That was one of the headlines on a regular news email Ireceived this morning.

BUT the original email was from Elektor. The article the email links is a bit short on detail:-
http://www.elektor.com/news/store-thermal-energy-forever.2182261.lynkx

So I followed the link in that article to another at techthefuture:-
http://www.techthefuture.com/energy/zeolite-stores-thermal-energy-for-unlimited-amount-of-time
Still short on detail so I tried to follow their link to Fraunhofer Institute.
But that link doesn't seem to work :-/

But then I found this
http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2012/june/compact-and-flexible-thermal-storage.html
and it has a link to a pdf.

Even that is still frustratingly short on detail though.
Is it just a very slow news week or is there something more to this that might be worth getting excited about?

PS: I think we might have done the subject to death in another thread recently but this is supposedly engineering news, not product related yet, so I thought it might be worth a new thread/outlook. Briefly considered posting it in renewables or heating/cooling topics but decided it was perhaps more general interest (if there is anything to it).

I have been using a similar system for drying woodchip using activated alumina and solar. Surprised it is considered news as the technology has been around for a long time and is used in dehumidifiers.

As with most things, you have to exhaust the alternatives first before you start developing a new line.
If there are easier/cheaper/better ways of achieving an aim, then tend to be used.
I suspect that most of us on here could go into a strangers house and cut their energy usage by 20%.
Armed with £100, probably by 30%.
£10,000 and probably 70% (though they would not like the lifestyle much)

Posted By: Sprocket>

I wonder if this "research" is just that or whether they really do have evidence it could lead to a practical affordable product. There are suggestions that the workable scale is slightly larger than domestic.

Its certainly practical if combined with a hvac system

Hmm, that definitely counts as "intermittent"...

I experienced a downpour of that ilk once in Malta ... while driving to the airport for a flight home. Had to take an interesting 'alternative' random-walk over hills since the lower roads were flash-flooded, and drive like billy-o across up-down roads to get through the foot-high (or more) torrents without stalling the engine...

Rgds

Damon

Puts things into perspective when one storm can release nearly 50 kWh.m^-2m you can see why the climate change sceptics get so worked up about the seemingly small impact that humans make.
Now if a house uses 100 kWh.m^-2.y^-1, that is 6 months worth of domestic use released in 2/3rd of an hour. Suspect that not much of the house would be left.

Posted By: SteamyTea.......... you can see why the climate change sceptics get so worked up about the seemingly small impact that humans make.

Surely ST with such powerful forces, that's exactly the point WHY "seemingly small" anthropogenic impact has to be taken seriously.

Effect.

It's amazing how many people there were in Montreal who so desperately needed to get somewhere right then that they were willing to risk wrecking their car engines and possibly blocking a junction likely to be needed by the emergency services rather than just wait an hour or two.

Or is it that they are so psychologically disconnected from the world around them by their urban existence that they simply can't conceive of having to adjust to circumstances a bit? I think it's this and a larger scale version of this mindset is why so many are climate sceptics.

Grumpiness is good for you, so they say, it makes you think more clearly.

"Victor"

One of the links Sprocket posted says...

"When water comes into contact with zeolite it is bound to its surface by means of a chemical reaction which generates heat. Reversely, when heat is applied the water is removed from the surface, generating large amounts of steam."

So it appears the energy is stored in a reversible chemical reaction of some sort. Ok so there might not be losses while the energy is "stored" but there will be some lost in the process of charging/discharging the store.

Posted By: Paul in Montreallast week, we had a thunderstorm in Montreal that dropped 80mm rain in 40 minutes (that's a whole month's worth - it was so heavy that manhole covers were blown off as geysers erupted ... and a hilly street near me had its asphalt stripped by the torrent of a river that formed). I did a few back of the envelope calculations and discovered the energy required to condense 80mm of rain over and area of 1 square kilometer is equivalent to 42,000 tons of TNT - so that's equivalent to 3 Hiroshima-sized bomb's worth of energy over each square kilometer. Quite sobering really! Put another way, each square meter received the equivalent of 73kW power output over that 40 minute period.

I'm confused about that. I agree that condensing the water releases thermal energy. I don't see how that has any effect on the ground. The energy released by the rain hitting the ground is its kinetic energy, converted from the gravitational potential energy by falling from a height. The heat from condensation just means you got rain instead of hail, surely? (The heat will also affect the weather system itself)

Posted By: Paul in Montrealhow much energy was involved above each of those square metres to make that rainfall in the first place!

Well, the energy isn't needed to make the rainfall. The energy is RELEASED when the rainfall is made. Making rain is exothermic.

Posted By: Paul in MontrealTrue. but that much energy was required to evaporate the water in the first place :)

Tends to be a more gradual process over several weeks though.
Not sure where Montreal's rain comes from, ours is from the Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean, you can almost tell how wet it will be in the UK from the sea surface temperatures in the preceding 3 months (I say almost as La Nina/El Nino, Humbolts, hurricanes and other weather events can seriously change it in the short term (what is happening at present).

Think the main thing to remember is that the earth is huge, and the energy from the sun is very big.

And we worry about a kWh or two or if a meter is measuring to the final Watt

Posted By: djh I don't see how that has any effect on the ground. The energy released by the rain hitting the ground is its kinetic energy, converted from the gravitational potential energy by falling from a height.

Thought I'd work some numbers....

If you had 80mm of water (80kg per square meter) in a cloud at 1000 meters height the PE would be about 784KJ per square meter (80 x 9.8 x 1000 = 784,000)

The terminal velocity of rain is about 9-10m/s so the KE hitting the ground is only 4kJ per square meter (0.5 x 80 x 10 x 10 = 4000).

So the vast majority of the PE energy in the rain is lost falling through and heating up the air.

If the 4KJ released hitting the ground arrives in 40mins the power per square meter is only 1.6 watts per meter.