Engineering porn


While I’m sure many engineers also found the paint-mixing porn I posted earlier soothing and pleasurable, the diversity of human experience also allows for other stimulants. Like this, the world’s largest engine.

wartsila_engine

The height of a four-story building, the Wärtsilä RT-flex96C is a two-stroke turbocharged low-speed diesel engine designed by the Finnish manufacturer Wärtsilä.

It is designed for large container ships that run on heavy fuel oil. Its largest 14-cylinder version is 13.5 metres (44 ft) high, 26.59 m (87 ft) long, weighs over 2,300 tonnes, and produces 80,080 kilowatts (107,390 hp). The engine is the largest reciprocating engine in the world.

Jesus. There are videos of assembly. Can we call this developmental engineering?

Let’s start one up.

And watch long, slow, lingering videos of the engine in operation. Nothing really happens, but the sound… my future industrial rock band, which I’m calling Wärtsilä (it even has the necessary umlauts!), won’t have a drummer, but we’ll just haul around one of these engines on tour to be the percussion section.

Whew. I need to cool down. Maybe I’ll go watch some paint-mixing videos or something.

Comments

  1. wzrd1 says

    Heh, you’re right that a percussionist won’t be needed. Just uncouple the exhaust, although some serious hearing protection would be required.
    You feel it as much as hear it, even when run through the vessel’s exhaust system.

    For those unfamiliar with heavy fuel oil used in maritime applications, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_oil#Bunker_fuel .

    Of course, installing that engine also requires some serious machinery, even when building the ship around it. Alas, I couldn’t quickly find any videos on that.

  2. Ice Swimmer says

    The compan’s name comes from the Värtsilä* parish and village (nowadays part of Tohmajärvi municipality in Northern Karelia, in the east of Finland), where it was founded first as a sawmill, then iron works (now long defunct, the engine production in Finland is now in Vaasa, on the west coast in addition to facilities in Switzerland and Italy) after having been bought by Nils Ludvig Arppe.

    The iron works first used limonite collected from the lake bottoms as the raw material. The company has become an engine builder through many mergers and splits.
    __
    * = W, which is pronounced as V, comes from the old orthography of Finnish.

  3. citizenjoe says

    I think Wartsila would be a fine name for one of the Palin spawn.
    Bristol. Piper. Track. Willow. Trig. Wartsilla. Maybe that last one has too many syllables to be remembered without palm-notes.
    Warsila of Wasilla!

  4. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    [buzzkill]
    drummers don’t keep the rhythm, that is the job for the bassist. percussions are for flamboyance. *rimshot*.
    Seriously, when I was in band, that point was always emphasized. That it was the bass players job to keep rhythm. The drums where extra. Bass (guitar) kept the beat, everyone else was free to improvise.
    Still, having a mechanical rhythm producer as the backdrop for a metal band would let the bass player improvise as well. Which I’m sure they’re all wanting to do and not just keeping the beat.
    — I’ll show myself out…

  5. Cuttlefish says

    This reminded me of the Clickspring clock-making series, which is in the final stages now–today’s video has the first actual ticking of a functional, though not yet final, clock!

  6. madtom1999 says

    Chuck out a lot of NO’s these things. Not sure what the calorific value of the fuel it uses but some of these engines are close to being able to being connected to a generator to generate O2 and H2 and the O2 can then be fed back into the engine and replace the air and as you no longer heat up all that N2 the thermodynamic efficiency of the engine can be nearly doubled meaning you get the same output power and a whole load of 02 for free (ish) – oh an dyou dont get the noxious nitrous either!

  7. Ice Swimmer says

    citizenjoe @ 4

    Värtsi is a Karelian surname. The late ballet dancer, choreographer and director Heikki Värtsi was probably the most famous man to bear the name. I have no idea about the ethymology of the name.

  8. Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y says

    Okay, the non-sneering references to engineers are kind of scaring me. This is a trap, isn’t it?

  9. chuckonpiggott says

    I have to ask, how does a two-stroke diesel work? And considering the difference in emissions between 2 & 4 stroke gasoline engines how could it have lower emissions?
    Granted with heavy oil it is probably self lubricating so no mixing of fuel but it would still be dirty.

