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I don't often comment, but this is really interesting. The pure simplicity of it, combined with reusability and safety. Just wow. Would love to see more of this concept
@@dudedudeson9732 Please stop with the misinformation. Tesla did not patent the salt battery. They patented a technique that uses salt to more cheaply extract lithium from ore.
I would think that since it seems to be somewhat granulated chunks, to add Sand at the bottom and mixed in would improve heat transfer: with the sand as the heat sink as a sand battery. He mentioned a thermos as a container, but that's double-walled, with the air gap is an insulator. So if I used to thermos, as the vessel, I would think of drilling a hole from the outside and fill it with sand in the air gap space. Hence the sand battery in the air gap space also. The only problem with the thermostat is it's round and the peltier device is flat and square. The cover the whole thing with peltier devices would be somewhat of a challenge unless you were able to melt aluminum from scrap and make a mounting plate. Or keep dipping the thermostat into a crucible of molten aluminum like a candle is made.
There is a synthetically produced zeolite clay material called a molecular sieve. These have pores in the material that adsorb water (and other chemicals depending on the diameter of the pores) which produce intense heat when exposed to water. They are used as desiccants to create very dry environments and adsorb more water faster than silica gels, and they are reusable. You can activate them by drying them with a heat source like a rocket stove for a few hours then store them in a dry enclosure until they are needed.
'by drying them with a heat source like a rocket stove' EXACTLY! And you'll be 10 times better off using the heat from your rocket stove to make power directly than trying to do this and having the huge efficiency loss of using the later heating effect. This is 'no-brainer' type stuff, drying is a terrible process, the moment you go into or out of 'drying' it's going to be a loss. ' a heat source like a rocket stove for a few hours ' Incredible amounts of energy in, tiny amounts of energy out.
@@ModelLights Yeah, air drying would be a better option, and that would take days to actually dry out, if not longer. I don't imagine this would be useful for day to day usage, but it is interesting and maybe an option for ultra long term energy storage and use. Something like a fallout shelter where using a lever to turn on something would physically dump water into a bucket of clay and that power would charge a capacitor to start a generator using some stable fuel that requires extra input energy to get started yet doesn't degrade like gasoline does.
@@anon_y_mousse Maybe using rcket stove for hours can be a waste, but all this excessive heat from sunny days and summers... Whe need to formalise a system to make it easy to use for showering and house heating.... Maybe solar "logs" ...?
You don't always have to use the same clay. It could easily be changed out every time the heat has dissipated. It could dry for as long as needed and re-used later. Clay is plentiful.
@@Caddowolf 👍 And if strong heat is needed, we could have some district solar concentrator where you bring back your used zeolite packs, and take back home baked ones...
If I'm not mistaken, the heat is produced when the clay is turned into its hydrous state, meaning you would need to do more than just let it dry out to remove the water again, as it's chemically bonding with the clay. You would need to heat it up in an oven at high temperatures, using significantly more energy than was produced.
Exactly, and in order to generate any amount of useful energy you'd need a giant array of thermoelectric pads, which really quickly becomes unwieldly... It's a fun little experiment, but if they were any more useful, believe me we'd be seeing them be used in a lot more places other than little drink coolers and temperature sensors...
Fork you have a winner. You are not mistaken. The clay also needs to be fired to a very specific point to make it a ceramic zeolite before this phenomena happens. Imagine the rain if this was a natural occurrence. Lots with this channel is technically true but some information is omitted and some energy unaccounted for.
Suppose you could use large parabolic mirrors to heat it up. Even relatively small ones melt sand. And larger ones will give a much larger ‘functional area of focus’. For that matter you can at night, use the clay for the heat differential and during the day, just use the mirrors
Cool video Rob The challenge with Seebeck effect generation and Peltier devices is to keep the cool side cool. Apart from the heat source which the clay and water provides you probably need a cold indefinite heat sink like flowing water in a river or the ocean for it to be viable. I am facinated by Peltier devices, the solid state part is so cool. Btw the Voyager space probes are powered by the Seebeck effect and they've been running for 60 years using radioactive material as the heat source and space as the heatsink. If only we had left over radioactive material which dissipates heat and an Ocean.....
So hypothetically, IF we had leftover radioactive material that dissipates heat, and an ocean, what could that be used to power? Could it charge solar vehicle batteries or heat homes?
