i see problems with this and i will list them below 1 overheating of solar panels 2 difficulty to start in winter 3 fouling of system with impure fuel 4 risk of exploding/out of control burning with damage 5 HOW DO YOU TURN OFF MOLTEN SODIUM
I'm old enough to have lived through the era of the disposable blade, single and double-blade razors. My modern, multi-blade is much better. It lasts for months. Going back to the old way seems to me to be a scam. We have gone beyond disposable blades. Let's not go back.
@@marsfreelander5969 1 Gallium arsenide is the semiconductor that works best at high temperatures, and is protected by an infrared mirror and likely a vacuum gap. The back side could also be cooled by the incoming air. 2 Since when do bunsen burners and gas ovens have trouble starting in winter? This will much more reliably start in cold weather than a piston engine, and can help warm the batteries in a hybrid vehicle. 3 A modern burner combusts fuel much more completely and cleanly than the explosions in a piston engine, there is a constant flow with no moving parts in the way. A piston engine is much more vulnerable to fouling from impure fuel. 4 No more so than any other vehicle with a fuel tank. 5 Like a sodium vapor lamp it is likely contained in a chamber. When you turn off the burner it cools down.
8:15 No there's not only two possibilities. The salt is inside a double walled, sealed sapphire tube. This is an interesting invention, BUT WE NEED TO STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUELS, AND HYDROGEN AT THIS POINT IS A BORDERLINE SCAM. 14:39 The waste heat from regular internal combustion engines is too low energy to be used efficiently this way. Thermodynamics.
Hmm... interesting. Did you mention the fuel that is used? fossil fuel? or Hydrogen? would it in this case not be easier/ more efficient to use Hydrogen cells?
I'm no photovoltaics specialist, but I worked in a lab at a university where the people next door worked on micro-scale heat exchangers, and one of their projects was related to recovering waste heat from Concentrated Photovoltaic Cells (CPV), a system where a relatively cheap, large Fresnel-type lens diverts sunlight into a relatively expensive, small PV cell. The problem with that is that the cell efficiency was inversely proportional to its temperature, which is why they were trying to match these tiny heat exchangers with the tiny PV cells and use that heat to convert alcohol and plant oil into biodiesel. This engine obviously works at high temperatures. Low-Pressure Sodium Vapor lamps work at about 300°C, and the assembly seems too compact for meaningful insulation, so these cells would be working at high, temperatures, and therefore at lowered efficiencies. I'd wait for independent confirmation of these numbers before believing these are even in the correct order of magnitude.
My first thought was exactly wether this sodium lamp an cell system could be used to discharge excess heat from traditional PVs (improving their efficency) while at the same time obtaining some more electricity out of it. Obviously your lab roommates were smarter than me, so I guess it wasn't doable/cheap enough.
IF they said 15% or 20% I would be drooling. Modern Thermoelectric generator (TEG) modules are at most 5%, some TEG modules claim up to 15%, but when people claim above 50%, I get red flags. Besides, this thing is competing against Thermoelectric generators and maybe fuel cells depending on fuel quality, so it seems like someone is trying to get people to invest into a hole... not my thing.
*I mean... a woman invented this dude. You just spent more time pointing out why it won't work, than she did, to make it "work".* This is so stupid, she had to be a drop out to not know the laws of physics says this is seriously impossible.
Where does the heat go? If it is so efficient then the thing would not get hot. But there is a huge flame coming out of one end! I say BS. Total complete BS.
It's solid state I your using heat your byproduct is cooling So there's still 30% of heat As gasoline burns at 1500° and peeks at 3900° so that's a lot of exercises heat now we need exhaust and cooling Also if this is as efficient as they say most likely it will be bought out and crushed
Its 60% efficient so 40% ends up as waste heat in the form of hot exhaust gases just like in any other combustion engine. I'm not sure what is there that you don't understand...
@@slo3337 video says they get 60% efficiency, animation shows hot exhaust gases (flames) leaving tube shaped device... 100% - 60% = 40% here are your flames
Sounds like it is better tuned, more efficient, produces more useful higher gradient waste heat, and doesn't have the headache of storing and transporting H2.
@@ticthak Yep and the control systems should be much simpler too so maintenance would a lot less with a longer reactor/generator life. This is quite interesting actually. Use excess renewables to create stored chemical energy, the burn that energy in the reactor for emergencies/peak shaving and seasonal use. I hope they can get it to work at an industrial scale!
but actually has zero similarity because there is no chemical reaction besides the combustion that produces heat. fuel > heat > light > electricity VS fuel > electricity. I don't know how the plan to extract so much heat from combustion gases though near needs to move from the gas to the sodium, so the exhaust gases temperature will be above sodium vapor temperature (260°C/533K) if you want to extract lets say 90% heat you need to have a heat source about ~5000 C/K. It sounds like using exhaust gases in a hybrid car would hardly produce any sodium vapor or only with extremely low efficiency
So many issues with this thing I don't even know where to start. The pollution alone would be extremely difficult to control. It reminds me of cheap Chinese diesel heaters, actually. * Pollution. There is no way to fully burn the fuel across a swath of power levels. They might be able to fully burn the fuel at a particular power level. * Backpressure from dealing with exhaust products to remove unwanted byproducts. * Efficiency of 60% with a hot exhaust? Not even possible. And 80% combined-cycle? I don't think that's possible either. * The high temperature of the system will greatly shorten the equipment lifespan, let alone the solar cells. * Build-up of byproducts on heat exchanger surfaces. * Multiple conversion steps... another nail in the "efficiency" coffin. The biggest red flag is having multiple conversion steps (fuel to heat, heat to light, light to cell, cell to electricity) and still claiming extreme efficiencies. That gets into "sell me the Brooklyn bridge" territory. I don't think this thing is real. -Matt
You forgot the biggest one: Even if the system works, burning gasoline is the worst way to heat table salt. Solar Concentrators, geothermal, nuclear, and even standard power plants would be better served integrating this than cars.
Similar to my first thought: How hot do those EV cells get exactly? And how efficient are they at that temperature and how long do they last at that temperature. Too many steps and energy conversions. Buildup of byproducts reduces efficiency fast. I know, for the fuel that is not burned in the first combustion, we could just add an afterburner for additional thrust out of the exhaust. Hey, it works for military jets, so why not here.
A modern burner for an external combustion engine consumes fuel much more completely and cleanly than the explosions in an internal combustion piston engine. A generator for a plug in battery hybrid vehicle does not need a variable power output.
As soon as I heard the efficiency figure I was like this is BS. Any basic understanding of how complex a jet engine is and you just laugh. You can't just have, "combustion", you need a compressor or to used a compressed oxidant (a rocket). The compressor alone robs more energy than he says will be lost in the full cycle. Lastly how on earth will you cool it enough for most of the energy to not be lost as heat?
So you get an animation and an explanation. Still seems sus to me. Thermal efficiency claims are unbelievably high. Extraordinary claims...yadayadayada.
For 10 kw per gram? (It looked like they listed under 4 liters in a graph. So volumetric is great unlike Hydrogen) That is on par with the best therotical batteries max potential! Lithium Air is said to be able to hold 12,300 watts per KG. So yeah. That is outstanding! I've already said TPV cells are the future. Or a part of it. For some applications. MIT just made some that capture heat at 2,000 celius, get better with more heat, and have more than 45% effiency. Basically the same as our best turbines! I say the future as in... The future is TPV cells plus nuclear or in ten years fusion! Sadly... I am super skeptical. Feel like the DoD would be on top of this. Just use sapphire... Oh yeah that is a great choice. So plentiful. Pretty cool if true, and I bet a ton of applications could benefit from this. TPV cells need more research. We waste so much heat, and potential energy. Having a part that captures that into electricity with no moving parts is a game changer for at least industrial purposes.
@@dianapennepacker6854 Actually, an ideal use case would be to power a house using wood as fuel, and use the waste heat to heat the house in cold weather, and heat water in all weather.
I've been trying to conceive of an efficient "fuel into electricity" system for years, so I am also VERY skeptical that you can convert the energy twice and get even close to 80% efficiency. But I hope I'm wrong! I'd love an electric gas motorcycle that can go 1000miles on 4 gallons of gas 😊
@@jef_3006 Yes, but this distinction seems almost academic nowadays. A fireplace is where combustion occurs; your chimney flue is where the exhaust goes. Is your furnace a jet or an "internal" combustion engine? Or are neither "engines"? (Producing heat is a form of "work" or is only force/motion "work?") In a rocket, combustion occurs in the nozzle to accelerate the exhaust for thrust as it leaves the nozzle. In an ICE car, the values are simply little doors that open and close for inlet air followed by exhaust. Actually more of a "digital" or step-by-step combustion/exhaust cycle rather than a more analog/continuous flow-controlled system.
The exhaust gases carries out energy from the system in 3 forms. 1) Sensible heat, expressed in the temperature of the gases, which the thing will try to recover as much as possible (but no chance to recover fully), 2) Latent heat: any fuel with hydrogen content mixed with air and burned will produce water molecules, and there is significant energy absorbed just in the process of water vaporization (not stored in temperature but in the gaseous state), and this latent heat will be lost unless we have a condenser, 3) Kinetic energy of the outgoing exhaust gases, which could be partially recovered with yet another device, a turbine. I see too many conversions needed to even considering a 60%+ efficiency.
Actually the idea itself is solid, pun unintended. The fuel source would have to be really clean to avoid soot buildup. There might be applications where such a pin energy source to convert fuel to electricity is useful. Ships, big rigs, planes, etc.
@@greghelton4668 If the idea works, then burning stuff to make electricity would still be the least efficient way of using it. Because at that point, really anything that heats up the salt is enough. And at that point, you may as well use a solar concentrator or something.
@@loneIyboy15 And said solar concentrator would be running on "free" energy, which is way better than using a fuel. But that's stationary power generation. This one is intended to move things, I guess.
I knew Danielle when she was doing her prior clean tech start-up, LightSail (grid scale energy storage). Unfortunately LightSail didn't beat out the battery tech that hit the market, and they folded. I think her use of "LightCell" as a trade name is a riff off of her old company's name.
Could this work? My sliver of engineering knowledge says 'Maybe.' But I'm really doubting their claimed efficiency numbers. Build one, Let someone else test it, and I'll believe it.
This video overstates what Lightcell themselves claim as far as efficiency, which is frustrating. The founder of the company, @danielle_fong, tried commenting to set the record straight, but for some reason the UA-cam algorithm has hid here reply.
Quartz is also a great way to filtrate bandwidth of light. Not to say it also has a higher melting point than regular glass. Glass is amorphous which makes it ineficiente to some light wavelengths.