  10. Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y says

    I have to ask, how does a two-stroke diesel work? And considering the difference in emissions between 2 & 4 stroke gasoline engines how could it have lower emissions?
    Granted with heavy oil it is probably self lubricating so no mixing of fuel but it would still be dirty.

    Two stroke diesels use turbochargers to compress the air charge rather than the crankcase.

  11. zetopan says

    Also note that due to the size of this engine and its relatively fixed low RPM, it is also the highest thermal efficiency internal combustion engine in the world. Its thermal efficiency is over 50%, whereas really good automobile engines have thermal efficiencies of 25% to 30%.

    The crankshaft consists of two crankshafts bolted together (with lots of giant bolts) because it is infeasible to build and handle(!) a one piece crankshaft that is long enough. In the last video you can see spare cylinders, spare crossheads, and spare pistons for repairs at sea.

    Oh, and the middle video is of a *much* smaller diesel engine, while the last video is a 12 cylinder vs the 14 cylinder shown in the first video. The Wärtsilä 12 cylinder version was the world largest until the Wärtsilä 14 cylinder version was produced.

  12. Lofty says

    Had a sniff at the wiki page for these monsters and spotted this:

    Wärtsilä admitted emissions fraud in 2016, with a few hundred engines affected.

    Fossil fuel engines need to die for the planet’s biosphere to survive.

  13. Mobius says

    The engine shown starting up and running is a Wartsila 34 which, according to the specs I Googled, is only 1/10 the horsepower of the huge 96C. Just imagine what one of those babies must sound like.

  14. wzrd1 says

    Fossil fuel engines need to die for the planet’s biosphere to survive.

    So, a company lies about the emissions of one series/line, abandon an entire technology? As that occurs in every field, who gets to move back into caves?
    Or if you’re complaining about internal combustion engine usage, what viable solution do you have to offer as an alternative to a few billion people dying horrific, lingering deaths?
    Without those fossil fuel engines, medications that keep myself and my wife alive never make it to us, not that it’d be that pleasant if somehow it did, as food wouldn’t make it to our city during the winter.

  15. Lofty says

    wzrd1, can you not conceive of any viable alternative to the burning of fossil fuels? Did humans suddenly snap out of the cave dwelling era precisely when the first infernal combustion engine was invented? Do you doubt the predictions of the bulk of the world’s climate scientists? Have you seen a container ship belching out a city’s worth of toxic black smoke? Have you seen what Elon Musk is doing with batteries? And no, I am not predicting the sudden death of all fossil fuel use within my lifetime, that would be extremely unlikely. I’m just pointing out what needs to happen to reduce the chance of a severely dangerous future from ruining the whole biosphere of this one planet we all share.

  16. unclefrogy says

    @21
    yes they probably do need to recede into the past but the way it has been explained to me is these new engines are more efficient and cleaner than what we were using before they are also allowing the building of ever bigger ships that can carry more cargo making them cost effective, few ships / trips to be sure containerization of most cargo has played a major part.
    It does seem to me a little bizarre to be moving vast amounts of stuff essentially back and forth across the world’s surface -> raw minimally processed material -> refining it to usable stock manufacturing -> manufacturing sub assemblies -> finished good to consumer -> recyclables to reprocessing -> feed stock to manufacturing all to the beat of great engines.
    I wonder how the further computerization of manufacturing and 3D printing will effect all of that

    uncle frogy

  17. wzrd1 says

    @Lofty #21, I asked a simple question, as you said that internal combustion engines have to die and I asked what is the alternative, other than do without, resulting in mass starvation and deprivation of medications needed for people to stay alive in the absence of those engines and no replacement available.
    It’s not like we’d be able to go back to horse drawn carts, steam engines wouldn’t be the best option in the world either. So, what alternative, other than Musk’s batteries, which have to be charged en masse anyway?

    I don’t have a replacement to suggest for many niche areas, save nuclear and that isn’t much of an option when it comes to ground transport or sea transport (a bit more practical for sea transport, but still a nightmare with waste or accidents).
    I’ve never been one to blanket say to eliminate a technology, save if I have a viable technology to replace it one for one.

  18. Ice Swimmer says

    As for the emissions, there are nowadays restrictions on sulphur emissions of the ships near shoreline as the heavy fuel oil (the “dregs” of oil refineries, unsuitable for ground vehicle fuels or lubricants) often contains huge amounts of sulphur, producing acidic enough fumes that the cylinder oil has to be an alkaline emulsion of oil and water so as not to corrode cylinders and pistons.

