Will Innovative Engineering Solve The PPE Gown Problem?
In the early 1970s, I worked as a programmer for various consultancies, who were doing innovative engineering. In one, which could have been Cambridge Consultants, where I worked for perhaps three months. One guy told me about a project he was working on, that was the automatic assembly of clothing.
I know more than a bit about making clothes, as my mother taught me how to knit, crochet, sew and use a sewing machine. In the early years of our marriage, I used to make dresses for C and in one instance, I made her a long heavy-weight winter coat.
So I am surprised, that innovative engineering has not come together to make hospital gowns automatically!
Let’s hope that some engineers have seen the gap in the market, and as I write, are putting together a machine, where you put material in one end and get gowns out the other. Neatly folded of course!
Automated Vegetation Monitoring Technology Deployed In Train Cabs
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Railway Gazette.
This is the introductory paragraph.
Transport for Wales has worked with technology company One Big Circle Ltd to fit trains with ‘smart’ cameras designed to automatically record, analyse and report lineside vegetation risks.
This is surely, a simple application of technology, that will spot vegetation problems, before they cause serious trouble.
ITM Power and Ørsted: Wind Turbine Electrolyser Integration
The title of this post is the same as that of this press release from ITM Power.
This is the introductory paragraph.
ITM Power (AIM: ITM), the energy storage and clean fuel company, is pleased to share details of a short project sponsored by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), in late 2019, entitled ‘Hydrogen supply competition’, ITM Power and Ørsted proposed the following: an electrolyser placed at the wind turbine e.g. in the tower or very near it, directly electrically connected to the DC link in the wind turbine, with appropriate power flow control and water supplied to it. This may represent a better design concept for bulk hydrogen production as opposed to, for instance, remotely located electrolysers at a terminal or platform, away from the wind turbine generator, due to reduced costs and energy losses.
Some points from the remainder of the press release.
- Costs can be saved as hydrogen pipes are more affordable than underwater power cables.
- The proposed design reduces the need for AC rectification.
After reading the press release, it sounds like the two companies are performing a serious re-think on how wind turbines and their links to get energy on-shore are designed.
Will they be using redundant gas pipes to bring the hydrogen ashore?
I think, that they could go further than that!
- Imagine a very large wind farm built over a cluster of redundant gas-fields that are suitable for the storage of gas.
- The wind farm will produce hydrogen, which could be either sent to an onshore terminal or stored in one of the redundant fields.
- When hydrogen is needed onshore, it can come from the turbine/electrolysers in the wind-farm or from offshore storage.
- The pipeline to the shore would probably also be reversible and used to take carbon dioxide offshore for storage.
- If more electricity is needed onshore, the hydrogen is used as fuel for a gas-fired power station.
It sounds complicated, but hydrogen gives a lot of flexibility, as it is easily converted to and from electricity.
Controlling this network is a classic problem for Control Engineers and sophisticated computers will make sure, there is both enough electricity and gas.
The other application for combined wind turbines and electrolysers is where there is a need for moderate amounts of gas in the middle of nowhere.
Uses could include.
- Large farms all over places like East Anglia, much of North America, Australia and Serbia, where it would be used for motive power and heating.
- Islands like the Orkneys to decarbonise heating and transport and especially aviation and small ships like tugs and ferries.
- Hydrogen filling stations for trucks and other vehicles in places like the Mid West and large parts of Africa and Asia.
- Large transport depots, that switch from diesel to hydrogen might install their own combined wind turbine and electrolyser.
- Ports of all sizes will switch to hydrogen and smaller ports may well use combined wind turbines and electrolysers.
- Will isolated villages and small towns have their own combined wind turbines and electrolyser to bring a much needed gas supply?
I used to own a farm and I would certainly have looked at the technology to see, if it was worth installing.
It is my view, that combined wind turbines and electrolysers are one of those enabling technologies, that will find lots of different applications.
The Innovation Must Go On
This is a snippet I found on this news round-up on Rail Business UK.