I like the idea you pitched at the end there - combining a regular old ICE with the "light cell" - which got me thinking a little. And I think I've come up with a really efficient combined system. Imagine this: 1) You have a solid, time-proven, fully balanced and port polished engine block of choice (let's do a V8) with Speed of Air pistons (seriously, look them up! Just do it!!!), 2) and instead of a traditional starter + alternator combination (which puts a toll on rotating the crankshaft just to charge the battery), you hook a 48-or-higher volt starter-generator electric motor to the crankshaft either directly or indirectly (kinda like RAM's very underrated e-Torque system which you should totally research if you haven't), 3) and after the exhaust manifold(s) you incorporate however many light cells that would correspond to the number of manifolds serving as both heat re-capture devices and mufflers, and you use primarily the light cells to generate electricity to juice up a super-capacitor-bank-equipped car battery (look up super capacitor banks), and use the excess electricity to put torque to the crankshaft using the starter-generator motor - which can also be used for regenerative engine breaking, RPM-matching for super smooth gear shifts, super smooth start-and-stop function along with takeoff torque boost (all of which RAM's e-Torque system already does) - creating a proper hybrid solution, and maybe even configure the light cells to work as catalytic converters while you're at it, just for good measure, or at least put cats in front of them to make the most of it. Running turbos would also really benefit this combined solution as it creates higher EGT's, which would just be harnessed by the light cells. Most of these solutions are already proven technologies that are already in use in various different areas, just not combined together in a factory produced vehicle. RAM's e-Torque system comes the closest, but the electric motor they use doesn't generate enough juice to provide additional torque over the whole RPM range, which only makes it a so called mild hybrid system. But the concept is great, especially if you where to harness the excess heat that's usually wasted out the tail pipe to produce "excess" electricity. All of these technologies put together and tuned in properly would first of all bump up the fuel economy by *_at least_* 50%. And thanks to the Speed of Air pistons you would also increase power and torque from normal combustion by 5-15% with the biggest increase in the low RPM's which is where it matters the most. But you would also *_DRAMATICALLY_* reduce the amount of unburnt fuel, soot and other harmful emissions, which greatly extends the lifespan of the engine oil and the engine itself, and *_completely_* nullifies the point of an EGR (which just kills engines prematurely anyway). And if you have catalytic converters you will have all the exhaust cleaning you would ever need for either gasoline or diesel engines. DPF's would also be moot at that point, along with DEF. That's how powerful just the Speed of Air piston upgrade is by itself. You seriously need to look those things up if you haven't! They truly are revolutionary! I believe that even a crude version of this light cell technology would make a big difference for any vehicle using an ICE, especially combined with some sort of starter-generator motor. The super capacitor bank would *_greatly_* extend the lifespan of whatever battery you couple that with, combining the benefits of readily available quick burst power with a gentler slow paced charging current to greatly reduce stress to the battery. And the starter-generator motor solution picks up the slack in a lot of areas to make it a really smooth driving, smooth shifting, efficient and plenty powerful hybrid platform, especially aided by that light cell solution. Take it for what it is, but I truly believe in a combined solution like the one I describe. A fun tidbit in all this: The germans are developing a water injection system that scavenges water vapor from exhaust gas *_and_* condensation from A/C systems to create a self-filling water injection system. Really clever if you ask me! Properly configured water-methanol/ethanol (or just water) injection systems have some really interesting benefits to both gas and diesel ICE's that you should look up if you haven't. Especially a non-methanol type system is actually really safe. It basically has no downsides, other than the fact that you occasionally need to refill the water tank such a system uses with distilled water. And that's what the germans are currently working around to eliminate as well.
catalytic converters already get 1000 centigrade hot, so a large one built with quarts encapsulated sodium low pressure lamps & tuned band-cap matched photovoltaics could convert exhaust heat energy into HEV traction battery charging while the engine is on, radically improving overall system efficiency or radically lowering fuel consumption
really good idea. the trouble is... all the light from the inside is lost, and you can only collect light from the edge, you need to heat the sodium without losing it,
I woke up in the middle of the night once with an idea for using waste heat. I googled, and unfortunately, someone had beat me to it (at least in a lab setting, I found a paper on it). Basically you use piezoelectric fins as a radiator, turning the movement of heat from the heat source to the ambient air to generate electricity. Basically it's the same technology that we use to turn thermostats on and off scaled up. Probably would add a lot of weight, so might not be worth it for cars and such, but another way to deal with converting waste heat to electricity.
@@nacoran We often make things overly complex. This video is a good example of trying to keep it simple. i agree that it is very easy to overcomplicate something to the point of any potential benefits being nullified. It seems to me that we are not used to thinking of building simple, efficient, synergetic systems. In reality. Most of our systems are synergetic. In many cases we only go as far as we need to go to get a system to work. Then we get used to working within that system instead of looking at ways to make large scale changes. This seems to be partly the problem of industry.
Formula 1 cars have energy recovery systems (ERS) and been doing this sort of thing for at least a handful of years now. Imperfectly of course but they're still pretty amazing relative to 'no ERS'.
I was not too impressed with the "Light Cell" until the end of the video when you brilliantly combined it with a normal piston based internal combustion engine. The problem might be in getting a high enough temperature from the exhaust to, more or less, fluoresce the sodium. Anyone interested in working on the idea might want to try an old school automotive mechanics tool called a "vortex tube" to provide an incredibly high temperature air flow to heat the sodium.
@@CUBETechie Anyplace you want to separate hot and cool air that is pressurized a vortex tube is the simple way to go but the tube in this application may need to be made with ceramics because of much higher temps than standard mechanics compressed shop air. mIKEY
Electric hybrid cars need small efficient generators as range extenders so they can have small batteries for day to day driving without range anxiety. Attaching it to a big clunky piston engine would defeat the point. Your typical car engine sends about a third of its energy out the radiator a third out the exhaust pipe and a third to the wheels. If the predictions are right tis will be more effiecient by itself.
Or you know we could scrap the car idea and go for trains, which if we’re talking electric trains, can be at least 100 times efficient as car travel per person.
I could see it being used as a generator in a hybrid configuration using waste heat from standard internal combustion engine but having it as a standalone power unit doesn't seem viable.
The main issue I see with your plan of adding this setup to an existing ICE, is that the exhaust temps aren’t high enough to boil the salt. Exhaust headers can reach 1600° after a hard drive. NaCl boils at 2669°F, so you’d most likely have to reintroduce fuel after the header to heat it back up enough to make the light cell function.
Combining this with a modern Sterling engine of some kind (like Karno), to make electric power directly from the waste heat would really squeeze the extra efficiency out of it.
It looks like a recouperator to preheat the intake air would be better, if this works that is. Thought you can only get the sodium yellow through electric discharge not just by heating it up.
the problem i've seen across videos dealing with both sterling engines, and also peltier related devices is that there seem to be a loss of efficiency over time. its hard to prevent the temperature from equalizing. and since both really require a large temperature difference on both sides of the device it ends up getting less and less efficient the longer it runs.
fun tangent fact: "this orange light is the superior green + blue screen CGI replacement that Disney used back in the old times where CGIs weren't a thing.
That’s right. That specific frequency of yellow is so narrow that you can filter it out without changing any of the other colors in the shot. So one strip of film would see the yellow as white, while another would see it as black. And that is how the great mattes for Marry Poppins worked.
i think thats why i got recommended this video. i had just watched steven mould's black flame video, and had previously watched corridor crew's video on it.
This is real. The principle is well established. But you’re overstating what they claim for efficiency. They don’t claim to be that efficient. @danielle_fong, the founder, made a comment here, but it’s not showing up for some reason.
they would need to keep the solar cells cool too. The temprature of a solar cell greatly effects its efficiancy and at that power density they would definitely need an active cooling solution.
@@TwoBitDaVinci a Solution to cooling would be to use a clear liquid with the same refractive index of the glass and use a regular radiator and fan setup. Maybe putting it between the PV cell and the lamp with a small vacuum between the lamp and the liquid (in another tube) so as not to cool the lamp
Well in theory, because it would be able to use most of the light coming and there is less over all IR light - they would stay cooler than your sun driven panels would.
pn junctions are inherently thin so that most of the light passes through without exciting electron-hole pairs. The bottom material is mostly reflective so that the light passes back through and generates more electricity. The reflection coefficient is 90% or so. If the reflected light excites more sodium, then a little less than half is emitted toward the photocell again. The rest is absorbed by the heat exchanger surface and converted back to heat. This (sufficiently) hot surface does excite sodium, but it also emits significant blackbody radiation to be radiated away and to heat up the photocells and reduce their efficiency.
Very true. You could channel the incoming air stream through heat exchanger fins on the back of the PV cells to keep them cooler though, and it would also act as a preheater for the air. Also, these newer PV absorber semiconductors have amazing absorption coefficients - unlike silicon which needs 150 micrometers to absorb most of the light, germanium carbide only needs to be 15 micrometers thick. They will get really hot though, even with cooling, so like others, I really doubt these efficiency figures.
Thank you for providing enough details to know that this is likely a pipe dream. Seems like too much energy would be lost between them different energy exchanges. I’ll wait for the more dense batteries
14:20 I think you answered your own question earlier. We'd need the engine to be made out of copper to take the raw heat and get sodium up to temp. As it is we need to cool the aluminum engine blocks to keep them from melting. At these lower temps, you'll need to find a different material to glow and of course the appropriate PV material. You're essentially down in Peltier element territory, and while I've long wondered why we don't strategically strap peltier elements to car engines to recapture heat energy as electricity, I think the overwhelming answer is that you can't put them close enough to the heat to be effective while keeping the engine easy enough to manufacture.
ANY contamination in the combustion chamber would lead to different wavelengths being created and loss of efficiency. ANY inefficiencies in combustion (change of incoming temperature, change in air pressure / altitude, humidity, ....) would result in deposits on the glass cutting efficiency. Etc. There have been many proposed propulsion mechanisms that rely on super pure fuels (ex: fuel cells) that fail because of costs, contamination, inability to maintain the purity over time/transport, etc. It MIGHT work, but only after massive engineering inputs ($$$s) and only in very specific applications.
@@TwoBitDaVinci_"research and engineering"_ hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Heat is accelerating the aging proccess of pv-panels. Ageing is lowering the efficiency through lifetime exponentialy and the heat lowers the lifetime.
I'd think the more efficient you got the conversion the less that would be an issue... you are converting the heat to light, then converting the light to electricity. The more efficiently you do that the less waste heat you have, and on a moving vehicle you could add some air cooling. I think you're right though. Managing that heat is going to be critical. I really didn't get an idea of the scale on this... I know that, with the exception of some low speed concept vehicles you can't power a car with solar panels for continuous travel (day/night issues aside). This is 4x as efficient as regular solar cells... but you'd still need pretty significant surface area for the cells, although obviously you can fold them in ways you can't fold a panel you want to catch the sun.
As a long time owner of a Hyundai Sonata hybrid (before they got cheap) I've been trying a hundred ways to increase range and efficiency. Capturing the heat from engine exhaust just makes sense. Build an adapter that can transfer the heat from engine exhaust and stand up to the environment of a car engine or exhaust system and a way to store the extra energy then you got my vote. Need a car to test it on?
Now I understood the context of bandgap and photoelectric energy. What if we made photovoltaic cells (for roofs, not light cells) with multiple layers of photoelectric materials, each having its own bandgap? The layers would be thin so unused light can be captured by the layer below with the corresponding bandgap. The layers would be laid on a mirrored surface, so light reaching the mirror is reflected again towards the different layers and hence increase efficiency.
yeah, that would be a multi junction cell! Currently the challenge is to allow unabsorbed light to pass through higher layers to lower ones... but yes multi junction cells will eventualy be a thing, and can increase efficiency of solar to north of 40% 2x what we have now!