    Of course, fossil fuels have to be replaced with something else, but these kinds of big and efficient diesels may be the last ones to go because they have to go long distances and high energy density of the fuel means more cargo.

    Now if somebody were to invent a fully automatic sailing ship for bulk cargo and 3D-printing would advance a bit more…

  19. Lofty says

    wzrd1, I don’t know why you keep harping on about “mass starvation and deprivation of medications” being a direct result of phasing out the burning of fossil fuels. They will be the direct result of not stopping the burning of fossil fuels when climate change wipes out a large percentage of the worlds food sources. Please note I am not suggesting stopping engines that burn fuel, there will be bio fuels and synthetic fuels derived from excess renewable energy and stored in liquid or gaseous forms. They will be available for forms of transport that require energy dense fuels.

    Rather than waste hours searching for links to show you current technological advances in energy, I just suggest you look up Tony Seba, and listen. Start here.

  20. wzrd1 says

    @Lofty, I prefer to identify each problem area, then seek discussion on potential replacements area by area. That beats blanket pronouncements and misunderstandings. :)
    I’ll try to check that program when I get home, we’re getting ready for shift turnover and a meeting shortly after.

  21. Crimson Clupeidae says

    Some more engineering porn for ya’ll:

    http://globalsupertanker.com/

    It’s a 747 converted into a firefighter. I’m sitting about 100 yards from it right now, and I got to watch the daily progress on the paint job (nice timelapse video at the link) and internal tank installation. =)

  22. says

    >>it even has the necessary umlauts!
    >Yeah, but what a metal name needs is *unnecessary* umlauts. ;)

    But it does not have umlauts. ÅÄÖ are distinct letters in the Finnish and Swedish alphabet and not sound change in AAO
    ÄÖÜ in German are sound change of AOU with umlauts (from German “sound alteration”)

  23. EnlightenmentLiberal says

    I’ll keep it short.
    To Lofty:
    You realize that there are significant amount of people like myself (not sure about wzrd1), who agree entirely with you about the problems of climate change, and especially ocean acidification, and who are greatly concerned, but who also do not buy into the unsubstantiated hype around so-called green energy? I am entirely convinced that climate change and ocean acidificaiton is oneof the most important and pressing problem facing humanity today, and I can also be entirely convinced that so-called green strategies will fail completely and miserably because of simple and obvious technical issues. — That’s why I fully endorse conventional and next-gen nuclear fission reactors, which are safer and cleaner than gas, release near zero CO2, and are entirely sustainable under any reasonable definition of “sustainable” aka “will last for a billion years, at which point the sun will boil our oceans”.

    I asked a simple question, as you said that internal combustion engines have to die and I asked what is the alternative, other than do without, resulting in mass starvation and deprivation of medications needed for people to stay alive in the absence of those engines and no replacement available.

    AFAIK, the three super-hard things are: air travel, shipping, and trucking.

    Here are some alternatives.

    Shipping might survive by nuclear powered ships, but for obvious reasons I’d rather not have a nuclear reactor on every cargo ship.

    AFAIK, practical air travel only works with hydrocarbon liquid fuels.

    My understanding, which might be mistaken, is that a huge rollout of electrified railroads can help for trucking, but it’s impractical to use railroads to entirely replace trucking. Battery-powered trucks might help pick up some slack.

    I’ve heard a few interesting things about a internal combustion engine that uses boron. It’s published by a semi-reputable author (IMHO), but I’ve heard so few comment on it one way or the other that I’m still quite dubious.
    https://www.amazon.com/Prescription-Planet-Painless-Remedy-Environmental/dp/1419655825

    Perhaps the most enticing alternative that I see right now is using electricity to create gasoline from seawater, or seawater + air. In short, use electricity to pull CO2 out of the air or water, and use electricity to split water to get hydrogen, and use industry standard processes to create gasoline from that CO2 and H2. Assuming clean electricity, that’s CO2 neutral gasoline. Citations:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-diesel
    http://www.zmescience.com/research/us-navy-synthetic-jet-fuel-seawater-0423432/

    Lots of people are looking into this now. However, AFAIK, it’s still in the experimental lab-scale stage. We should be dumping millions of dollars into this right now to see if it can scale at cost.

