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#26 2022-07-26 08:04:34

tahanson43206
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Registered: 2018-04-27
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

For SpaceNut re posts in this topic ...

While looking for something else, I found the posts you had contributed to enhance this topic!

Your work reminds me that I set up this topic in hopes it would become a useful resource for someone wanting to implement the magnificent vision of kbd512, to make hydrocarbon fuel from air and water using solar power.

At the moment, except for one encouraging report from Spain, the vision remains no more than vaporware.

I am ever hopeful we (or at least some of us) will be able to create physical systems that bring into the Real Universe the concepts our brains can imagine.

(th)

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#27 2022-07-26 09:18:33

Calliban
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From: Northern England, UK
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Posts: 3,352

Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

What is needed to advance this solution is a small scale proof of concept.  Once we demonstrate that concentrated solar can produce fuel at a kW power level, then the case can be made for scaling up the enterprise to GW and then TW power levels.  At present, this is just words on a page.  Is there any way of demonstrating this at a hobby scale, that doesn't cost millions?


"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."

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#28 2022-07-26 10:30:50

kbd512
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

Calliban,

Someone already did that.  Void posted about it in another thread.  TLDR- It worked.

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#29 2022-07-26 10:52:10

tahanson43206
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

For Calliban re #28

To clarify so there is no misunderstanding .... the Spanish experiment was NOT done with the trough technology that is advocated by kbd512.

kbd512 has repeatedly, and thoroughly, made the case for why solar trough technology ** should ** be capable of delivering results.

This topic is available  if anyone discovered a report of work actually done with ** solar trough ** technology.

Elsewhere in the forum, there is a report of a Ukrainian gent building and demonstrating a solar trough made of aluminum foil on concrete barrel forms.

While (obviously) crude, the YouTube video that shows the work also shows that hot water is produced.

I would ** hope ** that a decent (production quality) demonstration of solar trough to hydrocarbon fuel might be demonstrated for under a million dollars (USD), such a demonstration is likely to cost more than a roll of aluminum foil and some concrete mix.

What is needed (as i see it) is an investment in a well thought out plan to yield the desired results.

However, there are two things needed that we do not presently have (to my knowledge, which is (of course) limited) ...

A well thought out plan with drawings, equipment and material specifications, and procedures for execution of construction and operation (a)
and
(b)a pool of investors who have trust in the management team who presented the well thought out plan.

I am hoping this topic will attract contributions by members able and willing to create that plan.

Once a plan suitable for presentation is in place, the next step is to find a salesperson willing to (attempt to) build up the trust needed so the plan is given a chance.

This sequence has been carried out hundreds if not thousands of times in the United States, so there is absolutely nothing NEW about it.

A possible starting point is to interview folks who are actually building trough solar concentrators, and publishing their tips (to the extent they are willing to share them).    The Spanish venture might be willing to provide some tips. They might even have filed patent applications, which would be professionally prepared.

(th)

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#30 2022-07-26 20:00:19

SpaceNut
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

The fixed trough does work but for limited hours of the day at peak power collecting levels.

The tracking unit would achieve about 3 times the power level over the course of a day for the same sized reflective surface.

I gave the temperature of the co2 separation of 800'C but still was looking at the low efficiency of just 4% conversion since its only 400 ppm for air content without any help to concentrate that value before hitting it with heat to cause it to de-bond.

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#31 2022-07-26 20:55:34

kbd512
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

SpaceNut,

Parabolic dish solar concentrators can achieve temperatures between 500C (800 Suns) and 1200C (8,000 Suns).  We should obviously look at lower temperature processes to create the syngas, to provide pumping power and the lower temperature process heat to convert Ethanol or Methanol into Gasoline / Kerosene / Diesel via the Socony-Mobil method, but we should use different types of concentrators for different purposes.

YouTube - Engineer775 - Super Cool Phase Change Solar Tracker - No Power Needed!!

What I want is an all-mechanical synthetic fuel plant, but will also accept an absolute minimum of electronics where it truly makes the most sense.  We need to keep the total complexity to a bare minimum.  This plant needs to be long-term maintainable, and so simple in operation that anyone with decent mechanical aptitude can be taught to run it.

