I Tried a Sand Battery - Here is Why It is a Game-Changer

[Music] winter is coming demand for energy is skyrocketing day by day it makes us to burn fossil fuels more and more affecting environment badly and depleting natural Wells more quickly but how about then well of course we have green energy that we can Harvest from nature as well however energy storage costs too high so we cannot store renewable energy easily green energy devices like solar panels and wind turbines are shut off when there is no demand because there is no reason for them to work however when there is demand most of these devices cannot provide 100% green energy we need cheaper energy storage solutions other than expensive batteries even though the new Solutions are not as effective as chemical batteries that's why there are many Technologies trying to store renewable energy in a cheaper way one example is gravity batteries that I have built in my previous videos but it did not justify itself however there are still different kinds of Technologies to store energy that we haven't heard of yet for example we can use simple sand to store energy using sand yes and make sure to watch the video till the end as I'll make my portable scand battery in this video check if this technology is legit or a scam no I'm serious about s in fact there are individuals who have already established the lucrative business in this field and the best part is it's incredibly affordable take for example the team at polar Knight energy a Finnish company that has constructed an enormous facility solely dedicated for storing energy in pure scent this is not just a scent Castle it's a fully functional battery made entirely out of scent the concept is simple fill a thermally insulated container with a sand and heated it up to 1000° C that's it the sand will retain that heat for several month now you got the idea we not storing electricity inent instead we're using it as a Thal battery the problem with thermal batteries is that you can't hold heat for a long time like you do with electricity in chemical batteries for example Swedish Company vetan Fall has built 25 M high and 200 megaw rated thermal energy storage to store heat in water the heat storage tank takes 56 million L of water and it can be stored up to only 98° C for certain hours but this door Tower can hold 600° CSUS of heat for several months so definitely sand is better at keeping heat than water and you can heat the sand to higher temperature than water as water boils at 100° C well you might also think that we can use that storage heat to run steam engine or any kind of heat to electricity generators to generate electricity but it's not simple as you think before showing you the your method let me tell you about the sponsor of this video cadas they produced Ultra compact Mini minimalistic Mini PC kadas M mind is a modular mini powerful PC that will have several plug-in playay modules for various tasks this tiny Beast only weighs about 433 G and packs Intel Core i7 is 32 GB of RAM 1 TB of M2 mvme SSD an extra slot for another additional SSD with this little guy I could prepare all information for this video like video scripting browsing for information about sand battery even I fully 3D models the objects that we're going to 3D print in this video later it could handle my 3D modeling tasks easily it's such a tiny machine so you can take it Vis you in your pocket without turning it off and continue your workflow from where you left as it has internal battery and auto slep mode if you think this minimal PC is boring kadas makes it fun for you with modular parts that you can attach at its bottom as it provides mind link interface that is faster even Thunderbolt 4 currently they provide Hadas dock with extra peripherals fingerprint scanner and ergonomic volume knob despite 3D modeling with this little PC I could play several games including fortnite CS2 and even GTA 5 but if you want better graphics kadas is about to produce a new plug-in playay module with Nvidia graphics card M's ecosystem allows kadas to produce more and more plugins that you can use with this little PC as they are planning to produce models like mine X playay mine talk and mine Studio display make sure to check out how do might by Links in video description back to the video when it comes to water it would be inefficient as Mr yonan says the efficiency will decrease to down to 25% where sand batter's efficiency is up to 95% so in order to use the stored energy efficiently we just need to use heat as heat why only heat because if you look at us statistics you can see that about 25 % of electricity produced in 2022 is used for water and space heating only which is quarter of electricity produced in whole country and that's not all because most of the electricity Generations are not considered carbon free because they included sources like natural gas and coal still most of the heat resources for homes is natural gas which includes CO2 emission again but working principle of this sand heat battery is that you heat the sand with electric heating element using electricity harvested from 100% Renewables such as wind or solar panel you can heat the sand up to 1000° C or even higher as long as it's hot it starts set hot for a long time as Polar Knight energy says best recharging cycle interval is 2 weeks so it should be able to retain heat for 2 weeks perfectly and it uses 100% renewable energy and produces zero CO2 emissions polar Knight energy hits air with heating element and blow it to sand tower through pipes during summer with high sunshine when winter comes cool air will be blown through sand tower using pipes and sand battery hits the air which hits the water in air to water exchanger unit then you can use it for anything that requires heat including warming homes hot water and others currently polar night energy can provide heat storage with 10 megawatt heating power with a capacity of th000 megaw hour is 50 years of work time Z prototype is providing heat to 100 homes and even public swimming pool well is this a scam about Dum idea or is it worth to try for that I tried to check and mock their technology with some adjustments so we can test if sand can really hold that heat for a long period of time but my method is little bit different where I've got a big bucket and I made holes at the top top of the bucket then I 3D modeled some air Outlets using my new Hadas mind PC and 3D printed the design using City K1 which was provided by Sint smart it's an online shop where you can buy different kind of 3D printers desktop CNC machines and other power tools as a DIY maker because they provide the machines with reasonable price thanks s smart for providing reality Kon Vis it I could 3D print with high temperature resistant filament ABS easily so back to the idea I have glued a cooling fan on the bucket lid so once it blows air inside the bucket air will go out from Outlets that we have 3D printed before I have put some sand to the bottom of the bucket in order to stop temperature and cover it inside the bucket with non each insulation material a Hut s Mis hooked up to ESP microcontroller for temperature monitoring later so we can calculate the effectiveness and cooling speed of standand to prove the technology now we need a metallic buckets that can stand to high temperature tempature about 500° C I have put scand in this little bucket sent was about 4.5 kg so now time to burn the sand I used propane gas with a portable stove to hit the sand but this was one of my mistake which I'll tell you later in this video it took continuous 2 hours to heat the scent during heating I realized that scent must be completely moisture-free otherwise first gas will have to dry the scand then hit it naturally it will take longer to hit as a take from experiment is that hitting the sand from bottom only does not give effective result we tried to cover it from sideways but it didn't help so sand temperature of bottom and top for different it takes longer to dissipate heat along the sand so it's better to hit the sand from all sides at once I think it's the reason why polar Knight energy uses spiral shaped tube with hot air inside with this takes from this experiment I tried to make it in a better way again this time I tried hit hitting the scent in a little furnace to hit the scent from all sides with this method temperature of scent was high enough to test the cooling down speed of sand I have used two therms one for sand one for hot air now you can see the graph it took 5 hours for sand to cool down from 200° C to room temperature and air temperature was stable as well during this time so my take from this experiment is that I think sand battery is a pretty nice idea to store the heat yes it's all only 5 hour storage but hey it was only about 5 kg of scent but it doesn't mean 1 hour per kilogram of scent polar Knight energy uses 100 tons of scent so if you want me to build bigger prototype of this scent battery is better Matrix just comment your desire and helpful ideas about it if the video gets enough comments I also will build the battery with several tons of scent in the next videos thank you for watching and see you in the next videos inshallah [Music] yeah

Channel: engineericly

Views: 86,532

Keywords: sand battery, energy storage, battery, sand battery technology, sand battery explained, sand battery how it works, DIY sand battery, engineericly, green energy, solar panel, wind turbine, green energy storage, best battery, best energy storage, sand battery diy, thermal battery, polar night energy, heat battery, cheap energy storage, cheap energy sources

Id: St8wodQY6VU

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2023