    Obviously, with all of these alternatives, we still need a clean, reliable, and sustainable source of energy, i.e. electricity. IMAO, that clean, reliable, and sustainable source is can only be conventional and next-gen nuclear fission reactors, with a personal bias, informed by facts, for the IFR, and some variant of the MSR, especially ThorCon.

    wzrd1, I don’t know why you keep harping on about “mass starvation and deprivation of medications” being a direct result of phasing out the burning of fossil fuels. They will be the direct result of not stopping the burning of fossil fuels when climate change wipes out a large percentage of the worlds food sources.

    Fun factoid: About 1% to 2% of the world’s total energy production goes into making fertilizer. It’s really that big. Using grossly approximate numbers, that’s about 35 watts per person, always-on year-round, just to make food. Without that fertilizer, most of the humans on the planet would starve. Without modern farming techniques, esp modern energy-rich fertilizer, the carrying capacity of the planet IIRC is about 1 billion humans.

  24. wzrd1 says

    I’m far from fond of sticking a nuclear commercial fleet on the open seas as well. There are quite enough wrecks about that have fueled reactors sitting on the ocean bottom already.

    I do recall a coal slurry fuel initially proposed for the SR71 Blackbird. A bit of updating and using a more purified version of fuel might be a way to go.

    Two problems with large networked electric trains are, electricity travels poorly and large electrical grids suffer an immense exposure to geomagnetic storms. One is a logistical/switching/balancing issue, the other, a nightmare to control for. One Carrington event and our infrastructure would be even more paralyzed than it would be today.

    The boron fuel cell design sounds doable, although a new logistical chain would have to be established, that’s also doable. Setting up logistical chains isn’t something new to us, we’ve done it repeatedly over the years.

    As I recall, the US Navy synthetic fuel program is somewhat mature, a viable product should be easily attainable, provided funding was increased. Personally, I’d lean toward the bioreactor design, more efficient and more potential uses for the residue from the reactor. Indeed, with a bit of tuning, one could turn such bioreactors into fertilizer plants as well.

    Of course, we also landfill a *lot* of fertilizer away from our cities every day in the form of composted sewage sludge. Case in point, the city of Philadelphia gives residents as much composted sewage sludge to residents as they wish. Non-residents and businesses have to pay for it, the rest goes into landfills.
    Between that and bioreactor output, that could tie up a *lot* of CO2.
    Being smarter with what fertilizers are being used would also be immensely beneficial. Fertilizer runoff has created immense cyanobacterial blooms, which are harmful in multiple ways to the environment. There is no excuse for fertilizing an ocean when the fertilizer was supposed to be for farmland!

    Being smarter with our resources can both stretch them immensely and neutralize polluting outputs, with just a bit of creative engineering.
    Alas, much of our creative engineering has more to do with loud booms and harming other humans, rather than improving the systems that we have and mitigating the mess that we’ve not only inherited, but added to significantly.

  25. Lofty says

    EL

    …but who also do not buy into the unsubstantiated hype around so-called green energy?

    Love your little sneer there. When serious engineers, serious economists and serious data analysts realize that soon green renewable energy will be cheaper than any other form of energy, then all that remains to do is work out how to efficiently store it. When it becomes even cheaper, then even inefficient storage will suffice. Turning ultra cheap solar energy into useful energy dense fuels will be a growth industry for countries not blessed with large stores of conventional energy. There will no doubt be room for nuclear energy, if it can compete on price. If it is too dear, only crooked governments and corporations will push its use.

  26. Lofty says

    wzrd1, trials are taking place of electric trucks with pantographs to collect overhead power. I envisage trucks powered by batteries with overhead cables for steep grades etc. Full sized battery electric passenger buses are already capable of meaningful intercity travel, and when batteries have further dropped in price, electric goods transport will become commonplace. Don’t know about ships and planes but one step at a time. As for large grids, modern long distance power transfer would be done with buried HVDC cables and smart controls which would be much less susceptible to interference than dumb AC grids.

