C14 would be a great power source with its huge lifetime and low energy betas.
yeah well be glad for Bosch-Haber Thomas!
@Dave Sopchak in the hackaday article it says "lithium-air battery" your working on. I didn't know you can reverse the process in the cell.. my only experience is with the open air ones.
Fritz Haber FTW, the man who feeds billions!
when he wasn't killing thousands!
Haber is very energy inefficient.
I saw some variants where microwaves were used instead of high pressure high temperature.
maybe they should use a C14 betavoltaic to drive Bosch Haber
I'm working on an article about improved catalysts to increase the efficiency of Haber-Bosch, FYI
That's one h--- of many C14 megacuries.
@ILove Scotch yeah in a nonaqueous Li air battery, you make lithium peroxide on discharge. That's the easy part. Oxidizing the lithium peroxide back to oxygen without trashing the battery has eluded everybody...except me ;)
Better idea. Thorium reactor and microwave synth rig. Nitrogen from air, hydrogen from water, ambient pressure microwave-assisted reaction, scalable factory that can act as local power plant when the wind gets counterrevolutional ideas and stops blowing and birdwhackers stop providing.
that nitrogen nitrogen triple bond is *not* easy to break, so it goes
microwave chemistry whacks the bonds directly without having to vibrate the whole atom including the nucleus that's there in only for a ride while taking the most mass.
Born-Oppenheimer approximation?
Catalytic nitrogen fixing bacteria with enhanced efficiency genetic would make Haber obsolete.
similar for photochemistry.
Brute force Haber is inelegant!
you know, if Bosch Haber didn't work, I'd say scrap it
Inelegant but nice to have. High volume density, and controllable.
let's talk electrolytic steel refining
It works just about as well as diesel engines work but for how long can be use it?
is it similar to copper refining, or to aluminium production? aqueous low-temp or hightemp molten salt?
@Thomas Shaddack cool with the kapton pyrolysis
alsohigh temp, the trick is to use electrochem rather than coke to be the reductant.
Not sure if this is off-topic or not. Regarding storage ... on the control side, are things moving towards standardization? Meaning inverters becoming tightly integrated with BMS systems?
but
said kapton pyrolysis could be also useful for eg. making flexible capacitive touch sensors. alternative to conductive inks.
even with aluminum, the carbon anodes get chewed up to CO2...
@Tom Johnson not off topic but I have no idea. Anyone else?
ah, so no electrorefining, more like electrowinning. i understand refining as purifying a substance that's already produced in previous step.
@tom "Meaning inverters becoming tightly integrated with BMS systems?" Nope.
@Thomas Shaddack Ah! I need to up my terminology game there ;)
I say we turn this whole inverter issue on its head (ducks)
close enough to be understood with just a single question. :D
There are the Mesa standards modbus ... which seem to be supplanted by SunSpec. I was curious as to how fast integration was being taken up.
Space vacuum mass spectroscopic refining is the way to go with unlimited solar energy.
SO MUCH ELECTROWINNING. YOU'RE GOING TO BE SICK OF ELECTROWINNING
@Dave Sopchak What do you mean about turning the inverter issue on its head?
@kjansky1 what are you working on?
as long as modbus isn't like flobus. Man I hated having to deal with the latter
A more sustainable power generation system.
sweet!
care to tell us more?
thought for inverters. I saw somewhere a 4-switch topology of a power converter. a coil. a mosfet from each its end to the ground. a mosfet from each coil end to left and right side. by pulsing the mosfets in proper order we have a buck or boost converter, and it works from left to right and from right to left as needed. a generic "glue" between batteries and power buses. (and if left and right side is connected together, and the coil gets a secondary, it's a h-bridge driver.)
also fun fact they use lithium peroxide in the space station. Eats CO2 and when it does it spits out oxygen, win win. Even better than lithium hydroxide
@Tom Johnson yet another attempt of mine at a bad joke
http://mesastandards.org/wp-content/uploads/MESA-ESS-Specification-December-2018-Version-1.pdf
Here is a link to the MESA-ESS standard if anyone is interested.@Thomas Shaddack thats just an Bi-directional buck boost convter.
