Wired.com: Take a jet engine hooked up to some big magnets, add some steam pipes, and what do you have? The comeback of some old-school technologies that could help solve our modern energy problem.
The idea is simple—generate both electricity and heat in the same place, but the potential benefits are big.
Unlike a traditional electric power plant, which can convert about 40 percent of its fuel into electricity but wastes the rest as heat, these combination plants capture that heat and use it to warm or cool buildings. The efficiency of combined heat and power plants can reach into the 80 percent range.
The Department of Energy has place $156 million of stimulus funding on these steam-age ideas. It fits with industrial, commercial and municipal interest in reducing fuel costs and environmental footprints.
Steam technology is an excellent application of thermodynamic process. We went from steam driven water wheel boats and locomotives in the mid 1800s to modern computer controlled electrical utility plants and nuclear powered submarines and surface ships whose power is derived from steam generated by onboard nuclear fission reactors.
As a space faring civilization in its infancy, we are contemplating lunar outposts which I am reasonably sure, could make good use of steam cycle equipment.
As someone trained in physics who enjoys speculating and studying concepts for deep space travel eventually to other star systems, I am a champion of nuclear fission and eventually nuclear fusion powered star ships that can in theory approach at least mildly relativistic velocities. For such vessels, steam driven turbo-electric systems can be energized by nuclear fission or nuclear fusion reactors once they are developed wherein the electrical power generated would then be used to power ion, electron, or photon rockets, all of which can have an exhaust velocity almost equal to C for the sake of efficiency and improved specific impulse performance criteria.
Wide spread steam applications have been with us for a better part of 2 centuries and will likely continue to remain so for a very long time to come.
I am happy that we have steam generation systems wherein the heat is used with 80 percent efficiency.
A very good idea, but not very new. Building and maintaining an infrastructure made of pipes is expensive. Why not focus more on micro-CHP? A home heater with a build-in generator. Efficiency can be almost 100%. Think of all new nuclear power plants that need NOT be build! Europe is launching these units with Stirling engines as generators, but small steam turbine can also be used. www.microturbine.eu