Power from Waste

Three weeks ago MIT press released an article highlighting developments in the nebulous field of metamaterials, in this particular case, creating a means in which to control the direction of flow of heat, by means of converting the vibrations caused by heat, into a form that can be more readily manipulated.  The article indicates that as understanding of this research becomes deeper it will be possible to develop thermal diodes, making it so heat will only flow one direction.  Depending on a range of variables including cost efficacy, overall rate of heat transfer across the thermal diode, size requirements of the meta-materials etc.. a range of cool options could become available.  If found to be very expensive, thermal diodes/lenses, would allow for remote sensors to operate without requiring costly batteries, this would make sense in situations where other traditional remote energy sources, solar and solar, make little sense.  As cost goes  down, cooler options become available, the obvious option is taking advantage of the waste heat from factories or other industrial facilities, where historically the energy density from the waste heat was too low to be captured.  The technology I would like to see, just because I'm curious, would be to concentrate the heat that radiates off of nuclear waste onto some kind of generator, either thermo-electric generators or boiling some kind of operating fluid.

Now let's get cray cray, assuming thermal diodes are efficient enough and sufficiently low cost you could theoretically create a network of thermal lenses to concentrate the thermal energy found in extremely deep underground mines that are no longer used for resource extraction.  Such concentrated thermal energy would allow for a very different type of geothermal power generators to exist without requiring excessive disruption of the surface environment, beyond low level cooling systems.

An Additional Idea Occurred Recently
This idea is entirely dependent on how the engineering parameters of a thermal diode material, but one field of technologies that could benefit from thermal diodes would be that of solar hot water heaters.  Currently solar hot water heaters need to come in a relatively large single assembly.  By directly applying a thermal diode underneath the black coating on the pipes used to transfer the heat to the working fluid it would be possible to eliminate the need for the extra weight of the systems glass cover.  Designers would have a much greater degree of flexibility when it would come to designing a home solar hot water heater that emphasized aesthetics while still being efficient.  (hey we're saying the thermal diodes are magic right now, when I get specs I can make less outrageous proposals)

DC to AC PV (pretty sure we could get some more acronyms in here)

This is partially inspired by an idea I had a long ways back, integrating capacitors into the fabrication of PV arrrays, and a product I saw recently that is intended to make PV easier in countries that have robust net metering laws.  The platform shown in the link appears to send power directly into the home's powerlines by immediately rectifying whatever output that comes from the individual solar panels, while it works for a rudimentary net metering platform I would be interested to see what would happen if you slightly changed the approach.
By adding in a series of capacitors, or ideally super capacitors into the body of the solar panel, it could be possible to stockpile up to N minutes of peak panel output. Additionally by having a robust array of the capacitors working in tandem with control chips, it would be possible to allow the solar panel to operate more efficiently (in my theoretical dream world).  My reasoning behind this is that the nature of the power output by traditional solar panels is heavily influenced by the performance of individual cells.  If one cell is producing less current than others, the net power output of that line of cells will be reduced.  With the right mix of control software and low enough energy requirements for the control systems, the net output of a given solar panel will increase.  (this part of the idea comes from a source that I don't remember off hand, lo siento)  The final intent of the capacitor array would be to serve as a means of helping to give the grid that uses this technology a little more flexibility when solar power is used, within a single package.

At the end of the day I can't say if there would be any overall benefit to the grid, but the idea intrigued me on an intellectual level and I thought I would  outline it for fun.

Death Star Math: Return(ing) with a (possible) Solution

Solving the greatest (well maybe not but definitely one of its less sexy issues) engineering problem of science fiction, managing the surplus heat produced by all of the fanciful technologies imagined in far off worlds. 

When doing the math for the Death Stars exhaust port calculations it started to become more and more apparent* that if any civilization was developing warp drives, planet destroying super lasers, matter to energy converting teleportation platforms, and other crazy innovations that I would love to see during my life time, they would also need to be developing a way to keep these systems within some kind of operation temperature.  Previous entries on this blog on system cooling have hopefully created a rather deep explanation as to why heat management is such an issue in building your technological wonder, unfortunately for we hard science buffs, there isn’t much of a solution when it comes to applying traditional 3 spatial dimension based mathematics to radiative cooling.  Hopefully nerdier readers will most likely have latched on to the concept of using 3 spatial dimensions and started to ask themselves what I might be suggesting.  Right now I would ask those who saw this idea as critical, to take 5 seconds to imagine what solution I am inferring in the previous statement.

Anyone who honestly clued in and said to themselves “Hey, couldn’t you just add a new dimension for the heat to go out into” or something of that overall gist, please leave a comment bragging about this and I will happily add two points into your arbitrary cosmic score card that I have running in the back of my mind for most of humanity (not really).  Those of you who have come up with an alternative solution that you think makes even more sense or less sense really, I look forward to seeing your suggestions as well (if anyone ever reads this), also if you could make it a workable solution for cooling technologies like the transporters in Star Trek, I would be eternally grateful.    

Back to mathing.  The physics of black body emissions as a means of maintaining thermal equilibrium have been rather established with work starting with Ben Franklin (or earlier really I don’t know the history of physics that well).  Under our paradigms in physics a surface will transfer heat based upon the properties defined in the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, where the exposed area of the surface will emit some percentage of an ideal body’s energy flux, as a dependent on the relationship of the temperature of the objects surface to the ambient environment with both of those values raised to the fourth power. 

