hot-source for a heat pump.
What an outstanding episode - spectacular introduction - fluent & clear explanation of the technology by Imogen 👏👏
There are a lot of Bakeries and Potterys that this will be good for. Id say most of the Food industry uses lots of gas.
It does. Usually to produce a lot of steam.
They were targeting uses 100-200C. That's just hot enough for baking. It's at the edge of their range. But you could definitely use this to get the ovens almost to temp and then top them up the last 10 or 20 C electrically if needed.
I think they can make much more impact in the industry rather than at home.
For home or several homes use, there has been a Dutch startup, that has a similar insulated vessel but just with water at up to 110 degrees Celcius.
It is still an electric boiler after all, but for example you could use it to shower all week from the cheap sunny hours in the weekend for example.
It's brilliant that causes of the carbon problem i.e. engine blocks are being turned into a solution!
Old bangers to modern hot banger blocks, with the piston popping compliment of banging lava rock aside. A good send off
As well as being very important, the tour through the process of making it was also fascinating.
Great vido and production quality. Presentation too. Well done all xx
Great to see the night storage heater reinvented…. What’s needed now is a heat pump cycle that works from solar thermal o/p temps to the storage temps of these units
That engine block looks a lot like a cylinder head imo😅😆
Indeed it is. Old alloy heads and blocks can also be recycled many times, being made into parts for EVs, like motor casings, reduction box casings and the like. It obviously works in these heat storage solutions too, but it seems a bit of a waste considering how energy intensive refining aluminium is to start with. I suspect that used aluminium is being used here because it melts at a low temperature (compared to iron), and it's relatively cheap to obtain.
Terrific episode! Fascinating technology, beautifully filmed, an engaging presenter that’s passionate about the subject matter … you just can’t beat it! 🤩 Only another FCS episode could come close 😁 Keep up the great work FCS team! 👏🏻
So interesting. Thank you very much for introducing us to this exciting potential.
This is so great. I wish them success.
Great love to see new solutions progressing
Lets hope the economics for this works and it spreads rapidly. Since this looks like a really nice thermal battery :D
Great intro to this video, FC. The whole vid was great. Thank you.
Learned about so many new technologies in sustainable development and EV field, Everything Electric team great work and keep us learning ❤😊😊
Great solution for industrial businesses/factories.
I have been enjoyed, so thank you for delivering.
I would love to see Everything Electric Show in Vienna. For central Europe it is perfect location. You would cover 4 states (Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Czech) with 3 nearby capital cities. Please consider coming to Vienna at some point 🙂
My dear central Europeans, like this so that we get to see our own local show!
Awesome bit of lateral thinking. Absolutely love the idea. Could possibly be used to capture and store waste industrial heat from smelting processes too.
The fact that it is warm hours later does not demonstrate high conductivity, it’s a demonstration of heat capacity. Porosity is also not a demonstration of conductivity. Typically, higher porosity means more air pockets which means better insulation. I get the feeling the volcanic rocks are just filler so you don’t need as much aluminum per unit volume.
Loved this - more of the same please! (small note for future things - make sure work out whether you mean "good heat conductor" or "good heat insulator", which is what you need here.)
I can confirm I kept my masterpiece! Make sure to spot it in the background of any episode filmed at my desk!
A piece of art! It is sort of a pallasite (kind of meteorite), maybe if you cut it and polish the cut surface it will look fantastic with polished rock in a metal matrix. Pallasite is olivine and iron/nickel, cut and polished they look like a stained glass window.
I expect at some point there will be mini versions of these that will sit outside a house where the oil/gas boiler used to be, or even buried in the ground. During the day they'll be heated by solar energy and water will be piped through them to heat radiators. Of course there are already solar water heaters (you can see them perched on top of houses in Israel, Turkey etc) but these might be a little bit less conspicuous.
It's innovation like this that gives me hope for the future of humankind on planet earth!
5:36 You had a go Imogen 🙂
Thanks
For once I have to disagree with Imogen: this is not a “cool” but a very hot solution! ;-) Brilliant video! Brilliant tech to allow quite some companies to stop burning stuff!