  27. wzrd1 says

    @Lofty, do we really need to revive the old Edison-Tesla arguments about AC vs DC for long distance transmission?
    1018 km isn’t really all that far compared to what long haul trucking currently travels. Not by a long shot! I suspect fuel cell technology would be the way to go there.
    Buried lines take care of corona loss, but then add closer coupling to geomagnetic field lines and ground currents, which would induce currents and hence, faults in the circuit. It doesn’t matter how smart it is, it’s a function of damping out sudden spikes and surges of counter-EMF created during a GM storm. Buried also has a problem with water seepage, which creates a nightmare of its own, just as one has with arcing problems with conventional power transmission systems.
    Basically, we’re talking about a coronal mass ejection ringing the earth’s magnetic field like the proverbial bell.
    Like this one:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
    For more:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm

    As for aircraft, that’s a special case of high energy density in greater extremes.

  28. Lofty says

    wzrd1

    @Lofty, do we really need to revive the old Edison-Tesla arguments about AC vs DC for long distance transmission?

    Huh? It’s the 21st century now, how about bringing some up-to-date objections to the argument?

    As for 1000km, that’s achievable with today’s battery tech. Do you really believe that battery development has stalled as of this minute? That none of the people working on fancy new electrode technologies will succeed? Anyway, I’ve wasted enough time trying to show you the way forward when clearly the past is of more interest to you. Goodbye.

  29. EnlightenmentLiberal says

    To Lofty

    When it becomes even cheaper, then even inefficient storage will suffice.

    Nope. That’s the catch-22 of energy storage. It’s bad form to pretend to rebut an argument that you don’t understand, which is exactly what you’re doing here.

    Let me try to explain. Sorry it’s so long.

    You’re not thinking like a systems analyst. As best as I can describe it in short, the thing that you have to realize is that our economy will only run on reliable power, and that will require some amount of batteries if a majority of the power is coming from wind and solar. Say, 7 days worth of full power of storage as an opening point in a discussion. Alternatively, I’ve seen plans that call for only 3 days of storage, but they require an approx 3x overbuild of solar in order to make it up. For arguments as to why this is reasonable, see my links above.

    Those batteries will not last forever. They have a finite lifetime, after which they need to be remade, recycled. That construction / recycling process takes energy, electricity to run the factories, gasoline to run the trucks, etc. When you calculate the energy costs of those batteries, it’s ginormous.

    The fundamental problem that you must realize is that you can build all of the solar panels you want, but in order for those solar panels to provide reliable power to factories etc., each solar panel needs backing storage. The storage needs is proportional to the amount of solar panel. Thus, as solar panel energy costs go to zero, the total energy costs do not go to zero, because you still have that energy cost of the battery, and that number is not dropping historically, and there are good reasons to believe it won’t drop substantial amounts in the future.

    Let me throw some numbers at you.

    1 sq meter of solar cell in the Sahara, poly-crystal silicon. Has an average conversion efficiency of about 15% over a hypothetical (and optimistic) 30 year lifetime. Over that lifetime, it’ll produce about 3.36e10 joules of electricity, and it’ll require about 2.172e9 joules to manufacture.

    How much lead-acid battery will we need to convert that unreliable electricity of that 1 sq meter of solar cell to reliable electricity? Using published energy cost numbers for lead-acid batteries (ESOI), and assuming only enough battery to meet 1 full day of demand, those batteries will require 4.37e9 joules to manufacture.

    Let’s look at the ratio of those numbers, known as EROI and sometimes EROEI:
    = (total energy produced) / (total energy consumed)
    = (3.36e10 joules) / (2.172e9 joules + 4.37e9 joules)
    = 5.14

    However, as I mentioned above, that 1 day of full demand is not going to be enough. Let’s go for the approach I outlined above, overbuild solar by 3x, and 3 days of storage. (It’s better than the 7 days of storage approach.) Approximately, that would be:
    EROEI
    = (3.36e10 joules) / ( [ (3) (2.172e9 joules) ] + [ (3) (4.37e9 joules) ] )
    = 1.71

    What does this number mean? This means that for every 1 unit of energy you use to construct the system, you get 1.71 units of energy out, when totalled over the whole system lifetime. That’s a net energy positive of 0.71 units, so we’re good, right? Using farm animals is also energy positive. If we want a significant majority of our population to not have their whole lives dedicated to maintaining our energy system, such as the state of humanity when all we had were farm animals, then this number must be much bigger. Coal and nuclear are around 50 to 100, depending on what assumptions you make and what papers you look at, and even then, about 1% of our population is dedicated to our energy supply. This is what it means to be an industrial civilization.

