[Aeronaut]

Rezwan wrote:

But, again my point is that INSIDE the FF module, you will have large conductors and big, heavy switchgear, etc. I just want people who havn’t dealt with this kind of thing to get an idea of what it’s like. Your run of the mill residential/commerical electrican could easily kill himself trying to work on this stuff. It take proper training and tools to do so.

Yes, the safety issues need to be made clear. I just read this article about Hybrid safety. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31112317/ If we’re headed into an electrical world, we need to understand how to deal with it. Not take it for granted.

There’s a lot of food for thought in that article, Rezwan. Thanx for the link. Imagine all those 600 volt batteries already on the road. Something the article didn’t point out is what might happen if the wreckage shorted out the actual wiring somewhere downstream of the battery pack.

I did some rough numbers to provide 100 houses with the full 100 amps of 220 volts that the main cutoff breaker is rated at. These numbers are rough because true power (RMS or Root Mean Square value) is 70.7% of that, I assumed steady load at 50% of max, and I used watts instead of Joules. I also rounded down, in favor of safety and headroom. For instance, what if (100) 30A heat pump compressors all kicked in at the same instant? What if (100) 30A clothes dryers also spiked the load at this same instant? Maybe its dinner time and there’s 20 to 50 electric ranges on 50 amp breakers lurking… In short, this is no place for optimistic numbers.

The first level of safety is the circuit’s breaker. Second is each house’s (or pole barn’s) main cutoff breaker. Third safety/fault isolation level is the local pad transformer, which I presume is protected by breaker or fuse. The local FF plant in this neighborhood would supply the 13.2kV highwire to use the pole-mounted transformers as the 4th safety level as well as minimize modifications to the existing electrical system. This just happens to be handy and highly visible on a major artery with plenty of police traffic on any given day, and the land is available in this neighborhood. New safety concerns are now isolated to roughly 1 acre (lots of buffer area inside the fence) housing 2 FF reactors to guarantee power is always on. One could also be tasked to selling power most of the time to pay for the installation, when not needed locally. Four or five of these sites just might be enough to power my township with a total of 6 to 10 FF reactors.

Periodic maintenance and emergency site visits would be sub-contracted to the big utility, who should be glad to have few guinea pigs to observe without committing capital until they determine their network architecture. Who knows- they may decide this is the way of their future. In any case, they already have the licensing and relationships to help make this happen smoothly.

Here’s the numbers:

100 houses @ 24kW peak rated load/house=2.4MW
Round up to 25kW peak load=2.5MW
Double that to allow for pole barns, etc….
===========================
5 MW peak rated load

Every shot puts 5MW profit in the output cap bank
60 hz (shots/second) picked to match line frequency
300 hz pulse rate could power 5 separate DC->AC converters to further isolate 80% of the system from a serious issue within the other 20%.

Conclusion: keep the kids from jumping the fence(s) and you have a reasonably safe local power system. A four site package could maybe cost 5 to 10M$. Primary payback mode would be reduced- or free- electricity. Second mode would be selling surplus electricity to the big utility. Damn! I want one of these packages in my township! How soon do you think we can make FF useful for something other than making heat?

[Aeronaut]

Rematog,

The problem with the grid is that it fails catastrophically rather than gracefully eroding, which could be the case if we were generating power at or near the township level. The local model is the one that can actually improve standards of living around the world. That’s the model driving the question of how do we easily ship these modules.

[Aeronaut]

Thanx, Rematog. I was overdue for a good laugh.

Seriously, though, we’ve been taking an engineering point of view towards distributing 5MW per FF unit. Just because the FF can crank out 5MW steadily if all goes well doesn’t mean every application will require that much power. How often do most people use every HP in their engine? If they ever do, how long is that burst? Only long enough to pass (hopefully) one car. We could leave the 5MW in the (cap) bank, reducing total neutron emission and number of maintenance cycles in some cases. Eventually another pulse would fill the output bank back up.

Now this is where it gets dangerous, because I’m thinking of limiting the power out through a bunch of system safeguards that reek of paddlewheel riverboat boiler relief valves being tied down. Ya just can’t make something foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

What I’m getting at is that 480 training and licensing is much more available, and it supports the goal of cheap distributed power.

[Aeronaut]

Okay. Let’s skin this cat another way, pulse it a lot slower and take industrial style 480 out of the cap banks. I hate rain clouds.