This thing needs to be functional and usable in sub-Saharan Africa to the most technologically advanced country on the planet.  That's the one thing we can't get from nuclear power of any description, fission or fusion.  That said, the world needs energy and lots of it.  Photovoltaics and batteries are not the answer to every problem.  They can and should be part of a comprehensive solution, but they are not "the solution".  At some point, you have to recycle that stuff.  Steel or Aluminum, concrete, ceramics, and oil working fluid do much better on that metric.  We know how to mass-recycle that stuff.  We don't know how to mass-recycle electronics and batteries.  Sometimes simpler truly is better, especially when complexity yields an endless waste stream of short-lived stuff we can't properly recycle.

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#32 2022-08-01 19:41:52

tahanson43206
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

The YouTube video at the link below is about a home made (but professional quality) solar reflection system ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMhtdCR2pJU

However, readers of this topic may find the video worth while because it shows so many ** real ** solar trough installations.

For kbd512 ... the idea of using concrete slabs as this gent has done may not match up with your vision, but I'm hoping it might stimulate some ideas.

The gent claims a cost of (about) $15 per square meter of reflective surface.

(th)

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#33 2022-08-02 01:31:55

kbd512
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

tahanson43206,

We must have different ideas about what the words "professional quality" mean, but the video was still interesting to watch.  I think we'll stick with field-proven commercial solar concentrator hardware.

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#34 2022-08-02 22:08:09

SpaceNut
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

The build it solar site has a large group of over achievers....then again if you buy something and alter its intended purpose into something else is it any less professional?

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#35 2022-11-06 17:02:49

kbd512
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

The US consumed 4,120,000,000,000,000Wh of electricity provided by utility-scale generators in 2021.  From that total, approximately 2,504,000,000,000,000Wh were provided by fossil fuels.  According to NREL, solar trough concentrators require a land area usage of approximately 3.9 acres per Gigawatt-hour of electricity generated, per year.  They further assert that this land area must be clear-cut or graded and will not be used for any other purpose.  That means any assertion that the land will be simultaneously used for other purposes is false.  That means 13,772,000 acres of land ((2,504,000,000,000,000 / 1,000,000,000) * 3.9 = 9,765,600) acres, or 15,258.75 square miles (if the land area was actually square-shaped, then each side of the square is just over 123.5 miles), of land would be required to replace all fossil fuels used for producing utility-grade electricity in the United States.

It's important to note that this land claim, which is significant, would be broken apart over Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, and Nevada.  Distributed equally, that's about 2,543.125 square miles per state, or parcels of land approximately 50.4 square miles per side.

Corn-based ethanol fuel requires a land area usage of approximately 42,000 square miles for comparison purposes, and about 140,000 square miles in total are devoted to corn production.

I think it's perfectly fair to ask states with otherwise unused deserts to devote that land to energy production, and of course, Texas is already considered the "Energy Capital of the World", so it's only right that my home state should devote more of its land to producing energy for Texas and the rest of the country.

We also need eastern seaboard and middle-America states to resume production of domestic steel and concrete- the materials that built this country to begin with.  We need 157,752,000t of steel and 162,760,000t of cement.  This will need to be done over 10 years, because we simply lack the production capacity to do this over a shorter time frame.  We produced 87,000,000t of steel and 92,000,000t of cement in 2021.  I think global glass production was only 23,400,000t, so we'll need to use polished steel or polished Aluminum-coated steel rather than Silver-coated glass.  Otherwise, we'd require 77,624,000t of glass, which might be a bridge too far, even over 10 years.

This Aluminum-Silicon coating is applied by hot-dipping and is electrochemically bonded to the base metal, which prevents further corrosion / oxidation and reflects about 80% of visible light and 90% of radiant heat.  That's clearly not as good as Silver, but much cheaper and easier to come by.  Silver reflects about 95% of all light, whereas Aluminum only reflects about 90%.  This design trade-off is required to contain costs, not run into any material supply limitations as would be the case with Silver, and to discourage theft.  Otherwise, 7,762.4t of Silver would be required, which would cost over 4 billion dollars.  The Aluminum-Silicon coating will also protect the steel or other base metal up to about 800C, whereas Silver would not, and won't distort at high temperatures the way stainless steel does.  All-in-all, Aluminum-Silicon is an excellent trade over Silver.  A 5% reduction in performance is almost meaningless at the scale required.

Hot-rolled sheet steel is $790/t and cold-rolled sheet steel is $1,100/t, meaning $124.6 billion dollars for hot-rolled or $173.5 billion dollars for cold-rolled.  We need both the strength and surface finish properties of cold-rolled steel, so $173.5 billion is our cost estimate for the steel required.  Imported cement costs us about $85/t, so $13.8 billion dollars.

