The world’s first commercial supercritical carbon dioxide power generator has begun operation in Southwest China’s Guizhou Province. It is viewed as a milestone in changing the power generation mode relying on steam for more than a century. China calls the project “Chaotan-1.” CGTN’s Zheng Yibing speaks to experts from Nuclear Power Institute of China about it.
Why is this such a big deal? Because traditional power generation relies on steam driven turbines, even in nuclear reactors. The thermodynamic losses in the process are substantial and a major barrier to more efficient power generation. With superheated CO2 as the medium, the efficiency of the energy conversion can be greatly increased and losses reduced.
This is actually a great achievement. It’s super hard to overcome steam.
Next can we overcome the turbine? We got like what? Solar? And the a dozen ways of turning a damn turbine.
Scientific breakthroughs are cool and all but engineering breakthroughs are awesome. Like people have known about possibility and benefits of doing this for decades they just didn’t do it… until now.
Progress that actually benefits people and not just the bottom line of corporations is cool.
once china gets their new chip fabs going: in x more years i wouldn’t be surprised if they start doing MHD turbines. they’ll have the experience from the molten salt reactors at that point too
but why a supercritical CO2 liquid, why not a supercritical CO2 gas
It’s both and neither. That’s what supercritical means.
oh i guess that makes sense then, I just googled sCO2 and it was characterized as a liquid
it’s really rude to call it a supercritical fluid if the whole point is that it loses the distinctions between gas and liquid >:(
In physics gases and liquids are both considered fluids.
I agree, the terminology can be confusing.
If you get the chance, you can look up what a supercritical transition looks like, because it’s really cool. I still remember to this day my first semester in uni one of the coolest demonstrations was seeing a fluid go supercritical, and you can really see the border between the liquid and the gas start to blur and eventually just disappear completely.
Just watched the Steve Mould video; very enlightening.
Steve Mould just did a neat video about supercritical fluids including actually physically showing some.
Good video.
Thank you for this!
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Is sCO2 more efficient as a heat transfer medium then Helium gas? I’m more familiar with Nuclear High Temperature Gas Reactors where He coolant is seen as a massive advancement from steam in both efficiency and safety.
This isn’t my area of expertise, but here’s a couple of papers that might answer your question:
Comparative Performance Analysis of Recuperative Helium and Supercritical CO2
SCO2 and CO2 as Working Fluids for Power Generation and Storage
My initial thoughts are that Helium is much lighter so maybe it requires a higher operating pressure to have the same efficiency, and the smaller molecule size could possibly lead to leakage issues? As i said, i’m not an expert.
Thank you!
Am a physicist who was educated at an institution with super conducting magnets.
Helium is so scarce at this point labs are moving away from it in favour of other methods. So regardless of it being technically better or not, co2 is everywhere and helium is rare.
Liquid helium keeps things cold but is (in some super conducting magnets anyway) often insulated by liquid nitrogen to prevent it from boiling off as quickly. At bare minimum the cost of helium would likely be prohibitive, ignoring everything else.
Thanks for the share - so many things here I didn’t even know was a thing.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