An interesting use of materials like zeolite is as thermal stabilization: The water and clay are kept in a closed container made of something which transports heat well. When it's hot outside the container, that heat goes into evaporating the water, but when it's cold enough for the water to condensate, the container heats up. But for that use, I'd probably be looking at ferrosulphate, since the tipping point for that is at some 60C or so, a temperature you can quite often reach on a sunny rooftop.
I am from Chattanooga, Tennessee and I must say that I absolutely loved your video. Great job!! It's always amazed me how some people are blessed and truly can make big things happen from the plain ordinary. Well, as you've proven, it's not so ordinary, until a brilliant mind such as yours comes on scene. Thank you very much!!!!
Very interesting video! Seems to me, it would be a great way to store "heat" for the winter. You just have logs of them outside in the summer "drying", and in the winter, just add water. Once done, you put them outside to dry again.
The trick is to get it dry and keep it dry, I would think. You'd also have to worry about a lot of water hitting a lot of anhydrous zeolite all at once, if you were doing any kind of scale.
'to dry again.' Most any battery tech has a 'downhill' slide. You're not just wetting this to produce electricity, when you wet it a chemical change is happening to make the electricity. Like iron rusting, aluminum oxidizing, etc. That part tends to not go backwards just because you later dry it out, eventually you will use up whatever is actually producing the energy. May still be a fine, cheap and easy idea. But pretty much guaranteed there is something else going on besides only wet and dry. And realize, spinning a motor is low energy, heating and cooling is not. This is probably a very low energy production system.
@@ModelLights You are correct that over time, there will probably be some undesired chemical reactions. Nevertheless, the heat released by anhydrous Zeolite is due to the "Heat of Adsorption" which means that in the process of water molecules adhering to the surface of the zeolite, it releases heat. This can be "recharged" simply by removing the water, and then heating it sort of like how you might heat silica. So this isn't a "battery" in the traditional sense of redox reaction.
Hi, thank you Robert for this information, your videos are just amazing to watch, so many ideas spring to mind, Looking forward to the next one already! I think there is going to be a lot of people experimenting with this stuff now! Take care and have a great day!
It can be used as a bladless wind generator by covering a cloth with it. When it dryes in the air you get what is essentially a type of fuel. Great job Robert, keep up the good work!
I always try and like your videos half way through watching and then i realise ive already liked it before ive even watched it. I appreciate all the content and info. Thank you
Love it. Id been studying peltier devices in order to create cooling devices but realized theyre more useful for electric generation but most articles claimed it wasnt efficient. But Im glad theres great minds like you challenging misinformation. It may not be enough to run a power station by itself but here in the altar desert I can assure you the hot and cold differences make a big difference. specially as a starting point for a cascading system or even an array of devices. Im on the hunt for peltier devices among other projects.
I rewatched from the two min mark about four times to see what I had missed. Had to google it. First result was a pdf titled: "On the driving force of cation exchange in clays" By Rotenberg, Morel, et al. Apparently there is a Na+ Cs+ exchange during the hydration/dehydration processes.
Astounding! I'd never heard of anything like this! Complete simplicity itself, abundantly refreshable, inert ingredients, safe, non-toxic, non-corrosive, no chemical reactions or by-products, ... yet an energy producer! What an eye-opener! It's energizing just to watch!
If this simple technology is all of those things, which it really is, why hasn't the world switched? We're rediscovering simple science, in supposedly the most advanced era of human history, and we're running on controllable resources, not cheap and limitless ones
@@intertonality9846 I think complex technology looks flashy to many people, and gets attention - like funding. But real advances seek the greatest utility in the large scheme of things. We sometimes forget what to look at first.
@@davidf2281 So the fan spun, how? And the water boiled, how? Heat is energy. Electricity can be produced by conversion of energy, and generally is. Are you just talking about industrial scale? Well, that takes research and engineering. That's not free. But there's no proof it couldn't be done. Your conclusion would be premature.
@@farmergiles1065 Dude, the clue is in the name. It's a battery. It doesn't produce energy, it stores energy from some other source for later release. And it does it *extremely* inefficiently since to recharge this battery you'll need to fire the clay in an oven.