Network Rail has issued a request for information on innovative techniques for undertaking tunnel renewals and enlargement while minimising blockades. NR said it manages 693 tunnels that are typically 150 years old; these require different and increasing levels of maintenance and renewal, but the growth of traffic means there is less access for maintenance.
Someone in Network Rail has got the engineering envelopes out again and is doing their thinking at home under lockdown, rather than in a real ale hostelry.
Companies and other organisations, should use COVID-19 as an opportunity to innovate.
Imagine the unthinkable and the downright bonkers, so long as it’s legal!
Think loony! You know it makes sense!
The New Generation Of Pumped Storage Systems
This excellent article on GreenTechMedia is entitled The 5 Most Promising Long-Duration Storage Technologies Left Standing.
One of the technologies the article discusses is pumped storage, which in the UK is used at the massive Electric Mountain in Snowdonia, which can hold 9.1 GWh of electricity and supply up to 1,800 MW of electricity when needed. That’s not bad for 1970s engineering!
The GreenTechMedia article introduces pumped storage like this.
Midcentury modern design is hot again, so why not midcentury storage technology? This gravity-based concept physically moves water from a low to a high reservoir, from which the water descends, when needed, to generate electricity. This dates from way before lithium-ion’s heyday and still provides some 95 percent of U.S. grid storage, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
The largest pumped storage system in the US is Bath County Pumped Storage Station, which is described as the biggest battery in the world. With a storage capacity of 24 GWh of electricity and a generating capacity of 3,003 MW, it dwarfs Electric Mountain. But then the Americans have bigger mountains.
Pumped storage is a good partner for intermittent renewables like wind and solar, but in a country like the UK, the US and other countries with strong planning laws getting permission to build a large pumped storage system is not easy. We tried to build one on Exmoor, but that was abandoned.
Note that the country building the most new pumped storage systems is China, where they have mountains and planning laws, that would not be acceptable anywhere else.
But engineers have come up with a new design, described in this paragraph from the GreenTechMedia article.
The new school of pumped hydro focuses on isolated reservoirs that don’t disrupt river ecosystems; this simplifies permitting, but projects still face a decade-long development timeline and billion-dollar price tags.
It then gives two examples of proposed systems.
Gordon Butte Pumped Storage Project
The operation of the Gordon Butte Pumped Storage Project is described like this in Wikipedia.
Gordon Butte will be located on a 177 acres (0.72 km2) site, and will have access to water from Cottonwood Creek, a tributary of the Musselshell River. The facility will operate as a closed system, without actively drawing or discharging water into the watershed. It will have a 4,000 acre-foot capacity reservoir, located 1,000 feet (300 m) above the base, with a power generation capacity of about 400 MW
The smaller size must make it easier to get it built.
How much energy will Gordon Butte hold in GWh?
- A 4,000 acre-foot reservoir has a capacity of 4,933,927.42128 cubic metres.
- As a cubic metre of water weighs a tonne, the reservoir can hold 4,933,927.42128 tonnes of water at an altitude of 300 metres.
- Using Omni’s Potential Energy Calculator, this gives a potential energy of 4,032,108 KWh.
This is just over 4 GWh.
Ths facility could supply 400 MW for ten hours or 4 MW for a thousand hours!
It should be noted that Electric Mountain has an efficiency of 74-76%.
Eagle Mountain Pumped Storage Facility
Eagle Mountain Pumped Storage Facility is introduced like this on its web site.
The pumped storage hydropower project at Eagle Mountain, CA will transform a scarred brownfield site into a 1,300 Megawatt generator of green electricity that can light one million homes. The site is in a remote part of the Mojave Desert, more than 50 miles from the nearest city, Blythe, CA, and more than 60 miles from Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. The construction of the project will create thousands of jobs and add millions of dollars to the local economy while adhering to the most rigorous environmental standards.
Note that it is turning an eyesore of the worst kind into a pumped storage facility. It’s surely better than using it for landfill!
Conclusion
Systems like these may have applications in the UK!