For size constraints this could be a good idea, but every layer is adding cost, for example 5 layers stacked with 5 different bandgaps, could cost the same as 5 normal panels we use today. The multi layer solar cell record is 47-48% efficiency, so only around twice as good as a normal solar cell, but maybe 5 times as expensive to produce depending on how many layers used. The normal cells we use today would still be much more efficient $/watt power then multi layer solar panels.
@@zaakoc Multi layered cells are multiple cells stacked on top of each other. Any fabrication breakthrough of the cells would apply to normal 1 layer cells too. The price difference between 1 layer and multi layer should stay roughly the same no matter how many breakthroughs.
Thanks for covering this Ricky. As micro-turbine gas-electric generators already are capable of about 70% efficiency, are very compact and simple, why not use them instead combustion photovoltaics? In regards to your concept of photovoltaic ICE exhaust power recovery, I'm thinking that if you were able to recover 50% of the waste energy from an ICE exhaust using photovoltaic generator, you would be recovering about 15% of the total engine thermal losses. Having worked with large Exhaust heat exchangers (stack robbers) to capture waste exhaust heat, but due exhaust restriction and back-pressure reducing engine power, we typically only recovered about 30% of exhaust heat. If similar was the case with photovoltaic recovery, you would only be recovering about 15% of the waste energy in the exhaust stream, and something like a exhaust power recovery microturbine, adapted from a turbo-charger to drive an electric generator might be as efficient and less expensive. BTW: Back in the 80's when I was working for in the Oil and Gas Industry and dealing with HPS and Mulit-Vapor lighting systems, the thought of using high temperature combustion gas to produce combustion based lighting using a multi-vapor tubes for remote off-grid locations occurred to me. I mentioned it to some engineering colleagues, and we estimated the efficiency could be considerably higher than electrically excited tubes but the maintenance, cost and complexities of producing such a system would likely be practical and affordable, plus having combustion sources in flammable environments is not suitable.
I realy enjoyed the new style... finaly you start to dig into those projects and not only read the advertisements they make... this explanation was perfect...
I don't think exhaust gas from a regular engine would be hot enough to melt salt and make it glow bright. You definitely raised many interesting points that got us all thinking about it.
About 20-25 years ago, I can't remember who did it(I want to say Smokey Yunick but I'm not sure). Did an experiment on a 4 cylinder Ford engine where he heats up the F/A mixture to 440 degrees F. This completely dried the mixture allowing much more complete combustion increasing fuel mileage and horsepower exponentially from about 130 HP to about 300 HP. With about half the fuel consumption. I don't know why it was never developed more, but it looked very promising.
The issues with Yunick's "adiabatic engine" were durability of the ceramic/metal seals and emissions. To use an analogy, you can't mass-manufacture an F1 engine for use in non-race-cars.
@@orionbetelgeuse1937Radiated where? A real implementation of this thing would have the sodium inside an insulated mirror and we do know how to make mirrors for specific wavelengths, practically no IR would get out. Exhaust gasses would also go through a heat exchanger with incoming combustion air to achieve 95+% heating efficiency like a condensing furnace. Intake air can also be routed around the device to pick up any heat that got through insulation. Efficiently heating sodium to incandescence and keeping it there is effectively a 20+ years old solved problem. Seems to me like it is all about how cost-effective, efficient and durable the sodium-PV part of the process actually is.
@@teardowndan5364 a heated thing radiates energy at various wavelenghts from infrared to visible light. For instance a lightbulb has the filament made from tungsten but the radiation produced is not monochromatic just on the spectral lines of the tungsten. the same will happen with the glass tube and the sodium. It will produce some yellow light but also a lot of infrared. All the energy radiated at wavelenghts bigger than the yellow light for which the panel is tuned is lost because it cannot be captured and the light with shorter wavelengths will be captured but with losses heating the panel.
Fascinating approach and with the right material and engineering it looks doable. The problems are always in the details and the engineering tolerances and efficiencies.
The problem, assuming the claims are valid, is that automotive engines have highly variable power needs. This system seems likely to be tuned to a very specific power output level to achieve its very high efficiency. That is the opposite of what a car needs. At best, in a car, is you use this as a means of recharging a depleted battery array. At that point, this power system is in competition with fixed point public utilities. So instead of comparing its efficiency to a cars IC engine, you should be comparing it to the efficiency of grid scale coal, natural gas or nuclear power plants.
Most EVs only use a fraction of their range each day there batteries are oversized for range anxiety and those odd trips. A small compact efficient lightweight generator like this would be great range extender for those odd trips so the battery can be much smaller lightweight increasing maneuverability, efficiency and reducing the cost of the electric vehicle without lugging round a heavy complex piston generator like current hybrids do. As the generator in such a plug in hybrid is just used to recharge the battery it does not need to be capable of variable loads at all.
I do love the thought of merging it into a traditional combustion engine. Even if the efficiency gains are too small to contribute to forward motion, it may at least be able to replace or at least supplement the alternator, freeing up some load on the engine and being able to reap the benefits of that extra efficiency with minimal effort, possibly easily enough to be swapped into existing ICE powered cars. It would also mean, depending on how much heat is absorbed, that your cooling system doesn't have to work quite as hard when the battery is being charged from this system.
Fuel cells work through combustion as well. It's just that the combustion reaction is facilitated by an electron exchange across a dielectric membrane. Recapture of waste heat from fuel cells using Sebeck units improves efficiency. Using thermo-optical conversion through a narrow band material would allow more of the heat to be recaptured using the photoelectric effect. I have a hard time believing the 80% efficiency number, but it is a good idea.
Could also be geothermal - all you need is a high temperature for sodium. Bury the sodium PV cells in the mantle, instead of steam generators. But current ones slso need cooling and thermal management. No pv cell can just perfectly function at high temp long term.
the point of using sodium is it emits light at only one wavelength. so having a special solar cell that is fine tuned to that specific wavelength increases efficiency. using another compound ruins that.
I heard that too, but I will not believe it before I seen external independent tests. If it is true it will come to all boats and trucks near you soon.
This isn't far-fetched, since truck-sized Diesel engines are already 40% efficient. You could add a steam engine to convert a little waste heat back into more energy or squirt water into the cylinders. I haven't looked at what they're doing.
I am neither a physicist nor an engineer, nor do I play one on TV, nor have I slept recently in a Holiday Inn Express. I am not sure about color or monochromaticity, but High-Intensity Discharge and Low-Pressure Sodium lamps operate at 150 to 210C (300-410F) which might be inserted post-catalytic converter for electrical generation. Also, since there is much infrared light energy, I would think there should be investigations into band-gap tuning of Perovskite or other cells. Hopefully, they would be less finicky and more long-lasting than the fuel-cells I've worked with. Anyway to gain energy and reduce pollution is worth a look IMHO.
I thought this might of been converting existing ICE vehicles by swapping the transmission with a generator, a small solid state battery, and electric motor transaxle. You get the sound of ICE, the cost effectiveness of a simple conversion, and no range anxiety of EVs. Edison Motors has done this with diesel pickups.
There's no way in hell they will work with any efficiency. Lighting a candle and then trying to gather a miniscule amount of light energy with a solar panel is the stupidest way to do it.
The effieciency lies in matching the band gap of the photovoltaic cell to the narrow yellow emission band (spectral line) of the hot sodium. That is where Danielle Fong, et al., thought outside the box.
Forget the candles. How much power is going through a car engine, jet aircraft engine, or large rocket engine like SpaceX Raptor? Raptor is around 8 gigawatts. If the energy conversion efficiency is the same 80% quoted earlier then that’s 6.4 gigawatts of electricity. California is using 19 gigawatts right as I type this, so about 3 Raptors worth of propellant burn is needed (about 310 pounds methane per second per Raptor, so around 900-1,000 pounds per second for all of California).
A problem is that sodium won't emit 589 nm light unless it gets much, much hotter than you can achieve by harvesting waste heat from an engine. Sodium vapor lamps work by heating it to well above 1000°C. That's why they need to use quartz or sapphire: those temperatures would melt glass and copper. (Even quartz is marginal.)
I’m no expert, but I see more questions about this system, many of which have been brought up by other commenters. My first thought is its thermal footprint, which, to me, seems counterproductive to what it claims to aspire to as a producer of efficient, clean energy. Second is, how is the sodium - salt - being carried in what form and how is it being managed. Do you just run down to the store and pick up a ten-pound bag of salt, dump it in the system and it takes care of the rest? Then there’s the primary fuel - regular gasoline or other things like hydrogen. The consumer or end-user will have to maintain and manage that. And with this system you have two sources to always worry about, which seems inconvenient. I’m no chemist, but if hydrogen is used and combusted with salt, what are the resulting products? I did a quick Google and, if correct, the result would be nitric acid, which was a component of smog - as nitric oxide - when motor vehicles used leaded gasoline and before catalytic converters. I may have the wrong information, but this doesn’t sound good. Other commenters call this a scam. I say it’s more like a new Theranos in the making. It promises much, but doesn’t appear to be anything there when you look past the hype.
I've read that heat damages regular solar panels and reduces their efficiency over time. Why wouldn't the high temperature from heating the sodium also similarly damage the photovoltaics?
On the internal combustion engine idea the Catalytic converter creates lots of heat while catalyzing. Using that waste energy would be awesome. Im sure it would be possible to pull the heat from the cooling system and air conditioning and concentrate it too. Imagine how small an internal combustion engine could be if it were 90% efficient having the extra power made into electricity to assist driving the wheels.
I like this format - Both describe new concepts created by others, AND extrapolate on the concept and provide a technical rationale for why the extrapolation may be plausible.
Yes in car there's multiple escaping heat sources that might be possible to recycle back into self charging if the heat can light up a substance, and or infrared spectrum can be used...but stray voltage within the car system might also be exploitable if electrostatic motors are real...Even in a non car design though, 1) polymer should be fed and store heat...2) the heat should radiate infrared energy and a filter on thermophotovoltaic panel should use it, OR the heat should cause polymer to glow in uv spectrum. Panels on roof is too vulnerable to weather/vandalism, but thermal panels are just heat collection so easier. Heat can also be pressurized for improved efficiency...
Sodium light has a color temperature of 2200K. This means that the Sodium needs to have this temperature to be able to emit light, (or if electricity flows through the sodium gas in a lamp at a lower temperature 900K, this is a different principle were electrons are knocked out of orbit creating a photon) .The glas tube needs to be even hotter due to the thermal resistance between the combustion chamber and the Sodium compartment. Melting point of Quartz is around 2000K, wonder how they fix that. If you want to reuse the heath from a combustion engine (40% power; 30% low temperature heath from the cooling system ; 30% heath from the exhaust at around 1100K) you need heath of at least 2200K, this is not the case for a combustion engine. In general the higher the combustion temperature the more mechanical energy can be generated. But... there are "no" materials available with high melting temperatures that can be used for (transparent and other)parts. The principle could work but I can't think of a solution to have a colder quartz tube sandwiched between a much hotter combustion camber and sodium compartment, while maintaining a good transparency for the 580nm Photo voltaic cells don't like high temperatures, sitting "close" to the sodium compartment requires a solution.
First of all, thank you for your videos. They are extremely interesting, I really like them. Regarding your idea about enhancing the yield of a reciprocating engine heating sodium until it glows, consider capturing heat at the exhaust pipe level rather than the combustion chamber. This approach avoids diminishing the mechanical energy of expanding gasses. High-performance engines, especially those with high RPMs or turbocharging, have exhaust pipes that get extremely hot, sometimes glowing red. By utilizing this waste heat, you can harness additional energy without compromising engine performance. Just a thought.