So, how many kWh of storage is in one of those thermoses?
I really love heat batteries, especially novel ones like this but I'm going to be pedantic. Both people in the video said engine block but don't they mean head? Aren't heads made from aluminium and blocks from steel? Imogen also said it was "still toasty" which means it's a good conductor of heat. Doesn't she mean "storer of heat"?
Some newer engine blocks are made of aluminium (with steel cylinders though) but those were heads.
Cheers its great thanks
@EverythingElectricShow Scalable by adding these small modules, sure. But are they planning for large industrial sized installations? (many larger sized containers)
I hope you got to keep your ingot, it would make a great door stop !
This is great technology. It reminds me of the sand battery. Simple and effective and cost effective solutions. 👏 👏
Sand strikes me as a lot cheaper and more useful on a large scale.
@@zapfanzapfanlow thermal conductivity means it's hard to get the energy in and out and you need a higher differential between storage temp and usage temp. These people have looked very hard at the problem and chosen the best material for this use.
@@adrianthoroughgood1191 This strikes me as a system for short storage and quick discharge, then it makes sense. A sand system was built in Finland recently but that is maybe 100 times the size of one of these thermoses. 8 MWh with 200 kW discharge rate.
@@zapfanzapfan was that for space heating? You need a lower output temp for that (50C rather than 200C) so sand may be more suitable for that use.
@@adrianthoroughgood1191 The sand is at 600 C and the transfer medium seems to be air so I guess you can have pretty much any temperature you like that the transfer medium can handle. There it is for hot water and district heating so the water outflow is probably around 100 C.
Imogen, I so hope that you were able to keep your artwork so that we can see it whilst you host the best event at your lovely home.
Nice.
Sounds like a bigger version of my 2nd generation Quantum storage heaters. Surely it might be a good subject to investigate??
Are the heating elements encased within the molten mix and are they replaceable when they become faulty?
7:40 "As with anything in the transition to Net Zero, it's going to be a range of solutions depending on what makes the most sense for your specific application." Exactly.
Start with reasoning from first principles that are based in an understanding of physics, learn from the best examples from around the world, then focus on which technologies are the most appropriate for any given implementation context. In other words, think globally, act locally.
A couple of times the point is made that the materials are good conductors of heat, a property that would be important if you needed to extract heat quickly but it seems to me a more important property would be possessing a high specific heat, a property that reflects the thermal energy stored per kg per degree centigrade (or Kelvin) e.g. J/kg.K.
Aluminum has both good thermal conductivity and high specific heat while remaining solid in the 100ºc ~ 500ºc range. around 230 W/m K and a specific heat of 921 J/kg K, and it is not expensive. Granite has SH of around 800 but a conductivity of only 3 W/m K so you need the Aluminum around it.
5:22 I seem to remember that you presented a similar technology in another video where the company was doing the reverse: had some sort of brick material with a specific alloy embedded.
For experts, here is the question: which of these two solutions would be best to reduce losses and/or store the maximum of heat?
Intuitively, I would say the one that’s a block aluminium spiked with volcanic rock would probably store more heat but have higher losses (14deg per day from “full” at 500deg to “empty” at 200deg according to what Imogen said), whereas it would be the opposite for the brick spiked with alloy bits (less heat, but less losses).
Any idea?
Tech is lovely. Money counts. Can we have some indication of cost to buy / cost to run....and maybe the vision is how this can fall with scale. Manual carrying of molten aluminium to a bunch of rocks looks like a good area to industrialise. With the money dimension its just an academic project. Nice video though!
Something to share with the MIT heat battery Technologists. Infrared semiconductors, electrical recovery of stored energy, looks like the other perfect solution.
Seems like fairly good principle, combining aluminium which has great thermal conductivity, ~60% that of copper, at a fraction of the cost of copper, with something that is extremely cheap to increase heat capacity for a given cost. Even though that "impure" aluminium definitely represent significant value, it is at least less valuable than pure aluminium, and it's not consumed in the process, which means the ingots should be able to last practically indefinitely, and be completely recyclable.
