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This sponsored article is dropped at you by COMSOL.
As we attempt to objectively examine nature, we are sometimes reminded of how pure forces have an effect on us personally. We will sit at a desk and think about warmth in its numerous types, however we is perhaps distracted if our toes are chilly! Once we flip up the warmth in our properties and workplaces, we should stability our private want for heat with the worldwide influence of burning fossil fuels like oil, gasoline, coal, and biomass. Anthropogenic local weather change confronts humanity with a problem: How can we maintain heat now as we attempt to forestall our world from overheating sooner or later?
It’s a daunting query {that a} startup referred to as Polar Night time Vitality, within the small and chilly nation of Finland (Determine 1), is making an attempt to reply. In a area identified for lengthy, darkish winter nights, Polar Night time Vitality is constructing a system within the metropolis of Tampere that may warmth buildings with saved photo voltaic power — all day, all evening, and all winter lengthy. The obvious contradictions don’t finish there. In an period of advanced cleantech options, usually produced from uncommon and costly supplies, Polar Night time Vitality’s warmth storage and distribution system consists of straightforward ducts, pumps, valves, and sand. The novel system reveals potential for tackling world issues in a affected person, considerate, and human-scaled method.
A Small Nation with Massive Heating Wants
Huge issues demand large options, and there’s maybe no larger Twenty first-century drawback than local weather change. To fulfill this problem, many governments and organizations are investing in new know-how to assist reduce using fossil fuels. These initiatives have largely targeted on renewable electrical energy technology, distribution, and storage.
“If you ask folks about cleaner power, they consider electrical energy,” says Tommi Eronen, CEO of Polar Night time Vitality. “However we even have to chop emissions from heating.” Out of Finland’s energy-related emissions, 82 p.c come from heating home buildings (Ref. 1). “We wish to exchange all of that if we’re to have any hope of assembly our world local weather targets,” Eronen says.
Assume Globally, Warmth Domestically
The spirit of “Assume Globally, Act Domestically”, a mantra related to the Nineteen Sixties, lives on with Polar Night time Vitality’s crew of innovators. Their journey started with a query posed by its founders, Tommi Eronen and Markku Ylönen, after they had been college classmates: “Is it doable to construct an energy-self-sufficient and cost-effective hippie commune for engineers utilizing solely solar energy?” After commencement, the undertaking they codenamed “Hippie Commune” grew to become Polar Night time Vitality, with Eronen as CEO and Ylönen as CTO.
What started as a lighthearted (however critical) scholar undertaking led to a 3 MWh/100 kW pilot plant within the Finnish metropolis of Tampere, which started operation in the course of the winter of 2020–2021. The system makes use of electrical energy to warmth air, which is then circulated via an exchanger that heats water and distributes it to a number of buildings within the metropolis’s Hiedanranta district (Determine 2).
Contained in the system, electrically powered resistive heating parts warmth air to greater than 600°C. The new air is circulated via a community of pipes inside a sand-filled warmth storage vessel. The new air then flows again out of the vessel right into a warmth exchanger, the place it heats water that’s then circulated via constructing heating methods. The sand’s warmth storage capability ensures that even when the resistive parts are cool, the circulating air remains to be scorching sufficient to maintain the water (and buildings) heat.
“We solely have pipes, valves, a fan, and an electrical heating component. There’s nothing particular right here!” Eronen says, laughing.
A Battery for Warmth Constituted of Sand
Famous chemical engineer Donald Sadoway is quoted as saying: “If you wish to make a dirt-cheap battery, it’s important to make it out of grime.” Polar Night time Vitality’s system faces the identical core challenges as every other power infrastructure. It should ship energy to folks after they want it, the place they want it, and at a manageable worth. Because of this storing and distributing power is as essential as its technology. Current infrastructure meets these challenges in acquainted methods. For combustion-based heating, fuels like oil and gasoline are saved and moved to the place they are often burned. {The electrical} grid additionally helps the environment friendly distribution of energy and makes use of power generated via renewable means like wind and photo voltaic. The intermittent nature of daylight and robust winds, nevertheless, is a cussed drawback. Vitality storage is required to keep up regular energy output all through the peaks and valleys of renewable inputs. However even with latest advances in battery know-how, storing electrical energy stays comparatively costly, particularly on the scale required for heating buildings. What if, slightly than storing electrical energy, a “battery” may retailer warmth as an alternative?
Determine 3. Markku Ylönen with a consultant pattern of Polar Night time Vitality’s dirt-cheap warmth storage medium.
Many standard heating methods already retailer and distribute warmth by retaining and circulating heat water. Eronen and Ylönen acknowledged the advantages of water-based warmth storage in addition to its limitations. “There’s solely a lot warmth you may add to water earlier than it turns into steam,” says Eronen. “Steam can effectively distribute warmth, however it’s not actually cost-effective for large-scale storage.” To keep away from the drawbacks of storing warmth in water, they as an alternative turned to sand — 42 metric tons of it! (Determine 3) After the Solar goes down, the sand’s saved warmth is steadily launched again into the circulating airflow. This retains the air scorching sufficient to keep up regular temperatures within the water that flows via prospects’ radiators. On this method, sand permits solar energy to maintain folks heat, even in the course of the darkest and coldest Finnish nights. “Sand offers 4 occasions the power storage capability of water,” Eronen says. “Sand is environment friendly, unhazardous, transportable, and low cost!”
