Reply To: Fusion Oil

[vansig]

vansig wrote:
Someone please prove me wrong

Doh! it turns out i did make a silly calculation error, after all. can you tell where it is?

MTd2 wrote: Don’t you think this onion would waste a lot of energy by thermal loses? Why not just heating a liquid?

Just as a point of comparison, in fact the only point to doing it this way is IF it can achieve better efficiency than a heat engine.

“The maximum theoretical efficiency of a heat engine (which no engine ever obtains) is equal to the temperature difference between the hot and cold ends divided by the temperature at the hot end, all expressed in absolute temperature or kelvins.”

this would be, about:
(900 – 300)/900 = 66.6% if operating at 627 °C, cooling to 27 °C; or,
(1273 – 300)/1273=76.4% if operating at 1000 °C, cooling to 27 °C.
both of these are challenging because they exceed the creep limit of several candidate structural materials at the hot side.

so if the 80% claim for the onion carries any weight, it’s well-worth investigating.