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Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by cormacrelf on Wednesday April 13, 2022 @06:50PM (#31021279)
Also I wonder if, using similar principles to a heat pump's operation, you could still get juice out of stored heat at lower temperatures. Surely you can have this hot graphite sitting at under 2000°C, heat some fluid/gas to say 1000°C, and then compress the gas to increase its temperature? Surely that would be the ideal solution anyway, since you don't want your hot graphite to become a chunk of useless heat simply for dropping below temp briefly.

On the topic of heat pumps, you could also use a TPV for geothermal power. Since there are no moving parts and presumably no huge steam engine installation, it would be more feasible to have one of these in your back yard. The grid powers a heat pump, you compress the fluid till it hits 2000°C, and your TPV extracts power. The heat pump itself is >100% efficient, so overall you can steal a fair bit of electricity from the ground. Right?

Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by ok_computer on Thursday April 14, 2022 @10:32AM (#31027551)
I just want to point out that compressing gas takes a non-zero amount of work. Compressing gas to increase temperature to use temperature to make energy would be better spent using the compressing work directly to make electricity.
Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by qsdf38100 on Thursday April 14, 2022 @02:43AM (#31024021)
The best theoretical efficiency of a heat pump is 1/CarnotEfficency. So the best you can do is to have a round trip efficiency of 1. See Carnot batteries. So using a heat pump to increase the temperature so that a thermal engine is more efficient can’t possibly increase the overall efficiency.
Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by mcbishop on Thursday April 14, 2022 @11:46PM (#31036451)
Heat pumps are different than heat engines... I don't think Carnot efficiency applies. A heat pump can move several units of heat energy per input unit of electrical energy (thanks to awesome compressor / refrigerant / phase-change technology). ...They're >100% efficient.
Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by hinkley on Friday April 15, 2022 @01:03AM (#31036742)
> The best theoretical efficiency of a heat pump is 1/CarnotEfficency.

The facts have already been stated that refute your what if. Whether you missed it or not, you're arguing for a perpetual motion machine.

The Layman's version of the 3 Laws of Thermodynamics are:

    1) You can't win
    2) You can't cheat
    3) You can't even choose not to play
Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by qsdf38100 on Friday April 15, 2022 @06:27AM (#31038537)
Heat pumps really are reversed heat engines.

For instance, take a Brayton thermodynamic cycle. It's motor cycle, but you can literally just reverse the arrows on this cycle, it becomes a reversed Brayton cycle, which corresponds to a heat pump (or a refrigeration machine, depending on which inlet of the machine you're interested in). In practice, the reversing of the arrow means the reversing of the fluid flow, which means compression processes are now expansion processes and vice versa.

Carnot theory does still apply. The COP (Coefficient Of Performance) of a Carnot heat pump is 1/n, where n is the usual Carnot efficiency of a heat engine.

With n=1/3, you get a COP of 1/1/3 = 3 = 300%

Carnot efficiencies consider ideal machines. So ideal Carnot batteries have a n * 1/n = 100% efficiencies. It means you can't increase the efficiency of a heat engine by putting a heat pump in front of it. In an ideal case (ignoring all losses and inefficiencies), you would get the same efficiency. In practice, you can only be worse.

Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by bumby on Thursday April 14, 2022 @10:18AM (#31027373)
>The heat pump itself is >100% efficient

Are you sure you aren't confusing the coefficient of performance with the efficiency? If a heat pump was >100% efficient, I could cool my house by leaving my refrigerator door open.

Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by hnuser123456 on Thursday April 14, 2022 @12:11PM (#31028896)
If you pipe the heat from the compressor directly outside instead of venting it into the same room, that would work.
Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by bumby on Thursday April 14, 2022 @12:54PM (#31029619)
Correct, that's what refrigerated air conditioners do. But that's really just playing a trick with the system boundary in the problem; it doesn't mean the global efficiency has exceeded 100%.
Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by cormacrelf on Thursday April 14, 2022 @11:08PM (#31036271)
Yes, it's an imprecise term.
Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by bumby on Sunday April 17, 2022 @11:44AM (#31061629)
To be clear, I don't think the term is imprecise. Efficiency is always (work out)/(work in). The numbers get wonky when we aren't fully accounting for the "work in". In the case of refrigeration, we have to account for the work it takes to compress the fluid and the resulting waste heat.
Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by Szpadel on Wednesday April 13, 2022 @07:41PM (#31021692)
I'm not sure if there is any way to make heat pump operating in this scale of temperatures, and keep in mind that current heat pumps can only "pump" over about 50°C max until it's no longer profitable.
Re:A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as... by elil17 on Wednesday April 13, 2022 @07:48PM (#31021745)
That’s not really true at all. Home heat pumps are stuck there because of the refrigerants used. Ammonia heat pumps can go way hotter (though still nowhere close to those temps - more like 150c iirc), it’s just that ammonia requires safety controls that are impractical on a small scale.