Cosworth makes a generator using catalytic converters to combust fuel. The gas drives a generator to feed power into a turbine and then into batteries and electric motors. The efficiency is down around an ice engine but because there is no moving parts it is light and fuel agnostic
I think the key to making this work is transparent solar cells. Seems that with germanium you can stack multiple layers on top of each other, that could greatly increase the efficiency in a cilinder, and maybe cap it off with a mirror too.
I would not throw the exhaust energy out the back. I would use a regenerator to capture more of the heat and further cool the exhaust gasses. This in turn would require less fuel to reach and maintain operating temperatures. I like your hybrid approach. In theory you could fit them to existing vehicles. Only issue is you can't get the NaCl substrate hotter than the factory exhaust gasses without some sort of heat pump.
That is amazing! What about using the exhaust as a means of direct propulsion/car-levitation as well? That would reduce the frictional forces between the tires and road, and further increase the engine's efficiency.
Look at each step. Combustion: Air with 20 % oxygen is mixed with assume a gas fuel and burned. It's volume is greater then the air and fuel combined by a significant ratio so it will push the air and fuel gas out of the combustion section. The solution is a vertical mounted system where the less dense hot combustion product have buoyancy in room temperature air. However the exhaust and still burning fuel and air will either speed up and create more drag or the area increases. Radiant, and convection heating occurs heating the container of the combustion. That heat needs to be conducted, radiated, and convected to a heat sink. In this concept the final means of moving thermal energy is by radiation of the sodium at 589 nm wave length. This can only occur, with neither of the other methods being significant, if the gap in which this occurs in a vacuum and the surface is pure sodium. Table salt melts at 800C and sodium at 98C. Most efficient temperature is 300C. The salt needs to react with something to combine with chlorine being a gas that is removed by the vacuum pump. The only way of obtaining pure sodium. The sodium a liquid at 300C need to be a a porous ceramic vessel with sodium wetting the outer surface completely yet held in place by surface tension. There will be losses because something has to hold this assembly in place and achieve a vacuum. The voltaic Germanium semiconductor devices will never by 100 % efficient. however; the conversion of heat to electricity occurs in a gap between the terminals at different voltages. Physical features, so some fraction of the surface seen by the radiation hits them. The germanium is going to be heated by the radiation not converted into electricity and the also heated by the current. The combustion gases lowest temperature is about 300C so that the radiation is sufficient to make electricity. The hot gas enters the heat exchanger that is likely a cross flow device which is significantly less efficient than a counter flow heat exchanger. (the image) The inlet gases are heated cooling the exhaust gas. Buoyancy is the pump that moves the gases through the system. The hot inlet gases are now also buoyant but less then the average combustion gases. More resistance to the flow in the system as the inlet is below the then heated inlet gases. Shut down is another problem because the vacuum must end and the chlorine returned and combine with the sodium to make salt. I do not think they can achieve the efficiency predicted. My guess is that they didn't calculate all the losses and energy to needed to set the conditions like vacuum. I had spent 20 years supporting Electrical engineers and know that the minor losses are not included in the models used to design circuits. This didn't improve significantly when finite element is used to design the circuits.
Nobody ever seems to factor in energy used not to propel a vehicle but cabin comfort... In EVs you spent a lot of energy in the North just keeping the cabin warm enough to be comfortable. In the South we do it to keep cool... You should work on the 20% loss to warm the cabin... And also to use it to cool the cabin much in the same way you use a propane flame to make a refrigerator/freezer!!! Or creating fresh water straight out of the air... Which is good for still even more parts of the planet with scarcity of portable water!!!
Sounds like a mechanic nightmare. Also what happens when the inevitable exhaust gas buildup obscures the photovoltaic cells? There's almost no way you'd get a 100% burn of gases with no foreign elements especially if it's going to be commercially available.
A really big problem I see here is that the best photovoltaic cells are only about 25% efficient and those are very expensive, most common cells are only about 15%-20% efficient. So it doesn't matter how efficient your combustion is so long as it is reliant on photovoltaic to produce the output usable energy. As far as quantum dot photovoltaics goes those are a long way from being usable in the real world and certainly from being anything produced on scale.
this concept is amazing and shows what engineering is all about. take a hard problem and convert it to an easier, more solvable problem. it would be really interesting if you could do this with concentrated solar. have concentrated mirrors that burn a material to create a light at a wave length that you can capture more of with a cheaper material than pvs. thus, you up the efficiency and lower the costs.
I gotta admit I came into this video a total skeptic ready to tear this idea apart. I will say that the idea of converting heat to monochromatic light and then using a tuned photocell to convert it isnt just clever its a potential paradigm shift. Weve been boiling water to make electricity for many decades and this shows a path towards a new gold standard. Thoroughly impressed and will be watching this technology. Its even bwtter than the thermoacoustic solid states i had been studying earlier.
Standard ICE, if I am not mistaken, is chemical to mechanical, with waste heat. The light cell is chemical to thermal to electrical to mechanical. Again if I am understanding this proper. Combining the stages from various sources and requirements should increase the efficiency. Considering motors are more efficient at lower speeds and engines are at higher speeds, a combination without too much excessive demand on weight, structure and space requirements would win out.
It very probably is some sort of special fiber optics that consist not only of silicon in a very durable PES substrate but a metal element. I remember reading that it takes a matching frequency of light to harmonize with and propel electrons. Perhaps this can be used in car cylinder piston chambers to capture lost energy.. Since quantum dots arranged as knotted fibers can trap more energy maybe such are used for enhanced effect!
there are high pressure and low pressure sodium lamps. They do not use salt. They use sodium metal. You can see the sodium in a low sodium lamp. Only problem is that sodium is reactive when it comes into contact with water. Can you get enough heat from an internal combustion to light a low pressure sodium lamp while still cooling the engine?
About 20 years ago I knew a physicist who did government work that needed a security clearance. A colleague of his, a professor I knew, had developed a 70%+ efficient solar system. The patent was bought by a fossil fuel company and is still in a bottom drawer somewhere. To the people saying this is impossible because nothing substantial is left to be invented in this field, there _are_ things being invented, you just don't get to hear about them.
This isn't necessarily smoke and mirrors. The concept has been around for about thirty five years. I first heard of it in Popular Mechanic back in the day. The concept doesn't actually burn fuel like the ICE engine does. A Reformer splits apart molecules of the fuel. These are then fed into a fuel cell. This is used to drive electric motors for movement. Electricity is also used to power secondary systems. The drawback is the systems are full of membranes and costly platinum group metals.
I probably need to watch this several times, but the initial impression is that for something to burn in this way, it will consume oxygen and possibly emit noise at the same time. I have always been sceptical about the practicality of using hydrogen for most (probably all) forms of transport and believe that battery technology will develop rapidly, with a drop in price to match.
While I am very, very sceptical about this "Solid state engine", the idea of creating monochromatic light from heat and converting that light with a fine-tuned PV cell is interesting. However, as a heat source, concentrated sun light seems more reasonable. No exhaust means no energy loss due to still warm exhaust gas.
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i see problems with this and i will list them below
1 overheating of solar panels
2 difficulty to start in winter
3 fouling of system with impure fuel
4 risk of exploding/out of control burning with damage
5 HOW DO YOU TURN OFF MOLTEN SODIUM
I'm old enough to have lived through the era of the disposable blade, single and double-blade razors. My modern, multi-blade is much better. It lasts for months. Going back to the old way seems to me to be a scam. We have gone beyond disposable blades. Let's not go back.
@@marsfreelander5969 1 Gallium arsenide is the semiconductor that works best at high temperatures, and is protected by an infrared mirror and likely a vacuum gap. The back side could also be cooled by the incoming air.
2 Since when do bunsen burners and gas ovens have trouble starting in winter? This will much more reliably start in cold weather than a piston engine, and can help warm the batteries in a hybrid vehicle.
3 A modern burner combusts fuel much more completely and cleanly than the explosions in a piston engine, there is a constant flow with no moving parts in the way. A piston engine is much more vulnerable to fouling from impure fuel.
4 No more so than any other vehicle with a fuel tank.
5 Like a sodium vapor lamp it is likely contained in a chamber. When you turn off the burner it cools down.
8:15 No there's not only two possibilities. The salt is inside a double walled, sealed sapphire tube.
This is an interesting invention, BUT WE NEED TO STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUELS, AND HYDROGEN AT THIS POINT IS A BORDERLINE SCAM.
14:39 The waste heat from regular internal combustion engines is too low energy to be used efficiently this way. Thermodynamics.
*You should be embarrassed for posting this video.*
"Solid State Engine" - sounds more exciting words than photovoltaic gas lantern.
also not an engine until you strap an electric motor or some form of mechanical output to it.
Exactly.
It's not solid state either.
It uses a fuel which means it has a liquid or gas component.
Was going to say Blowtorch Solar Panel, You said it much better 🙂
I'll wait to see work in real life cause i have seen enough of Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos.
Hmm... interesting. Did you mention the fuel that is used? fossil fuel? or Hydrogen? would it in this case not be easier/ more efficient to use Hydrogen cells?
I'm no photovoltaics specialist, but I worked in a lab at a university where the people next door worked on micro-scale heat exchangers, and one of their projects was related to recovering waste heat from Concentrated Photovoltaic Cells (CPV), a system where a relatively cheap, large Fresnel-type lens diverts sunlight into a relatively expensive, small PV cell. The problem with that is that the cell efficiency was inversely proportional to its temperature, which is why they were trying to match these tiny heat exchangers with the tiny PV cells and use that heat to convert alcohol and plant oil into biodiesel.
This engine obviously works at high temperatures. Low-Pressure Sodium Vapor lamps work at about 300°C, and the assembly seems too compact for meaningful insulation, so these cells would be working at high, temperatures, and therefore at lowered efficiencies. I'd wait for independent confirmation of these numbers before believing these are even in the correct order of magnitude.
That’s exactly the issue. This would straight up melt these cells
My first thought was exactly wether this sodium lamp an cell system could be used to discharge excess heat from traditional PVs (improving their efficency) while at the same time obtaining some more electricity out of it.
Obviously your lab roommates were smarter than me, so I guess it wasn't doable/cheap enough.
just insulate the photovoltaic cells behind a double window. run cool air through the cell or with a vapour chamber
IF they said 15% or 20% I would be drooling. Modern Thermoelectric generator (TEG) modules are at most 5%, some TEG modules claim up to 15%, but when people claim above 50%, I get red flags. Besides, this thing is competing against Thermoelectric generators and maybe fuel cells depending on fuel quality, so it seems like someone is trying to get people to invest into a hole... not my thing.
*I mean... a woman invented this dude. You just spent more time pointing out why it won't work, than she did, to make it "work".*
This is so stupid, she had to be a drop out to not know the laws of physics says this is seriously impossible.
99% chance its a scam
I'll raise you to 99.9% scam
but it sounds so good....
It's not even a good one.
What my grandfather said about computers... some ideas are before their time 😊
Yep, you said it, "smoke and mirrors." Will be as 'successful' as Solyndra
This would work if thermodynamics would go for a coffee break while this is running...