100-200 °C isn't unreasonable for heat pumps. The COP decrease with increased ΔT, per step, and cost increase the higher COP you want per step, at any ΔT, for a given rate of heat pumping. Which means a great disadvantage if you want to be able to use as much energy as possible during short periods when energy is really cheap.
Storing heat is interesting in itself, so many possible options, all with their own set of advantages and disadvantages. I don't think there's one perfect system, and I also don't think a thermal storage system has to be perfect to have substantial potential as long as the price of electric power varies between around zero to absurd regularly. Maybe simple and reliable while leaving some potential efficiency on the table, has a better chance to reach commercial viability than high efficiency and very high cost with a complicated system that will require more maintenance.
This system using water/steam to convey the heat in a closed loop is also interesting, making it more or less ready for turning some of that stored heat into power. While that would reduce the amount of heat energy extracted, the total amount of energy possible to extract wouldn't be reduced.
Aluminium and granite have similar mass.
Rock is cheaper than aluminium.
Broken rock and melted aluminium can fit any shape. 😊😊
Where are we with large solar mirror arrays for high temp applications? Good job and good luck.
Concentrating solar is a bit of a nightmare because of all the precision moving parts required to constantly keep the mirrors aligned on the tower. If you're using molten salt for the working fluid you have corrosion difficulties and well. It's not easy.
Did I understand correctly that when fully charged it would take 21 days to get back to zero heat energy stored? That would be amazing. I hope they’re able to get lots of customers.
It look like something straight out of Austin Powers yeah baby yeah
Excellent production and presentation, but still a bit light on facts such as specific heat capacity - why use rocks + Al instead of just Al and what is the improvement in energy density as a result?
Oh well, here goes: eg, soapstone ~ 1kJ/kgK -> 300K delta -> 300kJ/kg -> 83 Wh/kg. Say 1000kg: 83 kWh per ton. Al has 0.9 kJ/kgK, so the rock adds ~10% and reduces cost, while the Al also acts as a 'vascular' system for heat. We don't know the mass of the contents of the storage units, but I guess from 500-200 °C would give a theoretical 83 kWh per tonne.
In fact, this could use concentrated solar power to charge instead of electricity, and with >80% thermal efficiency instead of ~20% PV efficiency - win win.
What is the round trip efficiency?
Your losses are energy used to run the pumps and the vacuum system to maintain insulation and the actual heat loss to the atmosphere. If you charge and use the energy every day in a normal industrial process they should be reasonably low. But efficiency isn't the point. It's not trying to compete with batteries. Low cost for large capacity is the goal.
@@adrianthoroughgood1191 but it matters.
Even if you get the energy when there's a peak in energy production, if there are a lot of these types of batteries they will still increase the demand and this raises the price somewhat. At 30 to 40% efficiency you would still need the price to be 3 times less than normal to reach parity.
I would like for the efficiency to reach at least 50% to consider this.
Because you also have to consider days when there isn't that much energy production during that time factories still need to work and output products, it will get very expensive if they can't rely on it or the cost is 3 times that of normal.
@@Simqer I only know what is in this video but given that she said the outside did not feel warm and it can hold the heat for up to 21 days it seems like the heat losses are quite low. I don't think they mentioned how much electricity it takes to run the pumps and vacuum. I would expect during normal usage it would be well above 50%, but of course you would need to measure it to be sure. It's converting heat into electricty that has bad efficiency but they are not trying to do that here. I think the expected use case is that you have your own on site solar panels so that after capex your electricity is basically free for most of the year. Of course having better effeciancy in the storage means needing fewer panels. But panels are pretty cheap these days.
Larger home still need something between this and a tepeo to keep them warm as a HP alternative that doesn’t require a whole home retrofit! I’m really sad these guys didn’t keep a domestic offering on the table
I quite fancy one of these in the garden - store the excess summer PV and progressively tap it off for heating in the winter - I wonder what the heat capacity is at 500C - probably not that simple but interesting idea 😅
If it self-discharges in 3 weeks it's not a very practical seasonal storage...