We need 1,277,040t / 1,277,040,000kg / 2,815,387,925lbs / 351,923,491 gallons of heat transfer oil.  Motor oil is around $30 per gallon, so $10.56 billion.

That's around $198 billion for the major materials, exclusive of the power conversion equipment.  If the farms are built over 10 years, that's about the same as our yearly budget for NASA.  I can't properly estimate the cost of the power conversion equipment without knowing what machinery will be producing the electricity and what materials will be used.  I also cannot estimate the cost for thermal power storage, built we'll need plenty of that, too.

However, it's readily apparent that replacing all fossil fuel generated electricity in America is an economically achievable proposition, even without the use of nuclear power, which will either increase or decrease the total cost, dependent upon how it's implemented.  I think we need nuclear for base load power, because it's the most reliable.  However, heat stored in salts or rocks or blocks of steel is also feasible.  Batteries are grossly infeasible at the scale required- far too much input energy and too short-lived for the paltry energy output they provide.  That observation probably makes a lot of people unhappy, but personal preferences are irrelevant to physics.

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#36 2022-11-06 17:47:15

tahanson43206
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

For kbd512 re #35

SearchTerm:Trough Solar - exhaustive analysis of requirements to replace fossil fuel
SearchTerm:Solar Trough

(th)

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#37 2022-11-06 17:58:06

SpaceNut
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

It appears desert land is what they require since low amounts of vegetation grow cannot block the ability to collect the energy at ground level.
Since that energy creation is not from fossil fuels or other similar means it's lobbied against same as the other free energy sources that can create power.

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#38 2022-11-06 18:11:46

tahanson43206
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

For SpaceNut re #37

We (humans) need folks to lobby ** for ** kbd512's idea, instead of against it.

Capitalism insures that there will be losers, and the American system seems to guarantee that losers will put up a fight as long as they possibly can.

(th)

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#39 2022-11-06 20:24:04

kbd512
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

If 35% of the electricity generated is used at night, then to store power for 1 day in molten salt, we need about 30,000,000t of salt if it can store about 80.

2,504,000,000,000,000 * 0.35 = 876,400,000,000,000Watt-hours of energy storage per year, assuming 35% total usage at night

876,400,000,000,000 / 365 = 2,401,095,890,411Wh per day of energy storage

Cast Iron can store 3,889,000J per cubic meter per degree Celsius, so if we can heat the Iron to 250°C during the day and then drop the temperature back to ambient, say 10°C at night, that would mean 1,011,140,000J / 280,872Wh per cubic meter.  Wrought Iron is around 7,680kg per cubic meter, or 36,571.875Wh per metric ton.  We can convert about half of that back into electricity.  So, 1 cubic meter of Iron stores 140kWh of energy.

2,401,095,890,411 / 140,000 = 17,150,685 cubic meters of Iron

17,150,685 * 7.68 = 131,717,261t of Iron

There's an American foundry that sells ductile cast Iron for $1,730 per metric ton, so $227,870,861,530.

Can Uncle Sam get a discount for buying in bulk?

Probably, but the cost is primarily energy and labor, so it's doubtful that it'll be a night-and-day difference.

That brings our cost up to approximately $40 billion per year, or $10 billion more than NASA's new yearly budget.

Nobody ever said this was going to be cheap, but 1GWe nuclear reactors go for $5 billion per copy.

2,504,000,000,000,000 / 8,760,000,000,000 (amount of power a 1GWe reactor produces per year, on average) = 286 1GWe reactors

286 reactors * $5,000,000,000 per reactor = $1,430,000,000,000 or $143 billion per year over 10 years

Utility grade solar thermal power ain't cheap, but it doesn't have to break the bank, either.  Yes, nuclear thermal power is WAY more materials-efficient than solar thermal, but cost-effective?...  Not so much.  I like nuclear power and all the good things it provides to us, but I don't like it well enough to bankrupt my fellow Americans pursuing something that I know cannot be realistically achieved.  In order for costs to be comparable, a cost reduction of 4X is required for nuclear power, and at the scale of the nation's entire fossil fuel power generation level, I don't think it's achievable.  A 2X cost reduction, perhaps doable, but 4X is asking for too much.

All the bulk materials I want to use can be readily recycled into new CSP power units, without much in the way of cleanup afterwards.

The solar troughs will collect heat and pump hot oil into the Iron blocks, and a second set of heat removal pipes containing CO2 removes the heat to make electrical power.