Could some of those massive quarries in the Peak District be converted into pumped storage systems, using the technology of my two examples?
This Google Map shows the quarries surrounding the town of Buxton.
Note.
- The white areas looking almost like clouds are quarries.
- Buxton has an altitude of three hundred metres, which is the altitude of the Gordon Butte Storage Project.
- The vast Tunstead Quarry, which is four kilometres East of Buxton has an area of over one square mile.
- Tunstead Quarry has a red arrow above it marked Buxton Lime and Cement.
Could we not extract as much limestone as is possible from Tunstead and then convert it into a pumped storage system like Gordon Butte? It could have an area of 2.5 square kilometres and an altitude of nearly a thousand feet. A rough estimate, based on Gordon Butte, indicates it could store over 10 GWh.
Hopefully, better hydro-electric power engineers than myself, are looking at the quarries in the Peak District, with eyes flashing like cash registers.
There is one pumped storage project under development in the UK at the present time; Snowdonia Pumped Hydro, which obtained planning permission in 2017.
These are some characteristics.
- Situated in Snowdonia in old slate quarries at Glyn Rhonwy.
- 99.9 MW of power
- 700 MWh of storage capacity.
- 2 reversible turbines
- Start to full power in 12 seconds
- Cycle efficiency of around 81%
- Project lifespan of 125 years
- Estimated carbon saving of 50,000 tonnes per year
It is under a tenth the size to Electric Mountain, but every little helps.
I would also feel that with a 125 year life, it could be the sort of investment, that would appeal to a Pension Fund.
Ventilators On Click
Click, the BBC’s technology program has just shown an item about ventilator development.
They showed a picture of the dyson machine and video of several others.
- One created its own oxygen.
- One was designed for developing countries.
- One was designed to be a minimal size.
- One was designed to be 3D printed.
- One cost around five hundred euros.
Developments were also from several countries in addition to the UK, including Canada, France and Spain,
I think the world is on a path to get enough ventilators.
The program will be repeated in BBC Breakfast tomorrow!
History And Future Of The Compressed Air Economy
A reader in Canada has sent me a link to this article on Low Tech Magazine, which has the same title as this post.
This is the introductory sub-title.
Historical compressed air systems hold the key to the design of a low-tech, low-cost, robust, sustainable and relatively energy efficient energy storage medium.
As regular readers of this blog, will have noticed, I regularly post about a company called Highview Power.
This is the introduction from the Wikipedia entry for Highview Power.
Highview Power is a long-duration energy storage pioneer, specialising in cryogenic energy storage. It is based in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has permission for a commercial-scale 50 Megawatt/250 Megawatt-hour plant in England, building upon its earlier 5 Megawatt and 350 Kilowatt pilot plants. It plans to develop a 50MW plant/400MWh (eight hours of storage) in Vermont.
It has over 30 patents developed in partnership with British universities and has won technology funding from the British Government.
In February 2020 Sumitomo Heavy Industries invested $46m in the company.
The article on Low Tech Magazine gives the history of compressed air energy storage (CAES) and is a good background to the subject.
Australia’s New Community Solar, Solar-Storage, ‘Solar Hydro’ And Solar Hydrogen Projects
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on Energy Storage News.
This is the introductory paragraph.
In the past couple of weeks, national and state government organisations in Australia have announced various stages of consideration for solar projects with a range of advanced and innovative storage solutions attached.
The article then goes on to describe some projects.
RayGen’s PV Ultra System
This paragraph describes the PV Ultra system.
The fully dispatchable power plant would use RayGen’s own technology PV Ultra, which is a combination of photovoltaic (PV) solar generation with the more expensive and engineering-intensive concentrated solar technology using angled mirror towers (heliostats). The PV Ultra system would generate both electricity and heat.
It’s obviously using what Australia has a lot of; sun to advantage.
RayGen’s Innovative Thermal Storage
This paragraph outlines the principle of RayGen’s thermal method of storage.
