How efficient would a wind up battery be? Could wind up batteries be used as ecologically safe batteries for electricity gained from renewable resources? Imagine wind turbines and solar panels powering electric motors that wind up these batteries when there is wind and sun, and then these wind up batteries slowly unwinding and powering electric motors that give us electricity when there is no sun/wind? Would this be efficient on any scale?
build one thats 20cm wide while being made out of a 10nm strip of carbon nanotube and wind it up 10 million times and lets see if we can get any reasonable amount of energy from one of these devices.
A watch that winds itself when your arm moves is gonna be the best we're ever gonna get.
wow that sucks
>Would this be efficient on any scale?
Not really, a simple lead cell is so much more efficient by a significant factor that there's simply no efficient use-case, which is why spring power was never really used for more than clocks and watches.
So a pump storage equvivalent but instead of something that is everywhere, cheap and fairly failsafe (water) you're gonna use frickhuge metal spring? Unless you plan to build those in dessert, just build a water tower. It has added benefit of being, ya know, a water tower.
Tho those mountaintop cisterns look rad.
a wind up "battery" can only output less energy than you put in to it.
there are much more efficient "batteries".
the best batteries ever made were nickel iron.
they last at least 100 years, cannot be over charged, or over discharged.
down side is:
expensive
large
only made in china now.
>a wind up "battery" can only output less energy than you put in to it.
All batteries everywhere are like this. Physics is a cruel mistress. You can't transfer energy without loss. Period.
>You can't transfer energy without loss. Period.
I can do it but im not gonna tell you how
You forgot that nickle iron batteries also have shit efficiency and poor energy density, compared to modern Lithium batteries.
Due to their long life, they would be a good choice for something like an uninterruptible power supply, but you wouldn't put one in anything portable.
Still - 100 years? Compared to ten with a well-maintained lead acid battery? I'd take a wall of iron nickle batteries in a heartbeat.
You're gonna get better energy density from a lithium battery the size of a suitcase, and everything about it will be cheaper.
I'm sure the energy density is much higher with lithium than with ...anything else, but I have to replace lithium batteries. They age. They fail. If money isn't the problem and space isn't a problem, I'd take a whole fricking room of nickel-iron batteries over a suitcase that holds more power and works for a few years.
Ironic that they're more expensive, since lithium is way harder to mine than iron or nickel.
they are more expensive because (last time I checked) only on factory makes them.
That'd do it.
as with many things in our free market society.
nickel iron batteries were too good.
Pros:
they can last 100 years with proper maintenance.
cannot be over charged
cannot be over discharged
can handle higher storage temps
higher max operating temps
no lead
no acid
can be discharged to 80%
battery starts to lose capacity? just replace the electrolyte.
C5 charge rate
Cons:
larger cells
need to be kept in a battery box
need to be vented
heavy
require maintenance
expensive because they are not popular and not made by many companies anymore.
The additional expense is significant, but if you never have to replace them, it might be worthwhile.
One of the iron/nickel battery links mentions using a lithium-fortified electrolyte. Any idea what this does? They claim it makes it last longer. Just wondering why.
Lithium is a small percentage component of lithium batteries, usually under 5%, nickel is by weight the major component and that's the expensive one. LFP should also last at least 20 years in standard use, which isn't bad at all compared to all the other benefits it has. Even past 20 years, it's just gradual capacity degradation.
Then shut the frick up and do it. Stop jerking off on PrepHole and go fill a room up with nickel iron batteries and don't talk about it again until you're done.
Nice post, little kid. I'm sure your friends who don't exist are all proud of you for typing that.
Fricking moron.
I'm telling you to do it. Your autistic ass doesn't understand how to evaluate pros and cons and the only way you'll learn is after you've loaded ten tons of batteries into your garage and you realize what a fricking idiot you are. So go and buy your goddamn nickel batteries.
Boy are you stupid, buddy.
Do you not understand hypotheticals? IF money isn't an option. IF room wasn't an concern. You clearly have the processing power of a fricking squirrel and the ability to reason of a rock. This is a thread discussing potentials and benefits, idiot. What's wrong with you? Longevity is a massive factor, and you little kids with your tiny brains and lack of foresight assume you'll always be grabbing that fat young person paycheck. I wish I could see you in 40 years, when everything you think now is moronic and frivolous, and you wish you had planned ahead better. Ignorant little c**t.