Time to retire ICE engines early then? At least the engine block is recyclable even if the fuel used to power it isn't! Probably a wise move for Caldera to focus on industrial heat...
That abundance of aluminium engine blocks that they are predicting may not come to fruition because the electric motors in EVs are housed in...
...ALUMINIUM...!!!
@@beepthesheep867 ICE engine blocks are much heavier than electric engines and frames aluminum castings are shifting magnesium castings. So it should not be a problem.
Most likely, they will just surface mine more bauxite ore for the extra aluminium consumption. At least this product can be made from recycled material IF sufficiently available.
Fun facts in producing aluminium:
The global aluminium market is prediced to grow from $229.85 billion in 2023 to $393.77 billion by 2032.
China holds the largest reserves of aluminium and is the largest producer of aluminium in the world.
Open-cut mining uses bulldozers to scrape top soil and overburden. Explosives are then used to loosen bauxite ore. The Bayer process is then used to refine bauxite ore for alumina, which involves heat, pressure, sodium hydroxide, and huge amounts of electricity. Smelting the alumina then produces aluminium.
Mining bauxite wreaks havoc on fragile ecosystems and biodiversity. Producing 1 ton of raw aluminium results in 4 to 5 tons of toxic waste. The so-called red mud contains heavy metals, has high alkalinity, and is stored in huge open tailing ponds. The red mud is extremely corrosive and is damaging to soil and lifeforms.
The primary impacts in producing aluminium are global warming potential, water consumption, fresh water ecotoxicity.
Recycled aluminium has to come from somewhere.
@ryuuguu01 Overall, there is significantly more aluminium used in the production of an EV compared to an ICE vehicle.
EV batteries are extremely heavy.
So, to be as efficient as possible, the rest of the vehicle has to be as light as possible.
Hence, the abundant use of aluminium and plastic over steel.
@ryuuguu01 GREAT NEWS, my Nissan Leaf is made from 99% recycled material.
Will there be sufficient aluminium for this PRODUCT from recycling aluminium engine blocks?
As my EV is recyclable, overall uses more aluminium than an ICE, and replaces my old diesel at a ratio of 1:1, the answer is a big fat No!!!
However, as new aluminium production is increasing to meet the demand of a lightweight future, there should be sufficient recycled aluminium from other sources to eventually ramp up production of this PRODUCT.
Isn’t it easier to use graphite?
I love the suit
👍
54:38 cool solution more like a red hot solution
Electric vehicles still need chassis blocks though also from aluminium.
So it’s not like it’s without value.
Caldera was born out of Isentropic which had a huge grant from the government to build grid level thermal storage.
What happened to that.
You could have asked them about that.
Is this new project actually being manufactured?
Isentropic concept was ingenious. Unfortunately the tech was not commercially viable.
cool. I mean hot.
Why are they calling them blocks? These are heads, cylinder heads. Nice tech though.
Fantastic product!!
It’s so nice to hear Imogen speak without all the “ummms” while she’s presenting something. Completely different from her interview style, which is borderline intolerable, due to “ummm” being in almost all of her sentences.
That's an engines cylinder head, not a block.
Why not copper? Copper retains it’s chemistry regardless how many times is melted or recycled AFAIK.
Very cool, this + small modular reactors can be a big deal for industry
too bad they abandoned the idea of building these tech to houses. New passive houses could benefit from heat system like that, especially with connection to solar panels.
It hasn’t been abandoned. There’s companies investigating sand batteries but for now the economics means it’s viable for bigger applications.
All in good time though.
You have a lot of spam and bots in the comments.
😤😡What a waste of aluminium.
Just stupid, to use highly recyclable materials this way.
What is needed is solar thermal to a thermal battery that can store the heat at minimum 1200 degrees.
This way minimum loses in changing energy types and can also be use for super heated steam to run turbine generation. Manufacturing needs high heat and electricity may as well build one solar station to deliver all your needs.
Moulton aluminium is cheap but not the best solution. 1414 Degrees Ltd .
If I can't burn fossil fuel in an ice engine, I want to burn iron dust under an Sterling engine. 🏴☠️🦜