michaelsuede
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Mar 21, 2011
- Messages
- 1,565
MS - what do you have to say about this? He was just waiting for the heat exchange unit, and let's be frank a heat exchanger can be made with just a few coils of copper tubing so I am amazed given his self claimed engineering prowess he couldn't build one himself. So what happened?
PeterWol62 - it appears your knowledge of his progress was almost completely wrong. He has had working heat generators for decades. Unless Mills lied when he made his claims 25 plus years ago? So what happened?
Mills discussed this in his lecture that I cited. The problem was achieving a power density that made it economically competitive.
Here's what Mills is quoted as saying back in 1991:
"...we have right now a cell running that is a commercial demonstration of this technology. "
ie. a prototype CIHT cell that was producing 10 watts (not kilowatts) of power.
"We're pushing right now ... we have a contract we're pursuing that will give us a one kilowatt -- a one thousand watt home heating unit within four months."
The contract never materialized. They were pursuing a contract, which didn't pan out because they weren't able to achieve adequate power density to make the unit economically competitive.
"We have the electrochemical power cell -- it is running. It has the capacity of putting out a thousand watts. And we are waiting for the heat exchanger unit to interface with that [power cell] and we will have a prototype of a home heating unit.'"
Mills is a little loose with the term "capacity" here. It wasn't putting out a 1000 watts. It had the potential to scale (capacity) to 1000 watts, but the 1000 watt prototype was never built.
The size and cost of the units were ultimately not competitive.
Consider you could buy a 1000 watt gas generator for a hundred bucks that burns 1 gal of fuel for 5 hours, using 1752 gallons over a year for 24/7 operation at 2 bucks a gallon, for $3500 a year in fuel costs.
For example, if a 1000 watt CIHT cell cost $35,000 to produce and install, that's like running a gas generator for 10 years anyways, and if the projected lifespan is 10 years, you may as well just buy the gas generator.
Of course, grid tied power is far cheaper than even a gas generator would be, so there was no point to going forward with a commercial variant of the CIHT cell.
I don't see anything untruthful about Mills previous statements. They are taken out of context and cited from disreputable sources. While the "capacity" issue may seem deceptive, it's also out of context so it's impossible to know what else may have accompanied that statement.
The current SunCell is achieving millions of watts of power in a space that's about the size of a coffee cup. This achievement totally destroys the power density issues that were holding back the previous generation from commercialization.
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