No, this is a thread for some fricking tard sperging about how obsolete technology is actually better. This is no different from someone making a thread about why a horse is actually a better vehicle because you don't need to buy gas. All of your hypotheticals and potentials don't fricking matter when you've brushed off all of these reasons that this technology died, and no, it's not because they were "too good." It's because their capacity is shit, their efficiency is shit, their internal resistance is shit, and you're shit for not realizing this.
>how obsolete technology is actually better
Dumbass
How many technologies are "obsolete" just because it's harder to monetize them? Pay attention to the world. It's a vile, greedy fricking place where you pay top dollar for shit that doesn't warrant it because it just happens to be the new thing.
Funny. Why do car manufacturers still install vent tubes on batteries in enclosed spaces? Is it possible that you don't know what the frick you're talking about because you've never charged a sealed battery in a sealed capsule to check the chemical composition of the resulting gases? Are you waiting to hear a hiss? There never was one.
>Why do car manufacturers still install vent tubes on batteries in enclosed spaces?
Again, it's there in case theres problem in charging circuit. Lithium ion batteries have vents too for same purpose.
Slas are extremely fire safe and used to power safety systems like exit lights and smoke xtract.
https://ironedison.com/shop/batteries/nickel-iron/nickel-iron-ni-fe-battery/
https://beyondoilsolar.com/product/nickel-iron-battery-industrial-series/
Problem with litium batteries is that they are fire hazard. Traditional batteries like lead acid are not
>Traditional batteries like lead acid are not
Have you forgotten their tendency to offgas hydrogen?
Car batteries exploding used to be a real problem.
>Have you forgotten their tendency to offgas hydrogen?
Sealed lead acid batteries (SLA) don't offgas and are safe to use in offices and such environments.
>Sealed lead acid batteries (SLA) don't offgas
incorrect. they have vents because they do offgas. they especially offgas if charged with too high of a voltage. if they did not vent they would explode.
No, they don't offgas. The gas is recombined inside battery. Vent is there just so the pack doesn't explode in case theres a fault in the charging circuit.
https://www.batteriesplus.com/blog/power/sla-battery-venting
Normally they don't offgas at all...
>not taking the planté pill
Pasted plate cells suck, but lead acid can be good if you use solid lead sheets. 20+ year lifespan and you can recycle them just by remelting the lead and making new sheets. Plus there's only two ingredients, both of which are cheap and abundant. Enjoy sourcing your nickel and keeping your electrolyte from carbonating. Nickel-iron is redditcore.
It’s sci-fi but check out “pump six” and “the windup girl”.
Not DIY. Go study the problem instead of wanting to be spoonfed.
Not OP, but you can go ahead and eat my ass for that one. Sometimes people need a starting point or a real-world scenario without the gloss. Sometimes, the starting point is just the conversation that was left off a hundred times already, and now restarted to your dismay. I think this is an interesting thread, and you should frick off in a different direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage#Mechanical
Plenty of physical energy storages exist and yes, they do work quite well.
As for winding something up, it's probably not the most effective way. There are things like flywheels in vacuum that are far better at storing energy but in the end, even mechanical systems have their limits and sometimes it's best to use different systems for different parts of the energy harvesting, much like in electrical systems.
Not effective at all. Regular battery would be much more effective.
And the need for such energy storgares is nowdays smaller since the home use inverters for solar panels and turbines are capable of generating grid quality power, automatically syncing output to the grid and pushing leftover there.
>Wind up battery
We pretty much abandoned that tech in the 1950s when electrical storage became cheap and efficient.
Anytime you wonder "can x replace <existing high energy storage medium>", realize that storing an equivalent amount of energy means guarding against accidentally releasing it all at once. Example: watch spring breaks - maybe in rare instances it pops out the watch face; giant spring powering a whole town breaks - town destroyed by flying debris flung out from the spring and its enclosure.
The spring, as an energy storage mechanism, is an extremely efficient one. How efficient depends on the material used, but typical spring steels could easily exceed 95% round-trip efficiency. You are likely to lose significantly more than that in whatever mechanism you use to wind/unwind the spring.