[Aeronaut]

That’s the way I read it, too.

[Aeronaut]

Rematog wrote:
But, again my point is that INSIDE the FF module, you will have large conductors and big, heavy switchgear, etc. I just want people who haven’t dealt with this kind of thing to get an idea of what it’s like. Your run of the mill residential/commerical electrican could easily kill himself trying to work on this stuff. It take proper training and tools to do so.

Rematog

These modules are beginning to sound like stubby double-wides on a lot of acres of gravel. And the scariest part is that electrical training and licensing to service these might take 20 years or more to trickle down to local use. Do you see co-ops and villages running a handful of FF modules within 5 years of when production begins?

[Aeronaut]

Rematog wrote: Aeronaut,

I’m discussing the FF modules power conditioning, cables etc. INSIDE the module.

LOL, A station tranformer yard would need 25 Modules (or a whole lot more, in our case 115 modules) to power it.

My point in these posts was that the board seems to be invisioning pencil sized cables and shoe box sized power conditioning modues inside the FF skid. More like wrist thick cables and desk sized modules.

Rematog

PS: Google “arc flash video clip”. I personally know two men who had “died” until revived by CPR and were crippled by their burns in two seperate arc flash accidents. Look at “High voltage arcs and sparks” and “Arc flash while racking a breaker”. Remember guys, we are discussing deploying >100,000 FF modules that will have many 10’s of thousands of men and women working in them. The power industry uses big, heavy equipment (expensive) for, amoung other reasons, the desire to send it’s employees home alive at the end of the day.

I agree, Rematog. Safety is job 1. I’ve heard stories about lowly 480 volt grabbing people and creating fire balls. We can’t really sketch out the power conditioning equipment until we know what voltage and current ranges we can tweak the output cap bank(s) to provide.

I’ve been seeing 1GW plants like stacking modules in a 3D matrix. Suppose we can get 15 amps of 382kV from our 5MW, and we arrange these modules in a circle with the transmission transformer(s) in a very physically isolated part of the site. Something like circling the wagons, but turning the wagons 90 degrees so the business end of each module faces the transformer.

[Aeronaut]

Rematog wrote: Aeronaut,

My bad…. you’ve quoted my un-proofed post. I’d divided 11,900 Kva by 480V, instead of the correct 0.48 Kv so that should have read 25,000 amps… I’ve corrected my post now.

At your desired 13.2 Kv, that would be about 900 Amps.

Yes, I am ignoring power factor or AC power correction.

Rematog

Oops- I saw the updated post after I’d posted. Who says we need to send all the current down one line? Especially if we’re distributing 3 phase to part of a large city, say, powering 25 local transformer yards? My intent was to produce electricity directly at a transmission voltage (the higher the better) to make the price of the transmission transformer more palatable.

[Aeronaut]

Rematog wrote: Aeronaut,

When you talk about this, I get the idea you are picturing typical power conditioning etc. equipment. Remember, we are talking about a 5MW machine, that’s 5000 KVA…..oh and thats just the Net output. Just a quick thought, if you are getting 42% net (I think I’ve seen this figure used), then:

5000KVA / 42% = 11,900 KVA Gross, So, 6,900 KVA is thus the input power. I don’t know what voltage we’re looking at, but a typical industrial voltage is 480V. So 11,900 KVA gross is abot 25 amps at 480 V.

Eric, is my back of the envelope calc. in the ball park?

Rematog

What I’m hoping for is at least 13.2 kV so we can use off-the-shelf local transmission equipment. The quick circuit sketch would be a bank of “chopper” switches with existing caps and coils for wave shaping. This could also turn the output cap bank’s DC into polyphase AC.

Yes, the video says 42% thermodynamic efficiency. I’m interpreting that as 58% of the energy released is not available for generating electricity. The first places I’d look for it would be radiation and heat.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

Aeronaut,

Your leaving out the high voltage/high current capacitors and power control/conditioning equipment (heavy stuff). While it would not have to be in the “engine nacelle”, it would need to be aboard…..

Regarding the prior discussion of heat pumps, so what if they are efficent. If FF is even close to as inexpensive as this board assumes, the cost of power will be so cheap that the cost of the heat pump will never be paid back vs very cheap resistance heating. Energy efficency is not a religion, it is an engineering/economic trade-off.

