"Brick" accumulators - simple and ingenious
Ordinary firebricks, which are in the technological arsenal of mankind for at least three millennia, would help to abandon fossil fuels and move to carbon-free energy sources, say scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the authors of a study recently published in the Electricity Journal.
The idea of the researchers is that the firebrick blocks, having high thermal capacity, can retain for a long time the heat, fed by electric resistance heaters processing excess electricity. In turn, brick installations, packed in a heat-insulating shell, can supply back the stored heat to industrial facilities or power generators, as required.
The technology itself, called FIRES (Firebrick Resistance-heated Energy Storage), is much cheaper than the cost of hydroelectric storage and battery systems.
Technically, FIRES could be developed almost a century ago in the 1920s, but then there was no market for it.
According to the developers of the innovation, brick batteries are capable to supplement solar panels and wind power stations, which produce surplus energy in peak sunny seasons or in rather windy weather. Thus, FIRES will increase the profitability of alternative energy sources.
Firebricks are able to withstand very high temperatures - up to 1600 degrees Celsius or more. The durability of this high-temperature building material is evidenced by archeological findings of the iron-melting furnaces built by the Hittites more than three thousand years ago.
Nowadays, firebricks vary in thermal conductivity. As for FIRES, its center can be laid with a brick of high coefficient of thermal conductivity, and, on the contrary, the outer parts of the structure can have a low heat transfer indicator, serving as an insulating shell.
Now the inventors analyze the choice of resistance heaters for a brick energy collector. The promising one is silicon carbide.
The lead author of the paper, Charles Forsberg, a research scientist in Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, hopes that the next step would be the creation by 2020 of several full-fledged FIRES stations that would verify the operation principle in real conditions.
