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It turns out spinning things is really useful and boiling fluids is a convenient way to spin things.
It’s still funny that so much boils down to steampunk with a fake mustache.
Wait, it’s all steampunk?
Always has been.
Not enough brass, though
“I’ll try spinning! That’s a good trick!”
Wisdom from a Jedi born to bring balance to things.
But spinning is so much cooler than not spinning!
Solar thermal is kinda obsolete I thought, now China is churning out PVs for pennies.
I mean it seems the more complex solution in deployment for sure, but its design could still have use in low heat industrial uses (sub 250°C, e.g. food prep, textile, sanitation etc.) where it is used heat -> heat rather than heat -> electricity -> heat. Maybe these replace thermal collectors eventually.
But that is not the point of this meme at all, just my thoughts.
IDK, heat pumps are basically multiplying the electricity they use.
Only with small temperature differences, the higher the difference the lower the COP.
Solar thermal has some distinct advantages when you start talking about really big instillations. Especially when considering power storage, molten salt systems can store heat and allow the generators to keep working even at night. Much cheaper than batteries at very large scales.
Thermal solar systems are generally very efficient when the goal is heating something, not just generating power. So say, you want to run an ammonia plant without burning natural gas, or if you want to melt down metals for recycling. There are so many industrial applications where it’s a better way of doing it than using an electric heating element.
For heating I’d guess it can still be relevant. As a means of producing electricity though? Yeah
It all boils down to steam…
I really like the concentrated solar systems that use molten salt, where rather than heating water directly, molten salt is heated and stored In large insulated tanks and tapped off to a heat exchanger to run the turbines, thus allowing power generation to match demand and continue at a constant rate even when light level very (such as at night).
One interesting idea is to use a concentrated solar system to run an Einstein–Szilard refrigerator, or some other absorption refrigerator cycle.
What are the tanks made of? “Molten salt” sounds like it would fuck up most materials
Various common steels with a bunch of insulation around it usually, sometimes with a thin coating. The potassium/sodium/calcium nitrate mixes that are used with concentrated solar systems operating in range between 200 C and 600 C. So like, yah you don’t want to touch it, but it’s not gonna do much to steel. It can be somewhat corrosive, but, this is fairly easily mitigated by design.
Molten salt for heat transfer and thermal storage is a pretty mature technology that goes way back before we started using it in concentrated solar systems.
Molten salt for heat transfer and thermal storage is a pretty mature technology that goes way back before we started using it in concentrated solar systems.
Isn’t the core problem with anything that uses molten salt is that when the heat
saucesource (thanks autocorrect, really, the context in that sentence means you should suggest “sauce”?) fails you just end up with a huge lump of solid salts that clog every part of your system?The Russian Alfa class had a similar problem due their use of lead-bismuth heated into a liquid.
When they lost power for whatever they’d essentially end up being written off as reheating them was incredibly difficult and very tricky.
molten salt systems can be fail safe by having the coolant drain from parts of the system that can’t operate with solidified salt in them, even if they do, you can sends someone with a heating element to remelt the system at critical points before turning it on. It’s not like water where the coolant will physically expand and burst things when it freezes, water’s actually pretty weird in that regard, most things take up less volume when they freeze.
I don’t know why they couldn’t do the same for an alpha class, but I suspect it’s because running the reactor without coolant in it would have caused a melt down, and if any coolant was left inside it when turned off, the control rods would have been frozen in place preventing it from being restarted. Perhaps in such a tightly sealed system, the shrinkage caused by cooling could have caused things to break as well.
Nokia 3310s.
If you’re gonna build it, you might as well over-build it I guess…
As a first guess, I would use glass fused to steel tanks. I would need to do a detailed look at material compatibility, talk to vendors, and run some bench scale studies before I moved forward with anything.
Source: am licensed engineer
why are there 2 people in suits?
They can’t keep getting away with this!!
I wonder if we could kill 2 birds with one stone. Have parabolic solar panels that reflect unabsorbed light to boil water.
It would be a less efficient boiler (because the ‘mirrors’ would be much less reflective), and much more expensive (because solar panels – especially custom-made curved ones – are much more expensive than mirrors).
Overall, I suppose maybe you could come out ahead if you used very efficient solar panels for it, and that would let you generate slightly more watts per surface area used…
But we really don’t need to optimize for surface area in 99% of cases. Almost everywhere solar power is used, space to install panels is abundant, and it would be much cheaper and more effective to just put one or the other of these solar collection methods over a slightly wider area if you want increased production. (And even then, most of the cases where production-per-surface-area is very important are on solar-powered vehicles, and these parabolic sun-tracking mirrors are impractical for use on a moving vehicle.)
You’d just have 2 inefficient power generators
How about running water through the back side of the panels to keep them cool, transfer the heat into a heat battery (sand) then us that to assist your hot water heater.
Either that or use it for temperature differential power generation.
Although I guess you could use the power generated by the panels to run a heat pump to boil the water used for cooling too.
Right on. and PV get’s less efficient when it gets hot, I’m unsure if there’s enough waste heat to do anything useful. but there is at least a marginally good reason to cool them.
At least hydro and wind power are still safe from the boiling water…
Still safe so far
Hydro is the OG boiled water.
Sun heats water. Water evaporates. Go up high. Falls down. Turn turbine.
Wind power is a side effect of the same process happening on a rotating globe.
Water evaporates.
Evaporation =/= boiling.
With all the solar mirrors, won’t we overhear the sun shooting all that light back?
guys its literally in fallout, so its canon.
Yes, Everything, always turns back to mechanical enginnering.
carcinization but for steam engines instead of crabs
Would solar boilers be more efficient than PV?
ah yes the bird blaster
I know this is a meme community but I was curious about this. It seems some birds do get burned, but not blasted. It varies a lot depending on the installation and it can also be mitigated. Also, the amount of birds dying from this is significantly lower than just the amount of birds hitting windows. For the benefit of other curious people, I’ll try to condense the relevant information from wikipedia and the sources.
In more general terms, a 2016 preliminary study assessed that the annual bird mortality per MW of installed power was similar between U.S. concentrated solar power plants and wind power plants, and higher for fossil fuel power plants.
How it was calculated for fossil fuel
Sovacool estimated avian mortality from fossil fuel power plants across the United States as a result of collision with infrastructure, electrocutions, pollution and contamination, and climate change. In addition, Sovacool estimated climate change-induced avian mortality (in terms of habitat loss and changes in migration) predicted to be the result of fossil fuel power plant operations.
A preliminary assessment of avian mortality at utility-scale solar energy facilities in the United States: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148116301422?via=ihub
Review of Avian Mortality Studies at Concentrating Solar Power Plants: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1364837
wait these could be built with co2 turbines as well, right??
Yes, super critical CO2 turbines can work in such a system. As can sterling engines. Or thermoelectric solid state couples.
Any system that uses a temperature differential to generate power can be used. It’s just a matter of what you care about in a given situation. Upfront cost, mechanical reliability, noise/vibration, and availability of needed components play in to what makes the most sense.