I so like your laughs when getting fascinated about amazements of science and it's applications in real life, so good, please keep going, you are great 😊😊👍🏻👍🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻🌹
I liked this for two reasons: number one, clay; and number two, water. :) Seriously, the two reasons were the science was interesting and incredibly useful, and the presentation was clear and enthusiastic. I couldn't help but smile as you laughed to yourself about the subject matter. (Increasingly, I find myself drawn to videos like this more for the utility than for my scientific curiosity. I truly hope I never need to use this, but I am grateful for the knowledge in case I do. Thanks!)
Thats fascinating. I could see using that as a back up to solar on rainy days, using it to offset the energy loss and then just letting the sun dry it out once the rain is over so you can offset the dip in energy.
Awesome and the Peltier device is made of two different ceramics also. One for the outer case and the inner ones that make power. So, three different ceramics and the crystals inside the device are two slightly different types. I don't know much about them, but I think there is a P and an N type. Does anyone know how to make the Peltier ceramics? Turn the sound up at 4:05 when the Zeolite clay and water start bubbling, it sounds like applause. Well-deserved too Rob. Thank you so much for this video :) You rock Rob!
What exactly is the mechanism at work? Is it chemical or physical? How many times can this process be repeated? Does the power output vary over cycles? Could the water be recaptured when drying used again in a closed cell?
Physical, water molecules being adsorped by the zeolite release kinetic energy as heat as it gets trapped in nano-pores of just the right size by van der walls forces. Drying doesn't cause any damage to the zeolite, so practically forever, or until it becomes too contaminated by other substances since it adsorbs other things like ammonia as well. Drying requires heat, basically adding kinetic energy back to the water molecules until they overcome the van der walls force. This will come out as steam, so yes it can be recaptured but mind the pressure involved.
It's physical, it's an entropy thing. Zeolite 13x is a molecular scale sieve. Further the surface on the crystals is repulsive to the room temperature water. But the water pushes its way into the high surface area interior of the zeolites, and the slower colder molecules can squish inside further and faster, and do so ever better by kicking the hot ones the the exterior. So it seems like energy is coming out, but really it's just spontaneously rearranging itself to be more comfortable. A very small amount of energy is chemical bonds breaking, it is from the hot water action destroying a very small amount of the crystal, but this particular formulation 13x, is very stable so that isn't really relevant, except for we probably need that to be even less to have a repeatability for thermal storage.
Enclose it all to collect the water back into a reservoir above the zeolite. When the wet Peltier dries and reaches ambient temperature, a thermostatic switch can turn on a second Peltier, wired to generate electricity as the zeolite dries, and, upon reaching ambient temperature, to open a valve on the reservoir to start a new wet cycle. Would the energy produced by the initial wet and dry cycles exceed the energy used to open the valve?
The device itself is a bunch of bismuth antimony telluride cubes, which are semiconductors that have a thermoelectric effect. These are encased in a ceramic square on both sides made of aluminum oxide for maximum heat transfer without being electrically conductive. Black wire is soldered to the cube at the begging of the cube array, red wire is soldered to the last cube of the array. Turns a temperature difference into a DC output.
So many people are obsessed with free-energy/perpetual-motion, as if its some game changer... when all along all we need to do is realize how abundant the energy in nature is already.
I’m going to put my clay in a shallow box behind my solar panel, daylight solar and heat to dry the clay then add a splash of water for night time power.
There is zeolite in our dish washer, I never really looked much into it but I was curious, this is quite impressive how much heat it can output ..of course adding a passive heatsink on the cool side would improve the power a bit aswell, which is very easy to do, also I remember luke made a thermal paste with graphene, it looked like it was performing pretty good, any update on that ? this could be useful for that device
Brilliant. Harnessing the electricity from tapping into the field pressure between hot and cold. 🤔💭💭💭. Tapping into a thunderstorm and controlling the lightning ( using the energy of dielectric before the discharge) harness lightning and feed it to a storage battery 🔋. 👍
What's the voltage and current produced from your setup there? Also, could you use calcium chloride to produce the same effect? Adding water to calcium chloride(the stuff used to melt snow) creates an exothermal reaction as well, and doesn't take the large amount of energy to dry as this would.
I wonder what result Rob would get if he insulated the heating container. What would be more interesting would be to get some numbers from the experiment; -starting weight of zeolite, -thermocouple in the mixture and a plot of time vs temp to quantify how much and for how long heat is produced -meter to measure the voltage/amperage produced (maybe also over the time that heat is produced to quantify how much is produced)
The amount of clay you would need for a single day's power supply vs. Renewability is probably not viable, but it could be part of a larger power cycle using different means of electricity production. Thank you for this!