    Let’s do the same for some cutting edge lithium ion batteries.

    The lithium ion batteries to cover that 1 sq meter of solar cells over its optimistic 30 year lifetime will have an energy bill of about 4.37e9 joules, but we’re still hosed.

    EROEI for 7 days of storage (approx): 3.53
    EROEI for 3 days of storage, with solar overbuild by 3x (approx): 3.47

    To put this in to terms that everyone should understand, solar energy might be free and everywhere, but it’s so diffuse that it takes so much effort in order to capture it, that’s it just not worth it in the end to power our civilization. It simply takes too much effort to do.

    A comparison might be useful. Imagine that the ground is covered in pennies, but you can only pick up one at a time. You should be a billionaire, right? However, if you do the calculations, for many people, it’s not worth their time to pick up that penny. Pennies can be as plentiful as you want, but if the costs of picking up that penny are too much, it doesn’t matter that there’s enough pennies out there for the taking to make you into a billionaire.

    Consequently, solar won’t work.

    These numbers are using highly optimistic assumptions. The solar cells in the Sahara desert. The solar cells are assumed to have a 30 year life, which is very optimistic, and also very optimistic assumptions concerning the conversion efficiency over this optimistic 30 year lifetime. The analysis ignores the problems of cleaning sand off the cells in a water-poor environment of the Sahara desert. Very importantly, it ignores seasonal variation which would increases energy costs by another approx 50% because you get less sun in winter, even in the Sahara, and we have to balance our energy budget on a daily or weekly basis, not a yearly basis.

    In the end, it’s barely net energy positive, even using these wildly optimistic assumptions.

    The reason why this is not yet a problem is because almost everyone looks at money cost, not energy cost, and they don’t do a whole systems analysis. In today’s markets, we have money-cheap energy because of plentiful oil, coal, and natural gas. As soon as you try to run an economy without fossil fuels (and without nuclear), aka with with only solar and wind, then the systems analysis kicks in, and that previously money-cheap energy will become very money-expensive, which will cause the money-cost of solar electricity and wind electricity to skyrocket. The only reason that the solar and wind shenanigans have gotten this far is because they have been subsidized by plentiful and cheap oil (money-cheap, because it’s energy-cheap to obtain).

    I’m also ignoring a couple of other fundamental and probably insurmountable problems, such as: If you do the analysis of how much lead you need, or lithium, or nickel, etc., and compare it to known and estimated reserves, you come up short by a factor of about 1000x. If you look at alternatives, such as pumped water storage, then it’s even worse, requiring absurd amounts of land, like land the size of a continent. Other energy storage systems suck even more. Please peruse the “do the math” links that I gave above, and the “brave new climate” “catch-22” link that I gave above for some further reading.

  30. EnlightenmentLiberal says

    PS: My back-of-napkin analysis is only talking about factory manufacture costs, and specifically I do not take into account labor costs in any way. Some EROEI analysis attempts to do hokey things by converting a unit of human labor into a unit of energy. Please don’t google something online, see the rebuttal “but they’re doing this weird thing with human labor costs converted to energy costs”, because the EROEI argument stands just fine without that questionable methodology. I’m looking literally at just the electricity and fuel costs in for mining, refining, manufacturing, and recycling, and the electricity that will flow out of the inverter at the solar panel or battery. I’m entirely ignoring any human labor component.

  31. wzrd1 says

    @Lofty, the laws of physics don’t change because of the century. Inductive reactance, capacitive reactance and resistive losses still are significant for both AC and DC, but resistive losses are greatest in DC circuits. That’s why we use AC globally, rather than DC to supply power over distance, the losses are too great.
    Unless you have some secret room temperature superconductor hanging out of your back pocket that you’ve failed to share with industry.
    While that is indeed an active field of research, AC is still the premier way to transmit power with far less loss.