I need lots of steel / cast Iron / cement / oil / CO2, but not much else.  I'm not asking for anything we cannot produce in the required quantities, and I'm not talking about destroying our existing systems, either.  That's a bunch of nonsense.  We will bring these new integrated power generation / power storage / fuel synthesis plants online at a pace that our grid and worker base can handle.  The money already allocated for "climate change legislation" could supply most of the input funding, but we need to use that money to build infrastructure, rather than line the pockets of rich people.  This same basic setup is how we will synthesize the Methane and Propane required to provide power to vehicles, backup generators, and home heating / cooking.  Efficiency favors very large fields of collectors and co-synthesis of energy products, because cars and trucks and fighter jets don't run on nuclear power.

I don't know what the manufacturing / fabrication facilities will cost (to stamp / weld / hot-dip / polish the steel), but I suspect we're talking about another $20 billion to $50 billion.

If it's not apparent, I'm looking out for the working poor and the middle class.  I have zero interest in becoming opulently wealthy or taking money from the people without giving back a lot more than I had to take from them, in order to provide for their energy needs.  This is entirely a long-term / lasting value proposition to improve their lives by making sure that we never ever run out energy.  This is not "Green New Deal", this is more like the plain old "New Deal", in which everyone gets a job and energy and a few nice things like a car, a home, and a future for their children that doesn't end in energy poverty / hell.

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#40 2022-11-06 21:32:38

SpaceNut
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

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#41 2022-11-07 01:52:04

kbd512
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

SpaceNut,

I took another look at molten salt for the energy storage, but with current prices for the salts (Sodium Nitrate and Potassium Nitrate), the cost was over $1,000 per metric ton.  Both chemicals are also used as fertilizers.  The world is now in desperately short supply of fertilizers and we should not assume that our predicament will change in the near future.  If turning corn into Ethanol was a generally bad idea that consumed enormous resources for little real benefit to emissions while drastically decreasing global food supplies, then consuming enormous quantities of fertilizer chemicals to store thermal power is an equally bad idea.  I had no idea that those chemicals had become so expensive to source, but a quick check of spot prices for both confirmed that their prices have drastically increased.  If we're going to spend that much money on salts, which will corrode steel over time, then we may as well stick with oil and CO2, which will not appreciably corrode either and have the added benefit of being easier to source.

Potash fertilizer production is only around 90 million tons per year.  America purchasing a huge chunk of that per year, in order to store thermal power, is a non-starter.  Further increasing fertilizer prices for the world is dumb and evil at the same time.

The alternative is cast Iron, which is more expensive, but also more durable, easier to recycle, and less likely to become contaminated.

This is an Iron swage block, and similar to the sort of Iron blocks we'd need to store thermal energy:
industrial_swage.jpg.022fadb240089d16f8d573a4f83c1dd8.jpg

In our case we'd use a bunch of similar blocks and Iron pipes to move hot oil or Carbon Dioxide through them, to either supply (oil) or collect (supercritical CO2) the stored thermal energy.

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#42 2022-11-07 06:31:21

tahanson43206
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

For kbd512 re #41

Your post did not mention sodium-chloride, so i went back and read the article SpaceNut linked.

The article does NOT specify the salt used, but it ** does ** refer to the fertilizer industry as a user of salt, so I am left with the impression they might be using the nitrate salt.

If you have time, please show the benefits of particular choices of salt for the thermal energy challenge, or perhaps just show links to the explanation.

I admit to disappointment that plain ordinary table salt does not appear to be useful for this purpose.

Update a bit later on a more modern computer:

OK ... Wikipedia has an explanation ... it is the combination of two factors at work...

The heat of melting is a factor .... lower is better

The heat storage capacity is the other ...

(there may well be other factors)

Cryolite (a fluoride salt) is used as a solvent for aluminium oxide in the production of aluminium in the Hall-Héroult process.

Fluoride, chloride, and hydroxide salts can be used as solvents in pyroprocessing of nuclear fuel.

Molten salts (fluoride, chloride, and nitrate) can be used as heat transfer fluids as well as for thermal storage. This thermal storage is commonly used in concentrated solar power plants.[3]

A commonly used thermal salt is the eutectic mixture of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate, which can be used as liquid between 260-550 °C. It has a heat of fusion of 161 J/g,[4] and a heat capacity of 1.53 J/(g K).[5]

Experimental salts using lithium can be formed that have a melting point of 116 °C while still having a heat capacity of 1.54 J/(g K).[5] Salts may cost $1,000 per ton, and a typical plant may use 30,000 tons of salt.[6]

So now I have a follow up question ... why is the price of nitrate salt going up?