This is very good. Along with your previous video on solar cooling. I wonder how many other chemical reactions are completely reversible like this. It seems pretty special though. When you add water to the clay, does it actually become some other compound, or is it just hot, wet clay?
That's a great video, Rob, thanks! It's got me thinking about using the wet zeolite and cooling it off in the wind and/or sunlight to generate a cold side for the Peltier (I saw you do that in an earlier video). It could be mounted on the roof in a weather-vane type arrangement to get the best wind exposure. This could then be used alternately from hot to cold and cold to hot. The thing is that the Peltier doesn't need to be swapped and the zeolite doesn't either. The only difference is exposing one side to wind and the other to water, then switch sides and do it all over again. There's no free lunch, so we'd need a constant (small) supply of water and the Peltier isn't very efficient, but as a proof of concept that would be very good. We could always go with a Stirling engine for better efficiency and greater wattage.
Wow, I can just picture buildings lined with big urns collecting rainwater and strings of lights connecting them, or even dousing rods placed on top to draw electromagnetic energy... Oh wait, they had those on buildings during the Chicago world's fair in 1893?
Great explanation Robert, whilst you were explaining it I was thinking large clay filled tubes with a fine mesh on the bottom to allow water to drain slowly and fed by a header tank of rain water.
The 'downside' of this is that you need to dry the zeolite for this reaction to happen, which takes as much energy to do as you get out in heat. Once the zeolite is saturated the effect halts.
Makes me think of the great pyramids having a hot and cold side as well as the clay mixture that were cast so tightly into blocks. I mean its the perfect angle for the dangle !
I would love to see a combination of this and the dessicant cooler like shown from Tech Ingredients, when i have time again i would work on that thanks for the idea
This is absolutely fantastic! Thank you so much! Will any clay work? How long does it generate a heating reaction? Would that particular setup work better if you insulated the tin from the table?
I would think a Sterling engine would be a lot more efficient than a Peltier junction when trying to extract usable energy from a heat difference. Peltier junctions also require complex PN junctions (aka silicon processing) that might require much higher technology than a Stirling engine. Have you tried using a Stirling engine with this?
But you can buy Peltier chips easily online, Sterling Engines can't really be bought (in any useful size) and require a very skilled machinist, working in a full metal shop, to construct the parts. All of which have to be made to extremely fine tolerances to work. *I* can put together a Peltier device that makes a worthwhile amount of energy in an afternoon (provided I already have the parts of course) with a cost of less than 250 usd, possibly much less depending on how many of the tools and parts I needed that I didn't already have, and what I could scavenge locally. As little as 50 usd is quite possible most of that going to the actual Peltier chips.
This is magic, just the fact that the water boiled the instant it came in contact with the clay is pure wizardry to me AND IT GENERATES ELECTRICITY. WHAT!?!
The water coming in contact with the clay doesn’t generate electricity, it generates heat. Turning heat into electricity is how a lot of power plants work, albeit by using the heat to create steam to drive a turbine. You can use Peltier modules or TECs with any heat and cold source. Turning heat into electricity is a well researched and used subject.
I used to live a few miles from a ghost town in northern peninsular Florida called Edgar. All that’s left is the post office and mining facilities, because underneath the site of the town is a huge deposit of kaolin, a type known as Edgar Plastic Kaolin.
Thank you. I do have to share with you that do not like when channels have additional guidelines to post. It’s already the riechsTube without your additional rules. Cheers.
Great idea, and there's no size restriction on that. You could use barrels on a axis. I suspect whatever size you do wouldn't dry out fully though, so the power output might keep decreasing until it's fully refreshed.
@@davidahmad6090 perhaps, but you're taking the heat out to generate elecricity, so I'm not sure whether you'd have enough left to dry it fully. Either way, some form of heating elements inside could dry it out. This could come from wind or solar. Maybe even a solar heater attached to the copper heat pipe.
@MrMatthewPR It's basically just the activated carbon nitrogen harvesting set up repurposed. Cooled activated charcoal absorbs nitrogen, heating it up expells it. Can be solar driven for the heating portion. And, although inefficient, generate liquid nitrogen by also using it as its own refrigerant.