    Conceivable with today’s battery check is all well and good, but recharging still takes time. Currently, a truck can refill a tank and continue on its way in minutes, whereas a battery bank takes up to 8 hours to recharge. Faster recharge is possible, but at a risk of hydrogen build-up and bad things can happen when hydrogen builds up. Fuel cells are far more promising.
    Meanwhile, batteries currently are lasting between 18 and 72 months (industrial and by extension, automotive), with a mean of around 60 months for deeper discharge models. Imagine rooms full of such batteries. What is your plan for replacement and recycling of rooms full of banks of batteries for local power generation? Those trucks, which now take twice longer to reach their destination due to recharge time?

    Practical engineering, not wishes for next century’s technology today are what interest me. What may be is all well and good, but I’m still waiting for fusion and room temperature superconductors, both of which would resolve many, many, many, many problems entirely. We don’t have those solutions, the synthesized fuel is quite promising and nearing fruition. Fuel cells are also very near fruition for everyday usage (there are already generation applications in the civilian market, that can only improve).
    But, suggesting we abandon everything for what might actually work in the future, ignoring the laws of physics and wishing isn’t a path forward.
    For, if you wish in one hand and shit in the other, we all know which hand will be filled first. Just don’t expect me to shake that hand.

  32. EnlightenmentLiberal says

    To wzrd1
    Regarding AC vs DC for long distance transmission. You have that backwards. High voltage DC has less power loss than AC, but high voltage DC tends to be more expensive than AC because DC transmission requires expensive AC-DC converter stations at both sides.

    Regarding charging times for truck batteries. I’ve heard ideas that instead of recharging the battery, one simply swaps the battery at battery swap stations. Seems pretty workable. IMHO, there are other more pressing issues with batteries, including environmental impact, and cost and weight compared to the amount of energy storage. These might be surmountable for certain applications, such as trucking (maybe), but definitely not for covering the intermittancy of solar and wind for the grid.

    PS:
    Fusion is going to produce nuclear waste too, just like fission. Fusion involves super high energy neutrons flying about, and that is going to transmute nearby materials into radioactive versions. Of course, I think that concerns over radioactive waste disposal are almost always vastly overrated, but I thought I should bring this up.

    Fusion has been “10 years away” constantly for the past 40 years. It’s a pipedream. I’ll believe it when it’s actually demonstrated.

  33. wzrd1 says

    @EL, if DC was lower loss, why would it require DC-DC conversion (not all that expensive for a simple rectifier)? It’d be DC.
    AC “travels well”, can be stepped up far easier and can use lighter conductors at the higher voltage/lower current.
    AC can be stepped up and down via a transformer, DC would require (initially) a vibrator, later various circuit schemes that range from a multivibrator circuit to PLL regulated multvibrators (a vibrator being essentially what a door buzzer is, with a contactor interrupting current through a coil, not unlike a spark plug coil, multivibrator being a solid state version (a hobbyist model being the old 555 timer chip). In short, a lot less complexity.
    Well, until one had to have different phase distribution points feed into the same grid…

    Swapping batteries? Potentially doable, frankly, fuel cells are logistically friendlier, dump the used solution, replace the empty or near empty fuel solution.

    As for fusion, not necessarily. One doesn’t have to have neutrons flying about, it’d be “better” if one didn’t, for the reasons you gave. Although, neutron activation tends to not typically be for all that long, as was well documented at Los Alamos, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It depends upon what’s irradiated and with what strength of neutron flux. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents#The_competing_systems

    Agreed, fusion’s been a decade away for nearly a half century, it’s likely I’ll be long gone before we have at least unity gain on fusion. We’ve had fusion since the 1950’s, but it’s always been at a loss, although neutron generators have shrunk tremendously.

  34. EnlightenmentLiberal says

    To wzrd1
    I’m merely noting that for long distance transmission, in the neighborhood of 1000 km, it seems like high voltage DC has far power loss than high voltage AC. I was correcting you merely on that point. There are many other factors, such as the ones that you noted, which explain why it’s not being done more commonly, and why it’s not necessarily a clear-cut victory for DC.

    How are you going to have fusion without a neutron flux? Magic cold fusion? Please.

    You are right that neutron activation tends to produce less bad waste than the waste of conventional nuclear fission by a considerable margin. However, try explaining that to an ignorant anti-nuke green though. Good luck. To them, anything that says “radioactive waste from power production” is automatically the worst thing ever, infinitely dangerous, can kill you with a single atom, etc etc.