Where does the heat go? If it is so efficient then the thing would not get hot. But there is a huge flame coming out of one end! I say BS. Total complete BS.
It's solid state I your using heat your byproduct is cooling
So there's still 30% of heat
As gasoline burns at 1500° and peeks at 3900° so that's a lot of exercises heat now we need exhaust and cooling
Also if this is as efficient as they say most likely it will be bought out and crushed
When a geet reactor is running efficiently its exhaust comes out close to ambient air temperature... soaking up heat to run a process can be done.
Its 60% efficient so 40% ends up as waste heat in the form of hot exhaust gases just like in any other combustion engine. I'm not sure what is there that you don't understand...
@@sznikers that's not what the picture is showing
@@slo3337 video says they get 60% efficiency, animation shows hot exhaust gases (flames) leaving tube shaped device...
100% - 60% = 40% here are your flames
Solid state combustion engine just sounds like a fuel cell with extra steps
BUT- nearly as high efficiency with more robust components, since there aren't currently any solid-state membrane fuel cell designs of large size.
Sounds like it is better tuned, more efficient, produces more useful higher gradient waste heat, and doesn't have the headache of storing and transporting H2.
@@ticthak Yep and the control systems should be much simpler too so maintenance would a lot less with a longer reactor/generator life. This is quite interesting actually. Use excess renewables to create stored chemical energy, the burn that energy in the reactor for emergencies/peak shaving and seasonal use. I hope they can get it to work at an industrial scale!
@@anydaynow01 Fuel cells can be made for multiple fuel types
but actually has zero similarity because there is no chemical reaction besides the combustion that produces heat. fuel > heat > light > electricity VS fuel > electricity. I don't know how the plan to extract so much heat from combustion gases though near needs to move from the gas to the sodium, so the exhaust gases temperature will be above sodium vapor temperature (260°C/533K) if you want to extract lets say 90% heat you need to have a heat source about ~5000 C/K.
It sounds like using exhaust gases in a hybrid car would hardly produce any sodium vapor or only with extremely low efficiency
Propane camping light check, solar panel check, save the planet, done 😂
China just recently released solid state battery EVs for sale so the US government decided to quadruple tariffs on EVs
@@luisrubalcava6331 Citation needed.
You forgot the table salt
@@testboga5991Shoot, I knew i was forgetting something.
I guess. A propane tank to light up cerium oxide mantle and then use the light to generate electricity using a solar panel?
So many issues with this thing I don't even know where to start. The pollution alone would be extremely difficult to control. It reminds me of cheap Chinese diesel heaters, actually.
* Pollution. There is no way to fully burn the fuel across a swath of power levels. They might be able to fully burn the fuel at a particular power level.
* Backpressure from dealing with exhaust products to remove unwanted byproducts.
* Efficiency of 60% with a hot exhaust? Not even possible. And 80% combined-cycle? I don't think that's possible either.
* The high temperature of the system will greatly shorten the equipment lifespan, let alone the solar cells.
* Build-up of byproducts on heat exchanger surfaces.
* Multiple conversion steps... another nail in the "efficiency" coffin.
The biggest red flag is having multiple conversion steps (fuel to heat, heat to light, light to cell, cell to electricity) and still claiming extreme efficiencies. That gets into "sell me the Brooklyn bridge" territory.
I don't think this thing is real.
-Matt
You forgot the biggest one: Even if the system works, burning gasoline is the worst way to heat table salt. Solar Concentrators, geothermal, nuclear, and even standard power plants would be better served integrating this than cars.
Similar to my first thought: How hot do those EV cells get exactly? And how efficient are they at that temperature and how long do they last at that temperature.
Too many steps and energy conversions. Buildup of byproducts reduces efficiency fast.
I know, for the fuel that is not burned in the first combustion, we could just add an afterburner for additional thrust out of the exhaust. Hey, it works for military jets, so why not here.
Jet car lmao
A modern burner for an external combustion engine consumes fuel much more completely and cleanly than the explosions in an internal combustion piston engine. A generator for a plug in battery hybrid vehicle does not need a variable power output.
As soon as I heard the efficiency figure I was like this is BS. Any basic understanding of how complex a jet engine is and you just laugh. You can't just have, "combustion", you need a compressor or to used a compressed oxidant (a rocket). The compressor alone robs more energy than he says will be lost in the full cycle. Lastly how on earth will you cool it enough for most of the energy to not be lost as heat?
So you get an animation and an explanation. Still seems sus to me. Thermal efficiency claims are unbelievably high. Extraordinary claims...yadayadayada.
I feel like we’re going in circles. Burning something to make energy from a solar panel to charge something … uhhh
And claiming it is at most 80%. LOL
@@UA-camWatcher264 That's my issue. There are many steps here, each with losses.
For 10 kw per gram? (It looked like they listed under 4 liters in a graph. So volumetric is great unlike Hydrogen)
That is on par with the best therotical batteries max potential! Lithium Air is said to be able to hold 12,300 watts per KG.
So yeah. That is outstanding!
I've already said TPV cells are the future. Or a part of it. For some applications.
MIT just made some that capture heat at 2,000 celius, get better with more heat, and have more than 45% effiency. Basically the same as our best turbines!
I say the future as in... The future is TPV cells plus nuclear or in ten years fusion!
Sadly... I am super skeptical. Feel like the DoD would be on top of this.
Just use sapphire... Oh yeah that is a great choice. So plentiful.
Pretty cool if true, and I bet a ton of applications could benefit from this.
TPV cells need more research. We waste so much heat, and potential energy. Having a part that captures that into electricity with no moving parts is a game changer for at least industrial purposes.
You left out the part where it burns green methane from whales.
@@dianapennepacker6854 Actually, an ideal use case would be to power a house using wood as fuel, and use the waste heat to heat the house in cold weather, and heat water in all weather.
I've been trying to conceive of an efficient "fuel into electricity" system for years, so I am also VERY skeptical that you can convert the energy twice and get even close to 80% efficiency. But I hope I'm wrong! I'd love an electric gas motorcycle that can go 1000miles on 4 gallons of gas 😊
yes!!! totally agree
Watch out for the ultra-hot exhaust cooking everything within a yard of it...
@@prophetzarquon1922 there is a heat exchanger at the flamey end .. so the gas coming out will be cooler than your room heater.
@@heartflame503 Heat exchanger _to where?_ It dumps it all upward?
@@prophetzarquon1922 it puts the heat back into the sodium to convert it into light and thus electricity.
A pulse jet engine is a solid state internal combustion engine.
I have WW2 vibes. :D
Jets (and rockets for that matter) are not internal combustion engines. One side of the engine is open, so the combustion isn't internal
Pulse jets are not solid state since they have moving parts (the valve flaps which cause the "buzz" in buzz bombs). A ram jet is solid state.
@@pilotusa Depends on the type of pulse jet. The Lockwood types have no moving parts.
@@jef_3006 Yes, but this distinction seems almost academic nowadays. A fireplace is where combustion occurs; your chimney flue is where the exhaust goes. Is your furnace a jet or an "internal" combustion engine? Or are neither "engines"? (Producing heat is a form of "work" or is only force/motion "work?") In a rocket, combustion occurs in the nozzle to accelerate the exhaust for thrust as it leaves the nozzle. In an ICE car, the values are simply little doors that open and close for inlet air followed by exhaust. Actually more of a "digital" or step-by-step combustion/exhaust cycle rather than a more analog/continuous flow-controlled system.
The exhaust gases carries out energy from the system in 3 forms. 1) Sensible heat, expressed in the temperature of the gases, which the thing will try to recover as much as possible (but no chance to recover fully), 2) Latent heat: any fuel with hydrogen content mixed with air and burned will produce water molecules, and there is significant energy absorbed just in the process of water vaporization (not stored in temperature but in the gaseous state), and this latent heat will be lost unless we have a condenser, 3) Kinetic energy of the outgoing exhaust gases, which could be partially recovered with yet another device, a turbine. I see too many conversions needed to even considering a 60%+ efficiency.
Yes,the first thing I thought of when I clicked on it was you would be dealing with the production of hydrocarbon exhaust,ie CO,CO2,etc
It takes a long, long time to make a reputation, and apparently 15:13 to break it.
The only legit science in this episode is the shaver.
Haha! Only the advert here is truthful! 😂😂😂 💯%
Actually the idea itself is solid, pun unintended. The fuel source would have to be really clean to avoid soot buildup. There might be applications where such a pin energy source to convert fuel to electricity is useful. Ships, big rigs, planes, etc.
those are legit, i want to get one of those, but damn they're expensive, but built to last
@@greghelton4668 If the idea works, then burning stuff to make electricity would still be the least efficient way of using it. Because at that point, really anything that heats up the salt is enough. And at that point, you may as well use a solar concentrator or something.
@@loneIyboy15 And said solar concentrator would be running on "free" energy, which is way better than using a fuel. But that's stationary power generation. This one is intended to move things, I guess.
I knew Danielle when she was doing her prior clean tech start-up, LightSail (grid scale energy storage). Unfortunately LightSail didn't beat out the battery tech that hit the market, and they folded.
I think her use of "LightCell" as a trade name is a riff off of her old company's name.
wow that's amazing, what are the odds!
@@TwoBitDaVinci ikr... not scammy at all
Could this work? My sliver of engineering knowledge says 'Maybe.' But I'm really doubting their claimed efficiency numbers. Build one, Let someone else test it, and I'll believe it.
That's what time is.
Local man discovers engineering for the first time.
No, shit sherlock. This is just a concept right now.
No dude. A woman invented it, lol. This is so stupid.
the whole hishschool dropout thing sounds like one of those 'fake miracle' stories they use for scams.
This video overstates what Lightcell themselves claim as far as efficiency, which is frustrating. The founder of the company, @danielle_fong, tried commenting to set the record straight, but for some reason the UA-cam algorithm has hid here reply.
Quartz is also a great way to filtrate bandwidth of light. Not to say it also has a higher melting point than regular glass. Glass is amorphous which makes it ineficiente to some light wavelengths.
I like the idea you pitched at the end there - combining a regular old ICE with the "light cell" - which got me thinking a little. And I think I've come up with a really efficient combined system.
Imagine this: 1) You have a solid, time-proven, fully balanced and port polished engine block of choice (let's do a V8) with Speed of Air pistons (seriously, look them up! Just do it!!!),
2) and instead of a traditional starter + alternator combination (which puts a toll on rotating the crankshaft just to charge the battery), you hook a 48-or-higher volt starter-generator electric motor to the crankshaft either directly or indirectly (kinda like RAM's very underrated e-Torque system which you should totally research if you haven't),
3) and after the exhaust manifold(s) you incorporate however many light cells that would correspond to the number of manifolds serving as both heat re-capture devices and mufflers,
and you use primarily the light cells to generate electricity to juice up a super-capacitor-bank-equipped car battery (look up super capacitor banks), and use the excess electricity to put torque to the crankshaft using the starter-generator motor - which can also be used for regenerative engine breaking, RPM-matching for super smooth gear shifts, super smooth start-and-stop function along with takeoff torque boost (all of which RAM's e-Torque system already does) - creating a proper hybrid solution, and maybe even configure the light cells to work as catalytic converters while you're at it, just for good measure, or at least put cats in front of them to make the most of it. Running turbos would also really benefit this combined solution as it creates higher EGT's, which would just be harnessed by the light cells.