I'll bet (without doing any research) that the price is increasing because hydrocarbon fuels are used to make them.

This seems to me like an opportunity to make the required salts using trough solar energy.

I don't know enough yet to have a good sense of what is possible ....;

a) Why not make thermal storage with sodium-chloride and live with the great heat ?

There may well be a good engineering reason

b) Why not make the required salts using solar trough systems and cut out the middle man?

There may well be reasons why it is necessary to continue using hydrocarbon fuels.

What we have in this topic is an extended opportunity for readers (forum and non-member alike) to gain insight into the problem and the opportunities that may be present.

(th)

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#43 2022-11-07 07:23:35

tahanson43206
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

This is a follow up to post #42, while we wait for a definitive answer by kbd512 ...

The cost of working with sodium-chloride salt may well be greater than the costs of working with salts having a lower melting point.   There may well be other factors that engineers consider in choosing a material for this purpose.

Another factor is the heat capacity of a solar trough ... if the heat potential of the trough is less than the melting point of sodium chloride, then sodium chloride is not very practical.  It might be practical for a nuclear application.

In one of the articles I found in the search reported above, I noted one researcher affirming that water is the most commonly used material for energy storage, but there must be good reasons why water is not favored for thermal energy storage.

Water is clearly favored for gravity energy storage, for a variety of reasons, including it's wide range of temperature in the liquid state.

In any case, I am definitely looking forward to future posts in this topic.

The idea of using thermal trough technology based on oil, to make low melting point salts, seems (to me at least) as an attractive option for a business venture.

(th)

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#44 2022-11-07 07:39:11

tahanson43206
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

This post is separate from others to concentrate on a single question....

Given a solar trough energy storage plant constructed with all traditional sources of energy, how long would it take that plant to duplicate itself?

The duration of that interval would determine the doubling time, and thus the time required to reach US energy requirements.

A plant intended to duplicate itself is NOT the same thing as a plant intended to supply energy to the consumer market.  Such a plant would contain/include capabilities not needed for the simple consumer power application.

(th)

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#45 2022-11-07 09:05:05

kbd512
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

tahanson43206,

Sodium Chloride melts around 800°C, unless it's mixed with something else.  The salt would still be solid at the anticipated 250°C operating temperatures of this solar power plant, which means solid blocks of it would be required and a method devised to uniformly spread / transfer the heat from the oil into the salt.  I don't know how easy that is to do, but my sense is that it's not so easy, because all molten salt thermal power storage plants use, as the name implies, molten / liquid salt.  If the salt can't be melted at low temperatures, then it's not terribly useful for this project.

Synthetic oil and supercritical CO2 are liquids / fluids that can readily be pumped at the temperatures involved and shouldn't corrode anything, whih means expensive piping won't need to be replaced as frequently.

If prices were lower for the Nitrogen-based salts that melt at lower temperatures, then using different types of salt or eutectic mixtures of salts (that generally have lower melting points) would be a more attractive option.  The high prices are affected by the prices of fossil fuel energy supplies for sure, which is also the case with any other technology claiming to be "green" (all the photovoltaics / wind turbines / batteries made from or with copious quantities of coal and gas), but it's a function of scarcity.  There is not enough fertilizer to go around, because much of it came from Russia or Ukraine and China.  The war in Ukraine took a lot of that production capacity offline, and there's no way to replace it.  Fertilizer plants also take years to build.

This plan is workable because it swears off the manufacturing of even more energy-intensive "high tech stuff", in preference to a much simpler and more maintainable system.  It's low efficiency makes it expensive, but the only practical alternative, which is nuclear power, is even more expensive to build and maintain.

After these solar thermal power plants are built, they can and probably will last as long as any nuclear thermal power plants, because the materials used are the same or substantially similar, temperatures are kept within reasonable limits, the solution is mostly maintainable using hand tools, and there are no corrosion-accelerating properties associated with the materials selected, which are also available in the required quantities at attainable price points.  NREL's experience with maintaining their own experimental solar thermal power plant, albeit a tower-based design that operates at higher temperatures, is now approaching 50 years.

