mleku on Nostr: nope read up a bit on metallurgy to learn why not if it's rigid enough to take the ...
nope
read up a bit on metallurgy to learn why not
if it's rigid enough to take the strain, it takes a lot more tempering, which is several cycles of heat to red, then rapidly cool
the crystals take weeks to grow at very high temperatures, so your efficiency at containing that heat is the major issue of efficiency, and i'm sure they use multi-meter-thick layers of glass fibre around the furnaces to keep them from wasting even more energy to keep the cystals liquid as they grow
it's an enormous amount of energy for both processes, and then, to focus on the towers, the amount of strain they are going to take in their working lifetime, at ideal conditions, will at best see them lose structural integrity substantially before they have pushed enough kinetic energy into the generator coils
but if they get an excess of push, the strain is increased and their lifespan and time to failure is increased
the more elastic you make metal, the more prone it is to fracturing, and it's exactly the same principle with glass, why lab glass is more resistant to temperature change is the boron and alumina added to it causes the glass to heat up more uniformly, and lowers its melting point, so it's easier to work
but this kind of glass is more brittle, and it is prone to fracturing catastrophically at a lower level of mechanical stress, but the trade off is it can absorb a lot more thermal stress without fracturing
you can't use glass like this for optic fibre, for example, because it is liable to break so they have to use a different kind of glass mix that is more flexible, which is the high silica, sodium/potassium based glass types, for the best optical permeability
anyway, that's the point... engineering the materials to take the strain, whether it's heat and radiation for the PV panels or the mechanical stress of the windmills, the cost of engineering it to take that strain for its lifetime is an energy input that is greater than the force that was applied to it
meaning, it always yields less energy back
and once it gets to some point near that, it will have fractures and cracks and mechanical failures, and will end up in the trash, because to recycle that shit is more expensive than making it out of fresh iron ore and coal
read up a bit on metallurgy to learn why not
if it's rigid enough to take the strain, it takes a lot more tempering, which is several cycles of heat to red, then rapidly cool
the crystals take weeks to grow at very high temperatures, so your efficiency at containing that heat is the major issue of efficiency, and i'm sure they use multi-meter-thick layers of glass fibre around the furnaces to keep them from wasting even more energy to keep the cystals liquid as they grow
it's an enormous amount of energy for both processes, and then, to focus on the towers, the amount of strain they are going to take in their working lifetime, at ideal conditions, will at best see them lose structural integrity substantially before they have pushed enough kinetic energy into the generator coils
but if they get an excess of push, the strain is increased and their lifespan and time to failure is increased
the more elastic you make metal, the more prone it is to fracturing, and it's exactly the same principle with glass, why lab glass is more resistant to temperature change is the boron and alumina added to it causes the glass to heat up more uniformly, and lowers its melting point, so it's easier to work
but this kind of glass is more brittle, and it is prone to fracturing catastrophically at a lower level of mechanical stress, but the trade off is it can absorb a lot more thermal stress without fracturing
you can't use glass like this for optic fibre, for example, because it is liable to break so they have to use a different kind of glass mix that is more flexible, which is the high silica, sodium/potassium based glass types, for the best optical permeability
anyway, that's the point... engineering the materials to take the strain, whether it's heat and radiation for the PV panels or the mechanical stress of the windmills, the cost of engineering it to take that strain for its lifetime is an energy input that is greater than the force that was applied to it
meaning, it always yields less energy back
and once it gets to some point near that, it will have fractures and cracks and mechanical failures, and will end up in the trash, because to recycle that shit is more expensive than making it out of fresh iron ore and coal