Most of these solutions are already proven technologies that are already in use in various different areas, just not combined together in a factory produced vehicle. RAM's e-Torque system comes the closest, but the electric motor they use doesn't generate enough juice to provide additional torque over the whole RPM range, which only makes it a so called mild hybrid system. But the concept is great, especially if you where to harness the excess heat that's usually wasted out the tail pipe to produce "excess" electricity.
All of these technologies put together and tuned in properly would first of all bump up the fuel economy by *_at least_* 50%. And thanks to the Speed of Air pistons you would also increase power and torque from normal combustion by 5-15% with the biggest increase in the low RPM's which is where it matters the most. But you would also *_DRAMATICALLY_* reduce the amount of unburnt fuel, soot and other harmful emissions, which greatly extends the lifespan of the engine oil and the engine itself, and *_completely_* nullifies the point of an EGR (which just kills engines prematurely anyway). And if you have catalytic converters you will have all the exhaust cleaning you would ever need for either gasoline or diesel engines. DPF's would also be moot at that point, along with DEF. That's how powerful just the Speed of Air piston upgrade is by itself. You seriously need to look those things up if you haven't! They truly are revolutionary!
I believe that even a crude version of this light cell technology would make a big difference for any vehicle using an ICE, especially combined with some sort of starter-generator motor.
The super capacitor bank would *_greatly_* extend the lifespan of whatever battery you couple that with, combining the benefits of readily available quick burst power with a gentler slow paced charging current to greatly reduce stress to the battery. And the starter-generator motor solution picks up the slack in a lot of areas to make it a really smooth driving, smooth shifting, efficient and plenty powerful hybrid platform, especially aided by that light cell solution.
Take it for what it is, but I truly believe in a combined solution like the one I describe.
A fun tidbit in all this: The germans are developing a water injection system that scavenges water vapor from exhaust gas *_and_* condensation from A/C systems to create a self-filling water injection system. Really clever if you ask me! Properly configured water-methanol/ethanol (or just water) injection systems have some really interesting benefits to both gas and diesel ICE's that you should look up if you haven't. Especially a non-methanol type system is actually really safe. It basically has no downsides, other than the fact that you occasionally need to refill the water tank such a system uses with distilled water. And that's what the germans are currently working around to eliminate as well.
catalytic converters already get 1000 centigrade hot, so a large one built with quarts encapsulated sodium low pressure lamps & tuned band-cap matched photovoltaics could convert exhaust heat energy into HEV traction battery charging while the engine is on, radically improving overall system efficiency or radically lowering fuel consumption
really good idea. the trouble is... all the light from the inside is lost, and you can only collect light from the edge, you need to heat the sodium without losing it,
ENGLISH PRO TIP:
Quartz is a crystalline mineral.💎
Quarts are how you buy Milk, 🐮
or in Australia, beer 🍺 😃
@@cyberGEK what dose English have to do with quatz?
That's still to cool to cause sodium to incandescence
.
Cooling an exhaust stream below 100C means liquid water will come out the end not water vapour. I’m not going to explain how much of a problem that is
That finish was great. Trying to efficiently use the remaining energy. Creating symbiotic engines.
I woke up in the middle of the night once with an idea for using waste heat. I googled, and unfortunately, someone had beat me to it (at least in a lab setting, I found a paper on it). Basically you use piezoelectric fins as a radiator, turning the movement of heat from the heat source to the ambient air to generate electricity. Basically it's the same technology that we use to turn thermostats on and off scaled up. Probably would add a lot of weight, so might not be worth it for cars and such, but another way to deal with converting waste heat to electricity.
@@nacoran We often make things overly complex. This video is a good example of trying to keep it simple. i agree that it is very easy to overcomplicate something to the point of any potential benefits being nullified. It seems to me that we are not used to thinking of building simple, efficient, synergetic systems. In reality. Most of our systems are synergetic. In many cases we only go as far as we need to go to get a system to work. Then we get used to working within that system instead of looking at ways to make large scale changes. This seems to be partly the problem of industry.
Formula 1 cars have energy recovery systems (ERS) and been doing this sort of thing for at least a handful of years now.
Imperfectly of course but they're still pretty amazing relative to 'no ERS'.
I was not too impressed with the "Light Cell" until the end of the video when you brilliantly combined it with a normal piston based internal combustion engine. The problem might be in getting a high enough temperature from the exhaust to, more or less, fluoresce the sodium. Anyone interested in working on the idea might want to try an old school automotive mechanics tool called a "vortex tube" to provide an incredibly high temperature air flow to heat the sodium.
Can't the vortextube be used directly After the Gas turbine exhaust?
@@CUBETechie Anyplace you want to separate hot and cool air that is pressurized a vortex tube is the simple way to go but the tube in this application may need to be made with ceramics because of much higher temps than standard mechanics compressed shop air.
mIKEY
@ExxonMobil
⛽️🧂
Electric hybrid cars need small efficient generators as range extenders so they can have small batteries for day to day driving without range anxiety. Attaching it to a big clunky piston engine would defeat the point. Your typical car engine sends about a third of its energy out the radiator a third out the exhaust pipe and a third to the wheels. If the predictions are right tis will be more effiecient by itself.
Or you know we could scrap the car idea and go for trains, which if we’re talking electric trains, can be at least 100 times efficient as car travel per person.
I could see it being used as a generator in a hybrid configuration using waste heat from standard internal combustion engine but having it as a standalone power unit doesn't seem viable.
The main issue I see with your plan of adding this setup to an existing ICE, is that the exhaust temps aren’t high enough to boil the salt.
Exhaust headers can reach 1600° after a hard drive. NaCl boils at 2669°F, so you’d most likely have to reintroduce fuel after the header to heat it back up enough to make the light cell function.
Combining this with a modern Sterling engine of some kind (like Karno), to make electric power directly from the waste heat would really squeeze the extra efficiency out of it.
It looks like a recouperator to preheat the intake air would be better, if this works that is. Thought you can only get the sodium yellow through electric discharge not just by heating it up.
the problem i've seen across videos dealing with both sterling engines, and also peltier related devices is that there seem to be a loss of efficiency over time. its hard to prevent the temperature from equalizing. and since both really require a large temperature difference on both sides of the device it ends up getting less and less efficient the longer it runs.
You can install this engine in a rear-engine design and completely eliminate the problem of other people tailgating you.
fun tangent fact: "this orange light is the superior green + blue screen CGI replacement that Disney used back in the old times where CGIs weren't a thing.
That’s right. That specific frequency of yellow is so narrow that you can filter it out without changing any of the other colors in the shot. So one strip of film would see the yellow as white, while another would see it as black. And that is how the great mattes for Marry Poppins worked.
i think thats why i got recommended this video. i had just watched steven mould's black flame video, and had previously watched corridor crew's video on it.
Interesting; thanks for bringing this to our attention.
With all that heat escaping out of the exhaust, it can't possibly be that efficient. Heat is energy.
This is real. The principle is well established. But you’re overstating what they claim for efficiency. They don’t claim to be that efficient. @danielle_fong, the founder, made a comment here, but it’s not showing up for some reason.
If the comment was made and deleted… I will immediately unsubscribe and flag this channel. I hope we can find out
@@jjptech I suspect it was an algorithm mistake, not intentional
they would need to keep the solar cells cool too.
The temprature of a solar cell greatly effects its efficiancy and at that power density they would definitely need an active cooling solution.
great point
Maybe flow the input fuel and/or air along the back of the cells?
@@TwoBitDaVinci a Solution to cooling would be to use a clear liquid with the same refractive index of the glass and use a regular radiator and fan setup. Maybe putting it between the PV cell and the lamp with a small vacuum between the lamp and the liquid (in another tube) so as not to cool the lamp
Well in theory, because it would be able to use most of the light coming and there is less over all IR light - they would stay cooler than your sun driven panels would.
pn junctions are inherently thin so that most of the light passes through without exciting electron-hole pairs. The bottom material is mostly reflective so that the light passes back through and generates more electricity. The reflection coefficient is 90% or so. If the reflected light excites more sodium, then a little less than half is emitted toward the photocell again. The rest is absorbed by the heat exchanger surface and converted back to heat. This (sufficiently) hot surface does excite sodium, but it also emits significant blackbody radiation to be radiated away and to heat up the photocells and reduce their efficiency.
Plus all the exhaust heat loss and compressor losses (is not mentioned but is required as this is functionally a jet engine)
Very true. You could channel the incoming air stream through heat exchanger fins on the back of the PV cells to keep them cooler though, and it would also act as a preheater for the air. Also, these newer PV absorber semiconductors have amazing absorption coefficients - unlike silicon which needs 150 micrometers to absorb most of the light, germanium carbide only needs to be 15 micrometers thick. They will get really hot though, even with cooling, so like others, I really doubt these efficiency figures.
Thank you for providing enough details to know that this is likely a pipe dream. Seems like too much energy would be lost between them different energy exchanges. I’ll wait for the more dense batteries
14:20 I think you answered your own question earlier. We'd need the engine to be made out of copper to take the raw heat and get sodium up to temp. As it is we need to cool the aluminum engine blocks to keep them from melting. At these lower temps, you'll need to find a different material to glow and of course the appropriate PV material. You're essentially down in Peltier element territory, and while I've long wondered why we don't strategically strap peltier elements to car engines to recapture heat energy as electricity, I think the overwhelming answer is that you can't put them close enough to the heat to be effective while keeping the engine easy enough to manufacture.
ANY contamination in the combustion chamber would lead to different wavelengths being created and loss of efficiency. ANY inefficiencies in combustion (change of incoming temperature, change in air pressure / altitude, humidity, ....) would result in deposits on the glass cutting efficiency. Etc. There have been many proposed propulsion mechanisms that rely on super pure fuels (ex: fuel cells) that fail because of costs, contamination, inability to maintain the purity over time/transport, etc. It MIGHT work, but only after massive engineering inputs ($$$s) and only in very specific applications.
If this is actually as advertised, a 1 gal size lawn mower should be available for christmas.
lol yeah... somehow I doubt it but its just great to see that research and engineering is being done on all sorts of possibilities
@@TwoBitDaVinci_"research and engineering"_
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Heat is accelerating the aging proccess of pv-panels. Ageing is lowering the efficiency through lifetime exponentialy and the heat lowers the lifetime.
I'd think the more efficient you got the conversion the less that would be an issue... you are converting the heat to light, then converting the light to electricity. The more efficiently you do that the less waste heat you have, and on a moving vehicle you could add some air cooling. I think you're right though. Managing that heat is going to be critical.
I really didn't get an idea of the scale on this... I know that, with the exception of some low speed concept vehicles you can't power a car with solar panels for continuous travel (day/night issues aside). This is 4x as efficient as regular solar cells... but you'd still need pretty significant surface area for the cells, although obviously you can fold them in ways you can't fold a panel you want to catch the sun.
@@nacoran Sodium will not convert all its energy to light, that's a pipe dream, it will get hot
perhaps i'm missing something, but i don't see a recent innovation here, they are lighting a candle next to a solar panel?
Yea, but.. it's a really bright candle. Surely nobody's ever thought of that.
it is the small bandgap PVs, which with use of monochromatic lightsource achieve high efficiency.
With the panel designed to work with the light coming from the burning fuel.
