Liquid Metal Storage batteries and wind generation

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This is what is going to make wind generation of electricity practical at long last. Liquid Metal Storage Batteries.
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Liquid Metal Battery Corporation (LMBC), a Cambridge, Massachusetts company founded in 2010 to develop new forms of electric storage batteries that work in large, grid-scale applications, announced it had secured the rights to key patent technology from MIT and had received financing from France's Total and from a personal investment by Bill Gates.
"This is an important step forward for Liquid Metal Battery Corporation," said Luis Ortiz, LMBC's President. "By securing the necessary IP infrastructure and funding from two important new-energy investors, LMBC can explore scale-up engineering and commercialization efforts."
Patents for all liquid metal battery inventions were licensed from MIT. The technologies were invented by Donald Sadoway, John Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry at MIT, and David Bradwell, whose doctoral research in the Sadoway laboratory was on liquid metal batteries. Sadoway and Bradwell, along with Dr. Luis Ortiz are founders of LMBC.
Affordable grid-level energy storage is the linchpin for massive deployment of renewable energy on the electric power grid. The approach being pursued by LMBC mixes the economies of scale in electrometallurgy with use of earth-abundant elements to achieve affordable electrical energy storage.
"A key limitation to the adoption of renewable energy sources like wind and solar is the fact that they are intermittent," said Bill Gates. "Breakthroughs in battery storage will be critical to advancing the use of renewables on a wide scale. I'm happy to be investing in this promising technology that Don and his team are working to bring to market."
The liquid metal battery received early sponsorship by the Desphpande Center, the Chesonis Family Foundation and DARPA. In the spring of 2009, Technology Review awarded liquid metal battery a position in the TR10 as one of the top 10 emerging technologies.
Later in 2009, ARPA-e chose the technology as a recipient of a grant in its first round of awards, this project alone totaling nearly $9,000,000 in funding (since its invention, the liquid metal battery has garnered approximately $12,000,000 of campus based research funds).
"Total has funded liquid metal battery research at MIT since 2009 and LMBC represents a continued commitment to this cutting-edge technology," said Philippe Boisseau, President Total Gas & Power. "As a major player in the Solar Industry, we are convinced that the development of a low-cost, long life battery will help the widespread deployment of affordable solar power."
LMBC's commercialization efforts will build upon the efforts and accomplishments of the dedicated team of researchers working on the Total and ARPA-e funded project at MIT. Liquid Metal Battery Corporation is recruiting a commercialization team to bring the liquid metal battery to its most efficient operational scale. The end product will be a cost-effective solution for bulk energy storage able to smooth out the intermittent flow of power from renewable sources like wind turbines and solar cells.

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ruveyn

The only drawback that I can see with this, is that Liquid Metal Batteries seem to contain a lot of elemental Na, which is rather nasty stuff due to the fact that it reacts quite vigorously with just about anything that it comes into contact with.

Furthermore, if any future designs contain Hg as the primary liquid metal, this would be rather nasty as well.

For the benefit of those who are wondering what a "liquid metal battery" is and how it works:

Sodium-Sulfur Battery (Wikipedia Link)

Interesting stuff, this.

Fortunately, the cells are airtight and can be kept in a sealed enviornment. To the best of my knowledge, so long as water doesn't contaminate the cells, there's no risk of explosion.



Why Mercury, if you don't mind me asking? How would using large amounts of it even be practical?

I guess because mercury has a tendency to form liquid amalgams with other metals at room temperature such as sodium, so it makes a good substrate to contain other metals in a convenient liquid state.

So cover it and contain it well.

ruveyn

Those batteries will be completely useless when oceanic storms knock down those offshore windmills! Also, these batteries will present a very serious fire danger as wind turbines can and DO catch fire during high winds when their rotors start to spin fast and large amounts of current are being generated. In fact, liquid metal is an explosion hazard. Wind power is a boondoggle and even with these new batteries it will still be expensive and unable to pay for itself.

i would like sources on that for modern revision wind turbines

i worked in the industry as a wind turbine tecnician and have worked on many of the most prevalant models throughout europe including research and spearhead projects.

the off shore turbines are almost impervious to even hurricane winds, their blades are not, in fact one of the most common damage scenarios are lightning damage to blades.
the wind turbines that have caught fire (the big case of some of the first off shore turbines to be mass produced) did so due to erosion of the dielectric layer in the transformers caused by the high salt content.
there have been some oil fires as well especially in badly serviced turbines but anything left unattended for too long will break.

as for ti being due to spinning too fast, very wrong, there is full decoupling on all modern turbines, on vestas and siemens turbines there is both full decoupling and they change the whole aerodynamic geometry by rotating the wings making rotation very hard(many others probably do the same since the wing trimming mechanism is used in all modern turbines, to what degree i dont know)

my power usage is offset 100% by windpower and i dont pay more than my neighbor, the q7 windfarm worked well enough to warrant 3 daugther projects that are probably finished by now and theres thousands of Mw's being built with twice that in the planning in europe and the meditaraenean and all of that is only what i know off.
it seems the power companies like wind turbines due to the fact that their unit size is relatively small so that they in certain proportions improve the grid itself due to the fine tuning that can easily be done remotely, anything beyond that proportion is purely for power, yet even in the countries where that proportion has been reached they often invest in wind power, increasingly from private sources.

i do agree it will never be a primary powersource but to say it isnt economically feasible is denying the increasing prices we pay for mainstream fossil sources,
nuclear would replace those in short order.

The danger of corrosion by seawater would be elevated with liquid metal batteries. Especially with Na! Any sort of leaking where seawater managed to get inside the battery container could easily produce an explosion. I find it very hard to believe that wind turbines would be able to withstand sustained winds in excess of 100mph without damage severe enough that the cease to put power on the grid, if not being completely toppled. If you built solid metal support towers, than maybe. But even still they'd have to be anchored at least 100 feet into the seabed to prevent them from tipping over due to sheer weight.