Within the physics of narratives like Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5 etc… we are told that advanced species have discovered additional dimensions that are used for transport and communication.   For a power nerd like me, these additional dimensions seem like a perfect place to dump all of our spaceship’s surplus heat.

Long before Darth Sideous asked his various minions to begin developing designs for the Death Star, or before Captain.  James. T. Kirk seduced his way across the galaxy.  Some rather bright scientists and engineers got together and developed a technology that would allow them to make a radiator that cools 4 dimensionally.  No longer would only the exposed surface of your vessel be your only means of keeping your reactors operational.  These innovators created a solution that would allow each individual atomic layer of the cooling system to dump heat into a fourth spatial dimension and they would do it all with a really contrived acronym.  A smooth cube, one meter on a side, would go from having an exposed surface area of 6 sq m to 5.97E09 sq m of radiative surface area (this is actually a minimal estimate as I’m not super-duper certain as to how many liberties I can take with estimations.)  While not an exact comparison for various reason, one rather contrived analogy is saying that it would be like going from riding a horse from point a to b to traveling at the speed of light.  Additionally it is discovered that the scientists have found that subspace or hyperspace, whatever this fourth spatial dimension is called, is roughly as cold as the vacuum of space in the majority of our universe.  This critical property will allow you to reduce the heat transfer equation to the following.

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As I mentioned earlier the area of the radiator is where the math gets the fuzziest, the estimated value of 5.97E09 square meters per cubic meter was calculated by finding the inter-planar spacing of graphene on Wikipedia, listed as 0.335 nm or 3.35E-10m.  Graphene was chosen because it is awesome and for how arbitrary calculations are here it worked for me.  The cube can then be thought of as 2.985E09 individual atom thick layers capable of radiating their waste heat into the fourth dimension.  Each layer is somehow able to simultaneously transfer energy between layers and emit energy from both sides, a trait of the fourth dimensional special phsysics.  It should be noted, that by my logic it might make “more sense” to treat each individual atom as a four dimensional radiator and/or eliminate the concept of treating the radiator as a solid system, why not a 4D cooling plasma, and to that I say, I’m already spending too much time on theoreticals and not enough finding work (I wish it was otherwise).  Anyways all of this logic adds up to us creating a new function for balancing out the requirements of the cooling system.  Depending on how the variables are solved you then plug them back into the unit conversion shown below.

 

In the case of the super radiator material developed by the Death Star Development teams, one capable of operating at 20,000K and as a perfect black body.  The Death Star would also need to be at least      99.9999975563% efficient as a system for the radiator to fit within the exterior envelope of the Battle Station as in both have an estimated volume of 2.1447E+15 cubic meters. (before the theoretical detractor says that if I’m putting the radiators magic into a 4^th spatial dimension why should I even worry about its volume and to that I simply say, “eh, it shows scale and system complexity”) At 99.9999999% efficiency the radiator system would be about 4% of the volume of the non-moon.  I hope that someone found this interesting.

Leveling Renewable Power with Sewage Plants

Building on the post about building my dream doomsday bunker, while using more of an eye towards 

rationality I would like to present an idea that I hope is pseudo original.  At this time pumped hydropower is still considered one of the most cost effective ways of storing power.  What is suggested here is using existing waste water facilities as a possible source for the water that is pumped into the storage lake.  The logic of this approach comes from a few key factors, the first comes from the established "ruined view", as sewage plants are rarely considered aesthetically pleasing, it would be reasonable to assume that developing a pumped hydropower facility near a sewage plant will have fewer NIMBY issues (not in my back yard).  The Second consideration also deals with sight availability, while proposals for using pumped hydro already exist, deployment options are limited by the availability of water that can be used for the storage water, by utilizing recently purified waste water, you allow more usage from a given unit of water before it is returned to the watershed or reserve aquifer.  Realistic modeling of the ROI of a technology like this are well beyond my current resource portfolio but I would be curious to see if this solution might turn out to be economically viable for some markets.

March 13  Another Feature that could be considered for this configuration, to a lesser extent the compressed air storage facility suggestion, would be to augment the facility's revenue stream by providing space for a decent sized server farm.  The synergy for the server farm would stem from being as close as possible to an extremely reliable supply of electricity and relatively cool water to mitigate the need for more active cooling solutions.  For the facility operator there would be the benefit of having a guaranteed inbuilt customer for some percentage of their output.  Additionally depending on how a facility like this was constructed it wouldn't be unreasonable that if the storage lake's altitude was partially a product of it being of artificial construction, building in a certain amount of industrial volume wouldn't be too unreasonable.
On the idea of making the storage lake artificial, as it isn't different enough for a full on post, a pumped hydro facility built out of an old landfill, waste storage site, etc.. could help make it a very long term solution for a range of problems.  

Printing out Plants

Several years ago (or more, few of my older journals are properly dated)  I became inspired by developments I had seen in the field of 3-D printing technologies, especially those that were being developed to produce replacement organs.  The idea that you could work from a canvas of living tissue as opposed simple metals and plastics was wondrous.  From that overwhelming image came a question for me, why not print out plants or coral reefs.  With advancements in biotechnology we might have the ability to print new ecosystems.  I began to imagine cities where the walls of buildings were living trees, not just dead concrete and metal.  I have since learned that grafting of more naturally grown plant structures is by leaps and bounds more cost effective, that being said I think it would be really really awesome if we could expand urban green zones into the z axis.
Visual Follow Up (Feb 7 2013)

Apologies to whoever on Imgur I stole this from,
Reddit didn't provide any copyright info.

Imagine structures like this, but with tree branches extending out, providing additional shade and productive biome.