Good news or a mirage (or wishful thinking)? And these MIT scientists promote this as sustainable technology!
The melting point of e.g. iron is 1,538°C!
"Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines. ...
The team’s design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius ...
The researchers plan to incorporate the TPV [thermphotovoltaic] cell into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources such as the sun and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. ...
The cell in the experiments is about a square centimeter. For a grid-scale thermal battery system, ... the TPV cells would have to scale up to about 10,000 square feet (about a quarter of a football field), and would operate in climate-controlled warehouses to draw power from huge banks of stored solar energy. ..."
The team’s design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius ...
The researchers plan to incorporate the TPV [thermphotovoltaic] cell into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources such as the sun and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. ...
The cell in the experiments is about a square centimeter. For a grid-scale thermal battery system, ... the TPV cells would have to scale up to about 10,000 square feet (about a quarter of a football field), and would operate in climate-controlled warehouses to draw power from huge banks of stored solar energy. ..."
From the abstract:
"Thermophotovoltaics (TPVs) convert predominantly infrared wavelength light to electricity via the photovoltaic effect, and can enable approaches to energy storage and conversion that use higher temperature heat sources than the turbines that are ubiquitous in electricity production today. ... Here we report the fabrication and measurement of TPV cells with efficiencies of more than 40% and experimentally demonstrate the efficiency of high-bandgap tandem TPV cells. The TPV cells are two-junction devices comprising III–V materials with bandgaps between 1.0 and 1.4 eV that are optimized for emitter temperatures of 1,900–2,400 °C. ... These cells can be integrated into a TPV system for thermal energy grid storage to enable dispatchable renewable energy. This creates a pathway for thermal energy grid storage to reach sufficiently high efficiency and sufficiently low cost to enable decarbonization of the electricity grid."
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