My previous project, while I continue to believe it will be important for the future of household decarbonization, SPAN electrical panels are working on, and I don’t think I’ll learn a lot from the measurements/models I make for forecasting/redistributing household electrical demand throughout the day. Changing gears.
One of the big not-clearly-solved problems in decarbonization is industrial heat: it makes up 10% of our global emissions, and it’s been historically seen as the hardest sector to decarbonize. See background on this topic, or this study.
A new solution has emerged: thermal batteries charged by cheap, renewable electricity. This paper gives background. (A company has emerged to commercialize this solution, Rondo, which I heard about via this Volts article.) Making a cheap, crude imitation, I’m curious if I can make my own thermal battery out of sand, charge it with a solar panel (or other power source if the math doesn’t work for the solar panel), store that energy in the sand, then measure how much energy I can get back out, which I could turn into an LED, spinning motor, etc.
This (hilarious, British) man made a tutorial of a DIY sand battery. Based on introductory understanding, I need to acquire sand, a container, a resistive heating element like this one, and a Peltier device. I don’t yet understand if Peltier devices are reversible, as in, if this module generates electricity the way a DC motor/generator does; I may need a different component?
