"Frank Scrooby" <X@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message news:fnchp1$1j1$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Greets
>
> Spotted these links:
> http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4243793.html
>
> http://www.johnsonems.com/jhtec.html
>
> Wonder what the residents here would think?
Sign me up. The fundamentals are there. I hate and end up not paying any
attention to SF (or listen to political campaign promises) that violate(s)
the first or second laws of thermodynamics. JTEC doesn't, so that
attribute
alone sets it apart.
It has potential to infiltrate a lot of different markets. Central station
power generation? Probably not in my lifetime.
A first glance, JTEC appears to share with most of the Stirling engines
some
of the limitations on realizing the high theoretical thermal efficiencies
-
e.g. conduction and regenerator losses, but is free of others - e.g.
mechanical losses. But with sound fundamentals, low realized efficiencies
won't impede development of JTEC to an extent greater than they impeded
Watt, who ended up doing pretty well.
This is especially true in cases where the heat input is "free" - e.g.
solar
or waste heat from a central station power plant (or, as with Watt, you're
working to dewater coal mines and you have "free" fuel.) JTEC wouldn't
have
any particular advantage in recovering stack losses from a central station
power plant or an internal combustion engine. That enterprise is dominated
by fouling and condensation, not basic conversion technology. The JFET
might
be particularly good at recovering and converting heat from the condenser
of
a steam plant, though. Especially at nuclear plants, which have relatively
larger waste heat, and relatively greater difficulty in rejecting it.
I suppose it'd be too greedy to ask for a neutron-hardened hot junction so
you could embed it in a fission reactor core and circulate the hydrogen
out
to the cold junction. Since this is an SF group, and such things can be
solved with a couple of clicks on the keyboard, it'd be a plausible
approach.
Besides for that, it would be flat FUN to work on a fission reactor/JTEC
design. The structural, thermal, and neutron dynamics would very cool and
they'd be completely outside anyone's experience. I dunno. Did I just
invent
a "fission-punk" genre?
If you had ambitions to use JTEC to generate power to add to the grid,
though, you'd have to accept the conversion losses to alternating current.
There must be thousands of installations that do this cheerfully with
solar-generated DC, but the conversion loss make it practical only with
free
input and maybe government subsidy.
Advice is usually worth what you pay for it.
Fred Klingener
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