This generation technology would in turn be co-located and connected to a ‘Thermal Hydro’ energy storage facility, with 17 hours of storage, which again is based on a technology RayGen is developing. Unlike pumped hydro energy storage which uses two reservoirs at different heights, relying on gravity to drive turbines, the Thermal Hydro plant would use a hot reservoir and a cold reservoir, linked together.
The principle of operation is described in this second paragraph.
The PV Ultra solution will therefore cool one reservoir using photovoltaic power and grid power when needed, while also heating the other reservoir using the heliostats. The difference in temperature would then generate electricity, via an Organic Rankine Cycle engine, a device which uses thermodynamic cycles to convert steam into mechanical energy and is widely used for biomass, waste incinerators and other existing generation types.
The article states that an Organic Rankine cycle engine has an efficiency of about seventy percent. I have linked to Wikipedia, which gives a good explanation of the Organic Rankine cycle, which is typically used in waste heat recovery and biomass power plants.
RayGen’s Flagship Project
RayGen’s flagship project will be rated at 4 MW, with a storage capacity of 50 MWh. It will be used to provide power in the West Murray region.
New South Wales Community Projects
The article then describes a group of community projects that are being set up in New South Wales.
This is the introductory paragraph
Elsewhere in Australia, the government of New South Wales approved grants earlier this month to assist the development of seven solar projects, all but one of which will include energy storage. Notably, five out of the seven will also be community distributed energy projects, including one standalone shared battery energy storage site.
Some points from the article include.
- The total solar power is rated at 17.2 MW.
- The energy storage is rated at 39.2 MWh
- One site is co-located with hydrogen electrolysis and storage,
New South Wales has certainly launched an ambitious plan.
Conclusion
I like RayGen’s system and the New South Wales initiative.
I also think, that both projects could find applications in some of the hotter places in the world.
Could solar power systems like these solve power supply problems in Africa, India and other sun-rich places>
Carry On Blogging
At seventy-two and after recovering from a serious stroke ten years ago, I could be considered to be in a relatively high-risk category from COVID-19.
I also live alone and am a coeliac.
But.
- I have reasonable supplies of ready-meals, tea, milk, beer and packaged foods to last for a week.
- I test my INR and on Friday it was 2.5.
- I weigh about 61 Kg.
- I exercise regularly and can easily walk a couple of miles briskly.
- I have plenty of INR testing strips, with probably enough to last until August.
- I have about two months of drugs, but there is supposed to be a system lunched this week to get drugs to people like me.
- I have an on-line subscription to The Times, so I can read their news in detail and get access to all their puzzles.
- I can walk round the corner to a shop, where I can get milk and other daily supplies.
- I can easily walk to my GP’s surgery and the local Marks and Spencer Simply Food.
- I have a son, who can put shopping on the door-step, ring the bell and run!
- I have enough cash to pay for goods that neighbours or others might deliver.
I also have the great advantage, that my front door almost opens onto the street, so I can receive deliveries without meeting the courier, by just leaning out the window and telling them to put them on the step.
I very much feel, that I can set myself up to just carry on blogging.
Others can help here by doing the following.
- Suggest topics, where they would like my comments.
- Sending me stories, that I might like to read on topics like battery-power, branch line reopening, design, energy storage, hydrogen-power, innovation, extreme science, humour and life in general.
- Sending me positive stories about COVID-19.
It’s probably best, if you don’t send me stories from the BBC and The Times as I read them extensively.
I shall always reply, if I can. Hopefully, I will try and treat subjects in a light-hearted manner to ease the burden of these serious times.
We must all carry on!
Let’s Get Innovating!
I liked this paragraph from a story in The Times about getting enough ventilators.
Rural hospitals in Canada are using techniques normally reserved for mass shootings. By installing separate tubes, one ventilator can treat up to nine patients, as long as they have the same infection and equal lung capacity.
I never thought, I’d see a benefit from mass shootings.
But it does show the benefits of top class innovation!
The Anonymous Widower 