I am impressed with buck/boost/inverters, it's comical how efficient, cheap and ubiquitous they've become. Bring on the GaN!
yup, another name for it (wasn't familiar with that one.)
Tom- thanks. I will look at that later
GaN for high freq compact, SiC for high voltage high power.
if anything, this chat has me opening up a dozen windows to read later ;)
Oh yes Ga devices because the element is so abundant.
SiC diodes are interesting. Schottky with very high voltage. No recovery time other than junction capacitance.
I've even heard of people using boron doped diamond for fast switching FETs
GaN! bah, SiC is where it's at :P
Since I see GaN advertised in all sorts of USB chargers, I assume costs should be dropping at some point.
hey SiC so many uses. I even use it to grind my telescope mirrors
higher index of refraction than diamond!
Don't fight. GaN and SiC both have their domains! :P Doped diamond would be LOVELY due to its extreme thermal conductivity.
You know, I think I heard that about diamond...
agreed Thomas, SiC in all HV stuffs, LV is GaN
Oh, yes, I have a 1 inch square 1mm thick piece of synthetic diamond right here...
yeah those higher bandgap/thermal conductivity stuff for the higher temps
I saw somewhere that diamond coatings could be made by electrochemistry, by high voltage electrolysis of dimethyl formamide. Or acetonitrile.
really
I will have to look that up
yep
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925963500005483
Diamond synthesis by electrolysis of acetates
A new method of electrochemical synthesis of different forms of carbon, including nanocrystalline diamond, is described. The electrolyte consists of a solution of ammonium acetate in acetic acid. The electrolysis is carried out by applying a shifted-square alternating voltage in the 10-100 Hz frequency range.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169433212014304
example:diamond-like carbon, hmm. I have some familiarity with that
boy who knew that diamond could be such a party killer ;)
no blood diamond!
Carbon nanotube semiconductors are the future.
so anyway when I was in grad school I worked on the electrochemistry of boron doped diamond and diamond like carbon
...thought... could blood be used as the organics-containing liquid in the coating synthesis?
...that would be seriously metal.
...and blood diamond, too.
holy cow
respect
Well, they're making synthetic diamonds out of human cremains, so that's sort of a blood diamond
only if some iron remains
although
carbon and iron have an interesting relationship
was that "cremains" intentional? That's a great word
Too much Fe in mammalian blood need to use Hemocyanin and you can generate the copper conductors at the same time.
yup. carbon dissolves in iron. hence it is not a good idea to use diamond abrasives for ferrous alloys, boron nitride is way better there.
who's the ferrous one of all?
Yes, Pretty sure it's the correct term -- at least that's what the funeral director who came to scare the hell out of us in high school religion class told us.
We should copper that.
...and molten iron is used as a solvent for carbon for one of the diamond synthesis methods.
come and get me, copper! I'm not afraid of your friends gold and silver, either!
He brought a box of them to show us -- looked like crushed gray Pringles
Wow iron + carbon and you get steel balls.
the cremains, or the diamond they made from them?
Any cold-efficient battery technologies gone mainstream? I have backup applications for equipment sitting in unheated buildings.
anything carbon-based can be used to make diamonds. the rest is just marketing.
Just the cremains lol
heard good things about lithium titanate batteries but not sure.
@Tom Johnson there's a startup in san diego that uses small fluorocarbons for solvent that work very well at low temp
I think they have a high limit to temp though
Good leads. Thanks.
if you want I can get you more detail. I was asked to review some of their stuff
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270163726_Evaluation_of_the_low_temperature_performance_of_lithium_manganese_oxidelithium_titanate_lithium-ion_batteries_for_startstop_applications
may be relevant.@Thomas Shaddack anything carbon-based can *and should* be used to make diamonds.
fify
Fluorocarbon forever chemicals are today's PCB oils.
@Dave Sopchak sure. Email is tj800x@gmail.com.
OK. I'll send it after this
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