I think we can safely say that hot Iron and steel is a winning long term durability design.  Some of our nuclear power plants have operated for longer periods of time.  We're designing a plant with relatively benign operating conditions, heavily protected from corrosion, operated in hot / dry environments, and built using dirt-common materials which we have extensive experience using.  I'm not worried about it working properly.  I know it will work.

It's a $250 billion dollar investment paid for by about 200 million tax payers.  If it operates for 50 years, then each tax payer is on the hook for $1,250, at $25 per year.  Individual monthly minimum electricity bills are more than that, so yes, it will be economical to own and operate.  The scale of the project is expansive, but the end result is low cost electricity and synthesized hydrocarbon fuels for an adult lifetime.  It's doable right now, it can be done again using stored fuels without much new mining, and it's repeatable at other desert locations around the world (Spain, Sahara Desert in Africa, Middle East, Gobi Desert in China, Thar Desert in India).

What I'm after is repeatable methods that people with basic metal working skills can reproduce around the world.  The oil and CO2 can be supplied, if necessary, but pretty much every country already knows how to make oil and collect CO2.  The turboelectric generators require some specialized fabrication / production, but that's about it.

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#46 2022-11-26 18:46:00

SpaceNut
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Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

I took a look back at the gasoline topic and the distillation stack temperatures and looked for the term and it is described as petrol which means more refinement is needed.

We know that we can keep using it and Why Gasoline 90% Distillation Temperature Affects Emissions with Port Fuel Injection and Premixed Charge

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/fsc432/ … ing-points

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files … ey-doc.pdf

https://kendrickoil.com/gasoline-manufacturing-process/

When the vapor reaches about 150 degrees Celsius, the hydrocarbon chains that make up gasoline begin to move into liquid state. The gasoline begins to collect on the distillation plates and gets siphoned off into a holding tank for the next step of the manufacturing process.

The sea water in with co2 is a different starting point for sure but its still within the grasp of knowledge.

https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/coal/ … o-gasoline

6-3-1_Fixed-bed_MTG_process.jpg

Seems we now have a Distillative separation of methane and carbon dioxide
patent

http://www.che.cemr.wvu.edu/publication … soline.pdf

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#47 2022-11-27 16:13:26

kbd512
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Posts: 7,362

Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

Earlier I estimated that the total cost for a plant that could provide all of America's gasoline or an equivalent hydrocarbon product would cost around 250 billion dollars.  If we sell gasoline or Propane product at $2/gallon and produce 110 million gallons per day, then the plant generates a total revenue of 80.3 billion dollars per year.  That means the entire construction cost of the plant is paid off in 3.11 years.  If we charge $3/gallon and produce the same 110 million gallons per day, then total yearly revenue is 120.45 billion, thus the plant recoups construction costs in 2.08 years.  Even if the plant only operates for 25 years instead of 50, then it's generated 2 trillion dollars to 3 trillion dollars in total revenue.  I propose that we reinvest 500 billion of that revenue to construct an additional 2 plants of similar size, so that we can also supply fuels to our allies and to start accumulating a "fuel ready reserve" (straight ready-to-use fuel, which requires no refining and input energy, unlike crude oil).

Over the next several decades, products sold from these plants can be used to pay down our national debt, presuming we refrain from starting any new wars and do not incur additional debts through spending more money than we generate in terms of tax revenues.

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#48 2022-11-27 19:49:08

SpaceNut
Administrator
From: New Hampshire
Registered: 2004-07-22
Posts: 28,747

Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

I would hope that this can be scaled down for individual use that is safe and not kept proprietary or in the realm of rich customer designs as a Sabatier reactor has been.

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#49 2022-11-27 20:53:11

tahanson43206
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Registered: 2018-04-27
Posts: 16,754

Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

For SpacdNut re #48

I'm sympathetic to your vision, and I have asked that question as well.  My (vague) recollection of the answer is that economies of scale may favor the large installation.   If you are able to persuade designers to create a plan for a community, and if the community has plenty of land and water available, a smaller facility might work.

It may be possible for you (or anyone) to go back over kbd512's previous work to discover the cost of a facility to serve a smaller customer base.

(th)

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#50 2022-11-27 21:07:17

SpaceNut
Administrator
From: New Hampshire
Registered: 2004-07-22
Posts: 28,747

Re: Trough Solar Collector- Design- Construction- Operation- Maintenance

Scale threatens the livelihood of the regular fuel producers and that is why if you can sneak in a smaller target for use, they cannot do anything to block it other than to buy up the technology just like they have done so in the past.

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