Is that more promising then this, also from MIT

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27625/

the batteries dont need to be on sea, remember the grid??

you might find it hard to believe but the wings rotate 90 degrees to make them aerodynamic rudders with very little wind resistance compared to normal operation and the tower is made to flex up to 3 meters in any one direction of a vestas v90. the tower itself is round and barely affected by win to begin with.

also, dont shift the goalpost, you said destroyed, all modern turbines have a cutoff sequence where the wings are decoupled from the generator, as mentioned in my previous post, so of course they wont be supplying the grid, then again in a hurricane the grid is often taken out as well so what would they be supplying?

also a tube(pound for pound stronger than a solid post) with some 20 centimeters thick walls of solid steel are plenty strong, they are anchored 150 feet when on monopiles but there are other mounting methods in use with a lower and higher depth required, depending on bottom conditions, the monopile even has a semi floating counterwheight to limit sway by sea and air currents.

then comes the geometry of the tapering, 6.5 meters in the bottom and 2 and a half some 300 feet up gives you an idea, a further stabilizing force, after that there is still the inner platforms and the fact that everyhting that can be is mounted with magnets since they allow for less welds to weaken the structure.

you may not believe it and it certainly can happen under the worst of circumstance but it wont be a normal thing to expect.

Here is a video showing what can happen to a wind turbine in high winds when the cut-off breaks fail:



[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbCs7ZQDKoM[/youtube]


In the case of turbines that have a cut-off sequence with decoupling, in hurricane force winds this could potentially cause the rotor to start spinning fast enough to pop right out of the turbine assembly. Corrosion of the dielectric for sea based turbines is also proving to be a serious issue. The bottom lines is that while you're correct about the fact that wind turbines can be built to structurally withstand hurricane force winds, they require an enormous amount of maintenance to function properly which is why wind power IMO is a boondoggle requiring huge government subsidies and is proving unable to pay for itself.

now how many others can you find? ( i remember this one, was in the news, older generation, some 10-20 years old)

again the wings do not provide rotation on a modern turbine in those conditions, the aerodynamic properties that provide it are disrupted when the wings are turned 90degrees.


btw. the dielectric issue was sorted half a decade ago, just when i started working, but the stories you probably heard about burning turbines were all from the big first field test, horns rev part 1,
it was later refitted when vestas realized their turbines suffered from several design flaws and made an entirely new revision specifically for offshore aplications, tens of thousands of them are used in northern europe alone today and they arent exploding anytime soon.


again i dont dsipute it can happen but remember just how many of these that are placed around the world, also a testament to the concept (in some parts of the world subsidized granted, but not all)

Very interesting. I didn't know the units can alter the pitch of the blades in hurricane force winds. As for the decoupler, is it mechanically operated? (I'm thinking of something like a centrifugally operated mechanism or something that uses a viscous fluid.)

This still doesn't change the fact that wind turbines are expensive to maintain and fairly short lifespans. But most of all, as I've said before, wind power is terribly inefficient and expensive and requires massive government subsidies in the billions of dollars. It was promised by the AWEA that it would pay for itself in circa 5 years but this has not happened. I'm not surprised that there are thousands of these machines in Europe, the US, and other first world countries which have the MONEY to spend on inefficient "green energy" like wind power. In place where money is tighter and efficiency is a big issue, this means of producing electricity is very scant. The french and Russians strongly prefer nuclear power and it sure saves them a lot on electric bills.

Last edited by AspieRogue on 14 Apr 2012, 2:58 am, edited 1 time in total.

the trim system is hydraulic, there are 3 actuators with individual accumulators set up so that when the power cuts they return to their inert position, basically there is a central hydraulic pump that forces them to extend against the accumulator, with no valve between the accumulator and the actuator, pump into the extend and accumulator into the retract as far as i remember.
when power goes to the pump the actuator forces the wing back into inert.

when you assemble them you use a small hydraulic pump to extend them individually and the power fails they snap back with enough force to rotate 5 tons in a second or so and fling the wing support a good 5 yards.

now you say in hurricane force winds but the cutoff is much much lower, this means the wind turbine would already have entered its fail safe mode and decoupled plus pitched the blades,
the generator would be disconnected from the internal systems and the transformer would be disconnected from the sub station high voltage.

this could be done in advance since they are almost always remotely operated.

as for the decoupler i dont know, it was a closed system delivered in place connected inside the gear box in the v80, the v90 used a planetary gearbox 4 meters in diameter and it came preinstalled as well, service would be by module change. if i were to take a guess i would say there is a dummy free spinning gear inside the gear box where it forces a gear change to to neutralize the blades, that is just a guess.
the gearboc was some 40 or 50 tons or so so it had the size.

both systems had an additional fail safe in the form of a composite coupling situated between the gear box and generator, its needed because of the high rpm and high stresses it has to take, no more than 40cm in diameter and half a centimeter thick, it is meant to absord the flexes of irregular wind but under extreme stress it would be the first to go, with wear and old parts they can go at peak conditions, everything else is overengineered with a safety factor i dont even want to care to guess at.

just because it doesnt work one place doesnt mean it wont in another.

life span is 15 years guaranteed and 30 years expected, with salvagable parts.

as for subsidies, abolish every last one of them, from everyone then no one can complain,
i know most wind power companies couldnt care less for the foreseealbe future, asia is investing and europe is expanding and it aint subsidies driving that change.
in china they are especially popular for remote areas where they are more than adequate and the power supply is spotty or nonexistent. (i dont know is it subsidies when they as a single financial institution acquires them? even so we can still abolish subsisides in the west)