“We’d like predictive modeling to reply as many questions as doable, earlier than we decide to assembling all this tools—and all this sand!”
—Tommi Eronen, CEO of Polar Night time Vitality
The Refined Evaluation Behind a Easy Resolution
Price effectivity is the muse of Polar Night time Vitality’s worth proposition. “As quickly as we determined to pursue this concept, we had been making an attempt to determine how the funds appeared,” says Eronen. Of their quest to do extra with much less, Polar Night time Vitality has lengthy trusted numerical simulation instruments. Eronen and Ylönen started utilizing the COMSOL Multiphysics software program as college students and it stays integral to their design course of. For instance, Eronen mentions the specs of an expanded warmth storage system that will serve extra buildings in Tampere. The crew calculated that supplying warmth to a district of 35,000 folks would require a sand-filled storage cylinder that’s 25 meters tall and 40 meters in diameter. How did they arrive at these dimensions? “The tough amount of fabric wanted is definitely simple to calculate, as a result of we all know how a lot warmth we are able to retailer in a cubic meter of sand,” Eronen explains. “We additionally needed to decide the house required for environment friendly warmth switch between the sand and our air circulating system (Determine 4). That’s way more tough to do! We used COMSOL to mannequin and consider totally different design choices.”
Determine 4. Tommi Eronen (foreground) and Ylönen inspecting the ductwork of a Polar Night time Vitality warmth storage vessel.
Multiphysics simulation software program helped form Polar Night time Vitality’s warmth exchanger design (Figures 5–6). Eronen says, “We constructed a selected mannequin to discover a design thought: What if we created an excellent scorching core of sand surrounded by heating ducts across the perimeter?” By modeling fluid circulate and warmth switch results within the COMSOL Multiphysics software program, the Polar Night time Vitality crew may quantify its design’s comparative benefits and downsides. “The simulation confirmed that the ‘scorching core’ design was good at storing warmth for very lengthy intervals of time,” says Eronen. “However for our supposed operational cycle, it makes extra sense to evenly distribute scorching air ducts all through the sand storage vessel,” he explains.
The sheer scale of Polar Night time Vitality’s sand-based warmth storage system makes simulation software program indispensable. “We can’t presumably construct full-size prototypes to check all of our concepts. We’d like predictive modeling to reply as many questions as doable, earlier than we decide to assembling all this tools — and all this sand!” Eronen says. “It’s important for us to make use of these immensely highly effective instruments.”
Adapting New Concepts to Current Infrastructure
By separating the duty of warmth storage from warmth technology and distribution, Polar Night time Vitality has made its system extra environment friendly and adaptable. There’s nice potential for retrofitting their sand-filled warmth storage and switch methods into present infrastructure (Determine 7). Tampere, an inland Finnish industrial metropolis of practically 250,000 folks, is a perfect testing floor for this new know-how. “Tampere, like many European cities, already has a district heating system that circulates water throughout whole neighborhoods,” says Eronen. “That allows us to modify many buildings to a renewable warmth supply shortly,” he says. Polar Night time Vitality’s pilot plant in Tampere may faucet into energy from the prevailing electrical grid, together with electrical energy generated by new photo voltaic panels. Dependable thermal storage permits town to generate or buy energy when it’s most reasonably priced after which distribute warmth when it’s wanted most.
Determine 7. A part of the warmth switch system put in by Polar Night time Vitality in Tampere, Finland. The vertical pipes at left are a part of the warmth exchanger, whereas the resistive heater parts are wrapped in white insulation at proper. Between these elements is the air-circulating radial blower.
As we speak: Finland; Tomorrow: The World
Because the Tampere system started operation in the course of the winter of 2020–2021, the Polar Night time Vitality crew has been gathering knowledge to match to their fashions. “Our simulations have confirmed to be very correct, which is encouraging,” Eronen says. And because the Polar Night time Vitality crew continues to develop their concepts domestically, they’re aiming to behave globally as effectively. The identical know-how that warms Finland’s lengthy, chilly nights may present higher power administration choices to the remainder of the world. Inexpensive thermal storage may assist industries and cities seize warmth that’s at the moment wasted, in addition to stability the inconsistencies in wind and solar energy output. However whereas Polar Night time Vitality is keen to work straight with potential prospects, they notice that the challenges forward are too large for them to sort out alone.
Tommi Eronen, CEO of Polar Night time Vitality.
“We wish to license this know-how. When you function an influence plant, please contact us,” Eronen says with fun. On a extra critical be aware, he provides, “We now have to get away from all types of combustion, even biomass. We have to defend and restore forests to allow them to maintain eradicating carbon from the air. As a result of local weather change is occurring so quick, we would like our concepts to unfold as shortly as doable.”
Reference
Statistics Finland, “Over one-half of Finland’s electrical energy was produced with renewable power sources in 2020”, November 2021.
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