A Prius will never save me enough in gas vs my Corolla to make it worth paying the difference. And a Volkswagen turbo diesel is just as green, more so if you burn bio-diesel fuel. About the same price, and more fun to drive too.

Rematog

Hopefully the caps really can be used to power multiple reactors. Since nobody’s gone into any detail about the power conditioning black boxes, I can only hope they can become “communal property” for at least 50 FF power blocks. In a matrix like that, a few more power conditioning modules could even be attractive from a structural standpoint. Btw- how tall are your ceilings?

Boilers are one of those maybe markets that is already geared to making and selling expensive water heaters to an energy-conscious (cost of steam) market. In that particular type of application, I believe FF would be a natural, with or without net electric output.

I hear you about the cars’ payoff. Since I can squeeze 30+ mpg out of my paid off ’00 Focus, why even think about a new car’s payments, including going back to full coverage insurance? The whole MPG “issue” is a non-starter with me.

It’s probably not possible to recover and use waste heat as cheaply as simply running a few more resistance heaters with FF electric output, as Rematog says. The hardware cost is just prohibitive.

As for the MPG thing, it all depends on the scale. E.g.: the TeslaMotors Roadster (current) and 5+2 passenger Model S sport sedan (2011) are pure BEVs (Battery Electric Vehicles) which, based on a rough cost-conversion equation, get about 200-250 MPG equivalent. That (plus the absence of maintenance costs for the vastly simplified power train and motor), makes a $50,000 Model S lease+running cost equivalent to a $30,000 ICE vehicle lease+running cost – while providing a MUCH better ride and product.

So the numbers matter.

Gentlemen- since all we have at this point is “waste” heat, why not sell that COP directly? If nothing else, we would have the world’s first practical fusion power plant. That distinction could break FF out of the pack. Imagine the headline: Focus Fusion Delivers Useful Energy While Big Science Scratches Head

[Aeronaut]

Rematog wrote: Aeronaut,

Your leaving out the high voltage/high current capacitors and power control/conditioning equipment (heavy stuff). While it would not have to be in the “engine nacelle”, it would need to be aboard…..

Regarding the prior discussion of heat pumps, so what if they are efficent. If FF is even close to as inexpensive as this board assumes, the cost of power will be so cheap that the cost of the heat pump will never be paid back vs very cheap resistance heating. Energy efficency is not a religion, it is an engineering/economic trade-off.

A Prius will never save me enough in gas vs my Corolla to make it worth paying the difference. And a Volkswagen turbo diesel is just as green, more so if you burn bio-diesel fuel. About the same price, and more fun to drive too.

Rematog

Hopefully the caps really can be used to power multiple reactors. Since nobody’s gone into any detail about the power conditioning black boxes, I can only hope they can become “communal property” for at least 50 FF power blocks. In a matrix like that, a few more power conditioning modules could even be attractive from a structural standpoint. Btw- how tall are your ceilings?

Boilers are one of those maybe markets that is already geared to making and selling expensive water heaters to an energy-conscious (cost of steam) market. In that particular type of application, I believe FF would be a natural, with or without net electric output.

I hear you about the cars’ payoff. Since I can squeeze 30+ mpg out of my paid off ’00 Focus, why even think about a new car’s payments, including going back to full coverage insurance? The whole MPG “issue” is a non-starter with me.

[Aeronaut]

Thanx for the link, Ricky.

Sorry for my less than warm tone in my previous responses, but your initial approach looked spammy.

I imagine those work (and sell) very well in Florida and other high humidity areas. One thing I noticed about the site is that the “Alternate Energy” link on the lower nav bar returns a server error. The pages that I did look at, however, are very professionally done. Welcome to FF.

[Aeronaut]

Is there a company website we can see? Using a Facebook page does not help your credibility. I’m assuming you used it to cloak an affiliate link?

[Aeronaut]

Be that as it may, that is the information that LPP currently presents potential investors. Predicated on a series of estimates, you and I can only speculate…..

[Aeronaut]

JimmyT wrote: With regards to weight and mass. This may help. Or maybe not: hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/Mechanics/slug.html

Hmmm. Any suggestions on getting this link to work?

Thanx, Jimmy. I clicked the Mass link and got it rephrased with and without gravity. Here’s that link: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/mass.html#mas

Looks like adding http:// to the link should make it clickable. Copy and paste always works, too.

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