@@WolfeSaber9933 ya, perhaps the way they are optimizing the waveform is an advancement
Yes, but they are tuning both the light and the solar panel to work better with each other.
As a long time owner of a Hyundai Sonata hybrid (before they got cheap) I've been trying a hundred ways to increase range and efficiency. Capturing the heat from engine exhaust just makes sense. Build an adapter that can transfer the heat from engine exhaust and stand up to the environment of a car engine or exhaust system and a way to store the extra energy then you got my vote. Need a car to test it on?
I love learning about different technologies! Thanks for sharing this and making it easy to digest. Keep shining ☀️
Thank you! Will do!
Now I understood the context of bandgap and photoelectric energy. What if we made photovoltaic cells (for roofs, not light cells) with multiple layers of photoelectric materials, each having its own bandgap? The layers would be thin so unused light can be captured by the layer below with the corresponding bandgap. The layers would be laid on a mirrored surface, so light reaching the mirror is reflected again towards the different layers and hence increase efficiency.
yeah, that would be a multi junction cell! Currently the challenge is to allow unabsorbed light to pass through higher layers to lower ones... but yes multi junction cells will eventualy be a thing, and can increase efficiency of solar to north of 40% 2x what we have now!
For size constraints this could be a good idea, but every layer is adding cost, for example 5 layers stacked with 5 different bandgaps, could cost the same as 5 normal panels we use today.
The multi layer solar cell record is 47-48% efficiency, so only around twice as good as a normal solar cell, but maybe 5 times as expensive to produce depending on how many layers used.
The normal cells we use today would still be much more efficient $/watt power then multi layer solar panels.
@@TwoBitDaVinci Watched this Idea being implemented over the years.
Multi layer cells are the future of solar cells.
Love your channel!
@@larsjrgensen5975 As it's adopted the cost of multi layer cells will drop.
@@zaakoc Multi layered cells are multiple cells stacked on top of each other. Any fabrication breakthrough of the cells would apply to normal 1 layer cells too.
The price difference between 1 layer and multi layer should stay roughly the same no matter how many breakthroughs.
Thanks for covering this Ricky. As micro-turbine gas-electric generators already are capable of about 70% efficiency, are very compact and simple, why not use them instead combustion photovoltaics?
In regards to your concept of photovoltaic ICE exhaust power recovery, I'm thinking that if you were able to recover 50% of the waste energy from an ICE exhaust using photovoltaic generator, you would be recovering about 15% of the total engine thermal losses. Having worked with large Exhaust heat exchangers (stack robbers) to capture waste exhaust heat, but due exhaust restriction and back-pressure reducing engine power, we typically only recovered about 30% of exhaust heat. If similar was the case with photovoltaic recovery, you would only be recovering about 15% of the waste energy in the exhaust stream, and something like a exhaust power recovery microturbine, adapted from a turbo-charger to drive an electric generator might be as efficient and less expensive.
BTW: Back in the 80's when I was working for in the Oil and Gas Industry and dealing with HPS and Mulit-Vapor lighting systems, the thought of using high temperature combustion gas to produce combustion based lighting using a multi-vapor tubes for remote off-grid locations occurred to me. I mentioned it to some engineering colleagues, and we estimated the efficiency could be considerably higher than electrically excited tubes but the maintenance, cost and complexities of producing such a system would likely be practical and affordable, plus having combustion sources in flammable environments is not suitable.
great insights Jack, that's interesting especially with your background... cheers!
I realy enjoyed the new style... finaly you start to dig into those projects and not only read the advertisements they make... this explanation was perfect...
so glad to hear it!!!! trust me its a process, one i work on constantly, and your feedback means a lot. thank you!
I don't think exhaust gas from a regular engine would be hot enough to melt salt and make it glow bright. You definitely raised many interesting points that got us all thinking about it.
About 20-25 years ago, I can't remember who did it(I want to say Smokey Yunick but I'm not sure). Did an experiment on a 4 cylinder Ford engine where he heats up the F/A mixture to 440 degrees F. This completely dried the mixture allowing much more complete combustion increasing fuel mileage and horsepower exponentially from about 130 HP to about 300 HP. With about half the fuel consumption. I don't know why it was never developed more, but it looked very promising.
The issues with Yunick's "adiabatic engine" were durability of the ceramic/metal seals and emissions. To use an analogy, you can't mass-manufacture an F1 engine for use in non-race-cars.
@@keithwilliams6007 yeah I remember that was an issue, but maybe after 25 years material science has improved enough to overcome that.
but about which temperatures are we talking about? what is the efficiency of the thermo-photo conversion at different tenperatures?
most of the energy will be radiated as infrared.
I read through an wiki article about TPV. Now I think this is just a scam for investors.
@@orionbetelgeuse1937Radiated where? A real implementation of this thing would have the sodium inside an insulated mirror and we do know how to make mirrors for specific wavelengths, practically no IR would get out. Exhaust gasses would also go through a heat exchanger with incoming combustion air to achieve 95+% heating efficiency like a condensing furnace. Intake air can also be routed around the device to pick up any heat that got through insulation.
Efficiently heating sodium to incandescence and keeping it there is effectively a 20+ years old solved problem. Seems to me like it is all about how cost-effective, efficient and durable the sodium-PV part of the process actually is.
@@teardowndan5364 a heated thing radiates energy at various wavelenghts from infrared to visible light. For instance a lightbulb has the filament made from tungsten but the radiation produced is not monochromatic just on the spectral lines of the tungsten. the same will happen with the glass tube and the sodium. It will produce some yellow light but also a lot of infrared. All the energy radiated at wavelenghts bigger than the yellow light for which the panel is tuned is lost because it cannot be captured and the light with shorter wavelengths will be captured but with losses heating the panel.
Fascinating approach and with the right material and engineering it looks doable. The problems are always in the details and the engineering tolerances and efficiencies.
perfectly said and I couldn't agree more!
70-80% efficiency...
I will only believe it when I see it.
Efficiency that high has me doubting its efficacy hard
9:33 two things come to mind here A) one is a product the other is a company or B) Lightcell is the research company to improve the patented product.
The combustion chamber probably uses a ceramic mesh coated with catalysts, similar to a catalytic converter.
It's another pipe dream that we'll never hear about again.
The problem, assuming the claims are valid, is that automotive engines have highly variable power needs. This system seems likely to be tuned to a very specific power output level to achieve its very high efficiency. That is the opposite of what a car needs. At best, in a car, is you use this as a means of recharging a depleted battery array. At that point, this power system is in competition with fixed point public utilities. So instead of comparing its efficiency to a cars IC engine, you should be comparing it to the efficiency of grid scale coal, natural gas or nuclear power plants.
A range extender for an electric car, plane or boat is still quite useful.
Most EVs only use a fraction of their range each day there batteries are oversized for range anxiety and those odd trips. A small compact efficient lightweight generator like this would be great range extender for those odd trips so the battery can be much smaller lightweight increasing maneuverability, efficiency and reducing the cost of the electric vehicle without lugging round a heavy complex piston generator like current hybrids do. As the generator in such a plug in hybrid is just used to recharge the battery it does not need to be capable of variable loads at all.
Problem is you're assuming the claims are valid, they aren't
The passion and effort you put into your videos is very admirable!
I appreciate that!
I do love the thought of merging it into a traditional combustion engine. Even if the efficiency gains are too small to contribute to forward motion, it may at least be able to replace or at least supplement the alternator, freeing up some load on the engine and being able to reap the benefits of that extra efficiency with minimal effort, possibly easily enough to be swapped into existing ICE powered cars. It would also mean, depending on how much heat is absorbed, that your cooling system doesn't have to work quite as hard when the battery is being charged from this system.
Fuel cells work through combustion as well. It's just that the combustion reaction is facilitated by an electron exchange across a dielectric membrane. Recapture of waste heat from fuel cells using Sebeck units improves efficiency. Using thermo-optical conversion through a narrow band material would allow more of the heat to be recaptured using the photoelectric effect. I have a hard time believing the 80% efficiency number, but it is a good idea.
Could also be geothermal - all you need is a high temperature for sodium.
Bury the sodium PV cells in the mantle, instead of steam generators.
But current ones slso need cooling and thermal management. No pv cell can just perfectly function at high temp long term.
Love the idea.
The mantal doesn't get nearly hot enough.
Maybe another compound that will glow at a lower temp.
the point of using sodium is it emits light at only one wavelength. so having a special solar cell that is fine tuned to that specific wavelength increases efficiency. using another compound ruins that.
Weichai in China is building Diesel truck engines with over 53% thermal efficiency (World record)
I don't trust China. They lie too much.
Very interesting!
I heard that too, but I will not believe it before I seen external independent tests. If it is true it will come to all boats and trucks near you soon.
It also asexually reproduces I bet.
This isn't far-fetched, since truck-sized Diesel engines are already 40% efficient. You could add a steam engine to convert a little waste heat back into more energy or squirt water into the cylinders. I haven't looked at what they're doing.
I am neither a physicist nor an engineer, nor do I play one on TV, nor have I slept recently in a Holiday Inn Express. I am not sure about color or monochromaticity, but High-Intensity Discharge and Low-Pressure Sodium lamps operate at 150 to 210C (300-410F) which might be inserted post-catalytic converter for electrical generation. Also, since there is much infrared light energy, I would think there should be investigations into band-gap tuning of Perovskite or other cells. Hopefully, they would be less finicky and more long-lasting than the fuel-cells I've worked with. Anyway to gain energy and reduce pollution is worth a look IMHO.
I thought this might of been converting existing ICE vehicles by swapping the transmission with a generator, a small solid state battery, and electric motor transaxle. You get the sound of ICE, the cost effectiveness of a simple conversion, and no range anxiety of EVs. Edison Motors has done this with diesel pickups.
whole chain sounds extremeley stupid to be efficienty more than 0.3%
1:40 This falls apart with the knowledge that photovoltaic cells works SIGNIFICANTLY better when cold, not hot (thermo).
There's no way in hell they will work with any efficiency. Lighting a candle and then trying to gather a miniscule amount of light energy with a solar panel is the stupidest way to do it.
The effieciency lies in matching the band gap of the photovoltaic cell
to the narrow yellow emission band (spectral line) of the hot sodium.
That is where Danielle Fong, et al., thought outside the box.
Forget the candles. How much power is going through a car engine, jet aircraft engine, or large rocket engine like SpaceX Raptor? Raptor is around 8 gigawatts. If the energy conversion efficiency is the same 80% quoted earlier then that’s 6.4 gigawatts of electricity. California is using 19 gigawatts right as I type this, so about 3 Raptors worth of propellant burn is needed (about 310 pounds methane per second per Raptor, so around 900-1,000 pounds per second for all of California).
A problem is that sodium won't emit 589 nm light unless it gets much, much hotter than you can achieve by harvesting waste heat from an engine. Sodium vapor lamps work by heating it to well above 1000°C. That's why they need to use quartz or sapphire: those temperatures would melt glass and copper. (Even quartz is marginal.)
Even with lower efficiency this is still a practical technology, the no moving parts and light weight is a big plus. Thanks for the Mesodyne link
Dude, why aren't you patenting your inventions? You invented like five things in this video.
