Why would I use this instead of a fuel cell?

I believe the bar graph is showing relative energy densities of the raw energy sources so the 5x bar is just the energy density of hydrogen as H2. Your 1250 Wh/L number is right for compressed gaseous hydrogen so The 500Wh/L lines up with burning H2 at 40% efficiency. The "use fuel for extended duration" implies that they believe they can achieve a much higher Wh/L with other fuels.

I would think the energy density varies with that of the fuel they put in. They mention hydrogen, natural gas, gasoline, ammonia, butane, propane, alcohols, syngas…. That’s about anything that is or can easily be turned into a gas that burns.

also, “/liter”, for gases such as hydrogen, can be made larger by using higher pressures in your tank.

On the other hand, they also say “target efficiency: ≥ 40% wire to wire”, and 40% of 1250 is 500, so it may be that.

The gasoline vs H2 ballpark is a little wider because storage is not trivial for H2 -- you need to carry around a cryogenic and/or high pressure vessel instead of a plastic box -- which will detract from your p/w ratio. It also wants to leak out, so H2 is maybe better for fleet vehicle applications where they can refill daily. Granted, anything is better than burning more hydrocarbons!

If that is 40% efficient as in 40% of the theoretical energy input comes out as electricity then it's quite incredible but I find that hard to believe. It would put it in the same range as diesel engines.

The better comparison is Fuel Cells and vehicle based electrical generators. So you could put this in a vehicle or remote location, run it off hydrogen or natural gas, and get better efficiency. Potentially this could be a much better option for longer term storage in remote areas as well, where excess solar/wind could be used to crack hydrogen which then gets stored and later burned in one of these instead of a much much larger battery installation.

Rechargeables/battery packs have inefficiencies due to the grid and/or solar cells though, in terms of where to measure inefficiency?

It might not be a hard sell compared to home generators. Forget hydrogen. Think natgas.

Do you mean watts or watt-hours?

1. The countercurrent heat exchanger achieves exactly that: exhaust gases are cooled while the inflowing fuel mixture is heated up.

2. Thermophotovoltaics in general can operate with any heat source, though this device is clearly optimized for combustion. However, the efficiency is far too low to compete in the large-scale power generation segment. This is almost certainly aimed at light aviation, heavy drones, military applications, etc., where there are not a lot of alternatives that combine small size, high power density and good efficiency.

1. It's hard to capture all the waste heat. If you could run this indoors (but vent outdoors if the fuel is anything other than H2, naturally) then you could use some of the waste heat to heat a building.

2. There are thermovoltaic generators, but they're limited by the need to cool one side of the material. These are typically used in deep space probes that use Pu 240 to power them. To my knowledge thermovoltaic generation is not scalable or practical on Earth at this time.

it can work purely from heat, however our process requires high temperature heat for power density.

To my limited understanding yes, that's what they claim.

Basically burning fuel (any fuel, really) with added sodium to create very bright monochromatic light that can then be converted into electricity using very high efficiency solar cells.

It's a different way to capture energy stored in fuel.

Normally to produce electricity from fuel you would spin a turbine, either with a mechanical engine or using vapour. But here the energy is captured through a photo cell, and the author claims that mixing sodium into certain fuels leads to a very significant part of fuel energy going into light at specific wavelength.

From the "wire-to-wire" mention it seems that they're proposing using electric power to generate and store hydrogen till it's needed, then burn it to get electric power back.

But they say other fuels work, in which case it wouldn't be "wire-to-wire", and then it'd be more appropriate to compare this to a power generator fueled by natural gas or gasoline. A generator with no pistons or turbines, just a fuel pump, sounds fantastic, if they can make it work. But you'd have to supply sodium.

we don't see any degradation in sapphire tubes, though quartz, which is more convenient to work with because it almost completely resists thermoshock, does degrade slowly. there is a layer of salt on the tube which becomes transparent when melted, above 800 C. sodium vapor is provided to the reaction tube via direct evaporation -- melted sodium has a high surface tension and surface affinity for alumina, and wicks into the chamber. after combustion as it cools, it reforms into sodium chloride. for all fuels we've explored, sodium-chlorine is the maximum bond energy, but you can have some swaps if you have for some reaction alkali or fluorine in your fuel (don't!), the sodium chloride condenses from 800-1400C in the heat exchanger, and then wicks itself back along the surface to where it is evaporating. We hope to drive this process to some number of 99.99..% recovery, and just add granular salt (or could be a solution) to replenish. There is only a few % of salt needed in the flame, and if you recover 99.9% of the salt then you would have hundreds of total refuelings before you need to replenish a salt vessel of about 1%.

I wonder if they recover the sodium and run it back through the process.

For that matter, could you maybe put sodium in a sealed container and then heat the whole container? Like a sodium vapor lamp but causing it to glow by throwing heat at it instead of passing electricity through it.

I don't think they are claiming an efficiency breakthrough on their heat exchanger, just that they've made a competitive heat exchanger that also blocks light very effectively.

I suspect this needs some moving parts to function - without a turbine's suction, you need some sort of a fan to pump air into the thing, and also a fuel pump. Most things with internal combustion require some kind of active cooling as well.

I read their statement of 40% efficiency would be compared to the currently available photovoltaics were generally 20% efficiency is normal.

oxygen works and might be worth it for a stationary application like a powerplant for an AI data center. but NOx breaks down exothermically. so our approach if you hold the flame at >1300 C for less than a second or so you can destroy most of the NOx. This doesn't happen in a Diesel because the pulse stays that hot for only a short time, locking in the NOX that is produced. this is a matter of sizing the heat exchanger / flow rates correctly. we have to validate all this though. good question

It's a very good idea that is worth pursuing, they are pursuing it. There are many many many problems that need solving between here and "this is a better way to make energy from heat at scale than turning water into steam and spinning a turbine". The science is fundamentally sound but we're nowhere near economic viability.

It's not like cold fusion, the lightcell is based on well-understood physics. The author may be too optimistic with efficiency claim, but those are relatively easy to verify independently.

It probably doesn't help that the website looks like an American Science & Surplus catalog

She seems like someone with an eye for a clever solution to an existing problem, an eye for funding (her compressed air "LightSail" thing raised over $70 million), and maybe a somewhat shaky relationship with practicality.

thanks!

Just be careful or you might make a Kugelblitz

fuel cells have trouble being cheap, lightweight, high efficiency, and long lasting, all at the same time. I think this could have better scaling on all those dimensions, plus could use natural gas or propane or other fuels for when you don't have hydrogen

we'll have to fire the web dev (me)

let me know if you can remember the name or a reference, thanks!

More likely than you think.

But sunlight is wide spectrum, and a lot of the reasons why the efficiency of regular solar panels is low, is that they don’t absorb all of the spectrum equally well. That’s why there’s all this talk of tandem solar cells with perovskites these days. The two solar cells can be tuned to extract energy from different wavelengths of light.

Since the light they’re making is nearly monochromatic, it’s a lot easier to get higher efficiency. That’s kind of the whole point of the invention.

That's not really relevant. They have a light source that runs on a fuel and are putting multiple PV cells around it. The efficiency they care about is the fuel in to electricity out. If you can put more cells around the light, the system efficiency goes up.

That can't be true. The current record for non-concentrating cells is 39.5% efficiency using triple junction cells [1]

Concentrating cells are at 47.6% [2]

[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00191-X

[2] https://publica-rest.fraunhofer.de/server/api/core/bitstream...