avernon · HackerTrans

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Hub and spoke is primarily used to fill large planes. If you have 10-20 passenger electric planes you'd land at some random county airport, eat a hamburger or a taco while the plane recharges, then get back on the same plane and finish the trip. So you'd have a layover like hub and spoke but all the concerns about missing connections go away.

avernon

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

Yes, I read the underlying paper a while back. It only looks at the very first step of a Dow-like process, before any electrochemistry happens. Instead of dumping hydroxide in a tank, they expose it to hydroxide in a serpentine flow path. When I was reading into this before calcium didn't seem to be too big of a problem for the Dow process because the calcium compounds are more soluble than magnesium hydroxide. They were actually adding more calcium with the lime. So their comparison may be to a different method than the Dow Process. It didn't seem particularly useful.

Then you neutralize the magnesium hydroxide with hydrochloric acid to make Magnesium chloride and do molten salt electrolysis on it to make pure magnesium and chlorine.

avernon

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

They mention that they are doing electrochemistry. A huge portion of historical magnesium production is from electrolysis, including the only operating plant in the US. Past methods have used lime to precipitate magnesium (Dow) or evaporation ponds to concentrate it (the current Utah plant). Probably the new thing they are doing is using something like Chlor-Alkali to make base that precipitates the magnesium instead of using lime. Then the electrolysis of molten magnesium salts would be similar to products of today. There is some chance they have improvements in these areas, but there are really only so many options. The job descriptions they've posted support this hypothesis.

Recently most magnesium comes from China. They mine ore, throw it in a coal-fired furnace along with some reducing agents, then collect pure magnesium vapor. This process is more labor and energy intensive, but has significantly less CAPEX. Works for China.

Chlor-alkali is more expensive than lime and the back-end electrolysis is more expensive than thermal reduction. So I'd be skeptical they are going to lower costs without some kind of CAPEX reducing magic for molten salt electrolysis.

avernon

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

In this case it is boil sodium, condense sodium to heat air, run air through turbine.

avernon

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

Quaise wants to use old coal plants. So yes if you can drill down super deep to hot enough temperatures.

avernon

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

Will your system be robust to changes in solar farm design? Like if the industry goes towards the Erthos model of installing panels on the ground without racking or trackers?

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