I’m no expert, but I see more questions about this system, many of which have been brought up by other commenters. My first thought is its thermal footprint, which, to me, seems counterproductive to what it claims to aspire to as a producer of efficient, clean energy. Second is, how is the sodium - salt - being carried in what form and how is it being managed. Do you just run down to the store and pick up a ten-pound bag of salt, dump it in the system and it takes care of the rest? Then there’s the primary fuel - regular gasoline or other things like hydrogen. The consumer or end-user will have to maintain and manage that. And with this system you have two sources to always worry about, which seems inconvenient. I’m no chemist, but if hydrogen is used and combusted with salt, what are the resulting products? I did a quick Google and, if correct, the result would be nitric acid, which was a component of smog - as nitric oxide - when motor vehicles used leaded gasoline and before catalytic converters. I may have the wrong information, but this doesn’t sound good.
Other commenters call this a scam. I say it’s more like a new Theranos in the making. It promises much, but doesn’t appear to be anything there when you look past the hype.
I've read that heat damages regular solar panels and reduces their efficiency over time. Why wouldn't the high temperature from heating the sodium also similarly damage the photovoltaics?
On the internal combustion engine idea the Catalytic converter creates lots of heat while catalyzing. Using that waste energy would be awesome. Im sure it would be possible to pull the heat from the cooling system and air conditioning and concentrate it too. Imagine how small an internal combustion engine could be if it were 90% efficient having the extra power made into electricity to assist driving the wheels.
I like how for this episode you went more to the drawingboard giving your own ideas to the mix
I like this format - Both describe new concepts created by others, AND extrapolate on the concept and provide a technical rationale for why the extrapolation may be plausible.
Yes in car there's multiple escaping heat sources that might be possible to recycle back into self charging if the heat can light up a substance, and or infrared spectrum can be used...but stray voltage within the car system might also be exploitable if electrostatic motors are real...Even in a non car design though, 1) polymer should be fed and store heat...2) the heat should radiate infrared energy and a filter on thermophotovoltaic panel should use it, OR the heat should cause polymer to glow in uv spectrum. Panels on roof is too vulnerable to weather/vandalism, but thermal panels are just heat collection so easier. Heat can also be pressurized for improved efficiency...
Sodium light has a color temperature of 2200K. This means that the Sodium needs to have this temperature to be able to emit light, (or if electricity flows through the sodium gas in a lamp at a lower temperature 900K, this is a different principle were electrons are knocked out of orbit creating a photon) .The glas tube needs to be even hotter due to the thermal resistance between the combustion chamber and the Sodium compartment. Melting point of Quartz is around 2000K, wonder how they fix that.
If you want to reuse the heath from a combustion engine (40% power; 30% low temperature heath from the cooling system ; 30% heath from the exhaust at around 1100K) you need heath of at least 2200K, this is not the case for a combustion engine. In general the higher the combustion temperature the more mechanical energy can be generated. But... there are "no" materials available with high melting temperatures that can be used for (transparent and other)parts. The principle could work but I can't think of a solution to have a colder quartz tube sandwiched between a much hotter combustion camber and sodium compartment, while maintaining a good transparency for the 580nm
Photo voltaic cells don't like high temperatures, sitting "close" to the sodium compartment requires a solution.
First of all, thank you for your videos. They are extremely interesting, I really like them. Regarding your idea about enhancing the yield of a reciprocating engine heating sodium until it glows, consider capturing heat at the exhaust pipe level rather than the combustion chamber. This approach avoids diminishing the mechanical energy of expanding gasses. High-performance engines, especially those with high RPMs or turbocharging, have exhaust pipes that get extremely hot, sometimes glowing red. By utilizing this waste heat, you can harness additional energy without compromising engine performance. Just a thought.
Cosworth makes a generator using catalytic converters to combust fuel. The gas drives a generator to feed power into a turbine and then into batteries and electric motors. The efficiency is down around an ice engine but because there is no moving parts it is light and fuel agnostic
Even with this tech, fuel efficiency in cars is never going to be above 1% considering how much fuel is spent getting fuel to your car.
I think the key to making this work is transparent solar cells. Seems that with germanium you can stack multiple layers on top of each other, that could greatly increase the efficiency in a cilinder, and maybe cap it off with a mirror too.
If you used the waste heat from the catalytic converter maybe that could run a lite cell.
I would not throw the exhaust energy out the back. I would use a regenerator to capture more of the heat and further cool the exhaust gasses. This in turn would require less fuel to reach and maintain operating temperatures. I like your hybrid approach. In theory you could fit them to existing vehicles. Only issue is you can't get the NaCl substrate hotter than the factory exhaust gasses without some sort of heat pump.
Very awesome. Heat to electricity, peltier device. I use it on my hydrogen engine to run the fan to cool it and power lights.
That's a great idea! Going to do a video on peltier chips
That is amazing! What about using the exhaust as a means of direct propulsion/car-levitation as well? That would reduce the frictional forces between the tires and road, and further increase the engine's efficiency.
The moment you said "photovoltaic", you debunked the efficiency claims by a margin. That was quick. Thanks for saving me the time to watch the rest.
Look at each step.
Combustion: Air with 20 % oxygen is mixed with assume a gas fuel and burned. It's volume is greater then the air and fuel combined by a significant ratio so it will push the air and fuel gas out of the combustion section. The solution is a vertical mounted system where the less dense hot combustion product have buoyancy in room temperature air. However the exhaust and still burning fuel and air will either speed up and create more drag or the area increases.
Radiant, and convection heating occurs heating the container of the combustion. That heat needs to be conducted, radiated, and convected to a heat sink. In this concept the final means of moving thermal energy is by radiation of the sodium at 589 nm wave length. This can only occur, with neither of the other methods being significant, if the gap in which this occurs in a vacuum and the surface is pure sodium. Table salt melts at 800C and sodium at 98C. Most efficient temperature is 300C. The salt needs to react with something to combine with chlorine being a gas that is removed by the vacuum pump. The only way of obtaining pure sodium. The sodium a liquid at 300C need to be a a porous ceramic vessel with sodium wetting the outer surface completely yet held in place by surface tension. There will be losses because something has to hold this assembly in place and achieve a vacuum. The voltaic Germanium semiconductor devices will never by 100 % efficient. however; the conversion of heat to electricity occurs in a gap between the terminals at different voltages. Physical features, so some fraction of the surface seen by the radiation hits them. The germanium is going to be heated by the radiation not converted into electricity and the also heated by the current.
The combustion gases lowest temperature is about 300C so that the radiation is sufficient to make electricity. The hot gas enters the heat exchanger that is likely a cross flow device which is significantly less efficient than a counter flow heat exchanger. (the image) The inlet gases are heated cooling the exhaust gas. Buoyancy is the pump that moves the gases through the system. The hot inlet gases are now also buoyant but less then the average combustion gases. More resistance to the flow in the system as the inlet is below the then heated inlet gases.
Shut down is another problem because the vacuum must end and the chlorine returned and combine with the sodium to make salt. I do not think they can achieve the efficiency predicted. My guess is that they didn't calculate all the losses and energy to needed to set the conditions like vacuum. I had spent 20 years supporting Electrical engineers and know that the minor losses are not included in the models used to design circuits. This didn't improve significantly when finite element is used to design the circuits.
Electricity by Theranos...
Nobody ever seems to factor in energy used not to propel a vehicle but cabin comfort...
In EVs you spent a lot of energy in the North just keeping the cabin warm enough to be comfortable. In the South we do it to keep cool...
You should work on the 20% loss to warm the cabin... And also to use it to cool the cabin much in the same way you use a propane flame to make a refrigerator/freezer!!!
Or creating fresh water straight out of the air... Which is good for still even more parts of the planet with scarcity of portable water!!!
Sounds like a mechanic nightmare. Also what happens when the inevitable exhaust gas buildup obscures the photovoltaic cells? There's almost no way you'd get a 100% burn of gases with no foreign elements especially if it's going to be commercially available.
that idea you pitched at the end was awesome. I think you should hire a team to make it happen.
A really big problem I see here is that the best photovoltaic cells are only about 25% efficient and those are very expensive, most common cells are only about 15%-20% efficient. So it doesn't matter how efficient your combustion is so long as it is reliant on photovoltaic to produce the output usable energy. As far as quantum dot photovoltaics goes those are a long way from being usable in the real world and certainly from being anything produced on scale.
this concept is amazing and shows what engineering is all about. take a hard problem and convert it to an easier, more solvable problem.
it would be really interesting if you could do this with concentrated solar. have concentrated mirrors that burn a material to create a light at a wave length that you can capture more of with a cheaper material than pvs. thus, you up the efficiency and lower the costs.
I gotta admit I came into this video a total skeptic ready to tear this idea apart. I will say that the idea of converting heat to monochromatic light and then using a tuned photocell to convert it isnt just clever its a potential paradigm shift. Weve been boiling water to make electricity for many decades and this shows a path towards a new gold standard. Thoroughly impressed and will be watching this technology. Its even bwtter than the thermoacoustic solid states i had been studying earlier.
Standard ICE, if I am not mistaken, is chemical to mechanical, with waste heat.
The light cell is chemical to thermal to electrical to mechanical. Again if I am understanding this proper.
Combining the stages from various sources and requirements should increase the efficiency.
Considering motors are more efficient at lower speeds and engines are at higher speeds, a combination without too much excessive demand on weight, structure and space requirements would win out.
It very probably is some sort of special fiber optics that consist not only of silicon in a very durable PES substrate but a metal element. I remember reading that it takes a matching frequency of light to harmonize with and propel electrons. Perhaps this can be used in car cylinder piston chambers to capture lost energy.. Since quantum dots arranged as knotted fibers can trap more energy maybe such are used for enhanced effect!
there are high pressure and low pressure sodium lamps. They do not use salt. They use sodium metal. You can see the sodium in a low sodium lamp. Only problem is that sodium is reactive when it comes into contact with water. Can you get enough heat from an internal combustion to light a low pressure sodium lamp while still cooling the engine?
About 20 years ago I knew a physicist who did government work that needed a security clearance. A colleague of his, a professor I knew, had developed a 70%+ efficient solar system. The patent was bought by a fossil fuel company and is still in a bottom drawer somewhere.
To the people saying this is impossible because nothing substantial is left to be invented in this field, there _are_ things being invented, you just don't get to hear about them.
This isn't necessarily smoke and mirrors. The concept has been around for about thirty five years. I first heard of it in Popular Mechanic back in the day.
The concept doesn't actually burn fuel like the ICE engine does. A Reformer splits apart molecules of the fuel. These are then fed into a fuel cell. This is used to drive electric motors for movement. Electricity is also used to power secondary systems.
The drawback is the systems are full of membranes and costly platinum group metals.
I probably need to watch this several times, but the initial impression is that for something to burn in this way, it will consume oxygen and possibly emit noise at the same time. I have always been sceptical about the practicality of using hydrogen for most (probably all) forms of transport and believe that battery technology will develop rapidly, with a drop in price to match.
Alright, this is the one. Finally, the perfect power source. I'm exercising my check writing hand
While I am very, very sceptical about this "Solid state engine", the idea of creating monochromatic light from heat and converting that light with a fine-tuned PV cell is interesting.
However, as a heat source, concentrated sun light seems more reasonable. No exhaust means no energy loss due to still warm exhaust gas.
Fish do you smell it. Buzz words 70- 80% efficiency that smells.
Magik
Moving parts are what makes the internal combustion engine exciting.