Homemade sand battery

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#81

So how do you make charcoal with your TLUD? Do you cook then dump the charcoal into an airtight bin, or do you quench the charcoal with water?

#82

The TLUD Iā€™ve been using lately is 6 inches in diameter and 12 inches high, so it is only good for a short cooking session. As soon as I remove the food, I grab the TLUD out of the ā€œframeā€ and dump the contents into a large stainless bowl of rainwater. After so many years in a severe drought, we finally got some water and things are green, so I am able to catch up on my piles of wood. I use a combination of Gary Gilmoreā€™s two barrel method when I have a lot of wood about the same size. For dirty logs and nasty thorny Mesquite and Huisache large stuff, I use a top down burn and quench early with about 100 gallons of dirty water. I sort through all this looking for firewood sized hunks, plus the small stuff that can be used in the cookstove TLUD. When loading the stove, I put some nasty stuff over the grate (which is partly burnt away), and then some nice dry pencil diameter hardwood about 1 to 2 inches long, then some torrified wood or char showing brown, and then some little stuff to get the fire going, with the help of a few drops of alcohol. A 12 volt computer fan is used at the beginning and end of the burn to prevent any smoke. (better to burn the smokeā€¦) Itā€™s usually so hot and dry here in Texas that I donā€™t have to worry about the charcoal being too wet.

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#83

Iā€™ll add this here. Apparently a cell similar to solar is converting great back to electric at 44% efficiency. It isnā€™t a seebeck style. But it is still in the lab.

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#84

Neat concept. A working temperature of 1425 C, 2615 F makes it slightly less practical with your average sand battery.

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#85

Yeah that and it used gold as a reflective material kind of make it impractical for commercialization, but the idea itself has potential. And really piggybacks solar panel design concepts. Just tuned to a different frequency.

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#86

Yep good infoā€¦ I ran into this type solar panel before in looking at heat storage, and it was so out of my normal frame of reference that I did not know how to process how it worked. But when you get to temps that high you have what I would guess you would call a miniature sun with all of that radiation. which is trapped bouncing around. The things that are out there we had no idea existed still blows my small brainā€¦

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#87

Mind blowing, but not yet fuse blowingā€¦

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