Your two problems are that they have garbage energy density (in terms of both volume and mass) and safety. You could cram 50-100x or more energy into a typical electrochemical cell than you could a spring of similar volume. And, while a battery failure can result in a pretty spectacular fire, a spring failing, if not contained, is somewhere between a bullet and a bomb.
Even where you "have to" use mechanical energy storage for some esoteric reason, you're better off with a flywheel in almost every case.
https://electrosparkles.com/edison-nife-battery-homemade
A quick google has shown me that nickel iron batteries do not need to be expensive
>How efficient would a wind up battery be?
well, we can look at volumetric energy storage in (J/cubic meter) and total possible energy in (J):
total energy:
stored_energy=1/2∗k∗(θ)^2
where :
k is the spring constant
θ the final angle in (rad)
finding the efficiency volumetrically is a bit more difficult and more material dependent but I will try to compare it with something we are familiar with like energy stored in elevated mass, so lets use a 1kg block of ASTM A229 spring steal and the same mass for the spring; starting for the elevated mass:
total energy=mgh ; if we assume height to be 1m
(1kg)(9.8m/s2)(1m)=9.8J
for volumetric energy storage, 76.44 J/cubic meter.
the spring :
total energy=1/2∗k∗(θ)^2;
Rate per degree : 0.137 N-mm/Degree
Spring Rate (or Spring constant) per 360 degrees, k360 degrees: 49.195 N-mm/360 Degrees
Maximum torque possible, Torquemax : 6,159.806 N-mm
Safe Travel
Maximum safe travel, Travelmax : 45,075.9299 Degrees
Physical Dimensions
Diameter of spring wire, d: 2.250 mm
Outer diameter of spring, Douter : 1,000.000 mm
Inner diameter of spring, Dinner : 995.500 mm
Mean diameter of spring, Dmean : 997.750 mm
Number of active coils, na : 10.000
Body length, Lbody : 24.750 mm
Length of leg 1: 10.000 mm
Length of leg 2: 10.000 mm
Total leg length: 20.000 mm
Direction of wind : Left hand
Spring index, C : 443.444
(0.5)(7.8 N-mm/rad)(7907.7rad)^2=243.9MJ
and for volumetric energy storage is 69GJ/cubic meter which is huge like 7 billion to 1.
>Could wind up batteries be used as ecologically safe batteries for electricity gained from renewable resources?
perhaps, but it is highly unlikely due to their "charging" behavior, the more u wind the spring the greater the energy required to turn it exponentially according to the equation:
total energy=1/2∗k∗(θ)^2;
which is the reason why it has such a high volumetric energy storage compared to gravity for the same material an mass.
To be continued->
so what would happen is that it will charge quickly (assuming a constant power averaged power source) in the beginning and grind to a stop in a short amount of time, also it has an annoying "unwind" response that speeds up then slows down as the energy in the spring approaches 0.
considering this fact springs would be horrible choice for renewable applications which are unstable power sources but as power smoothing devices they could be of gr8 help.
extra reads:
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82374665.pdf
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S2666123322000411?token=7CB6588B2913B5BE37738D2EA8449E0F8CCB201E8DACAADB0AA7185CFDEBA8266A8701D9B68ADF4E72C45F0D5C1F8DB9&originRegion=eu-west-1&originCreation=20221123104949
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120313380
have fun!
and lastly as many have pointed out,
chemical batteries are simply superior in every metric, and are cheaper to construct and keep safe at those scales compare to a massive metal spring, and aside from their fight about which battery chemistry is favored by Adolf Hitler, their point still stands, chemical batteries and simple hydro-gravitational storage systems are the most reliable and economical to setup and that is why they were chosen for these purposes.
>no one has mentioned centrifugal batteries yet
Okay, they're not exactly portable, but they do a good job storing energy, and have a long life.
They don't really. They're huge amd incredibly expensive and have very low energy density
In the space you could have 8 hours of battery backup you can have 30 minutes of flywheels. Just long enough to get a generator turned on if something fricky happens. They're nice because you get power conditioning built into the rest of your system if you do it right though.
They're nice for data centers because you absolutely do you have a generator and do need power conditioning.
Lead acid batteries are better priced and give you a longer run time though.
Lifepo homosexual stop typing. There is no fricking reason for you to say anything, no one called your baby ugly