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Beijing Unveils Supercritical CO2 Turbine That Could Upend Power Tech
China has launched the world's first carbon dioxide–based power generator, using supercritical CO2 instead of steam to produce electricity with over 50% efficiency.
The system harnesses industrial waste heat—such as from steel plants—and needs no water or fuel, reducing maintenance and equipment complexity.
Compact and versatile, the technology could revolutionize carbon capture by using CO2 for profitable energy generation, potentially lowering emissions and storage costs.
China has launched a first-of-its-kind power generator that works with carbon dioxide instead of steam, like traditional generators in power plants. Perhaps more importantly, however, the new generator works with waste heat and boasts a much higher efficiency than existing ones at doing that. According to the company that designed it, the generator is the start of a new era, the South China Morning Post reported.
Normally, thermal power generators work in one of two ways, both relying on heat to turn a turbine. In coal power plants, the burning of coal heats up water until it vaporizes, the vapor then being directed to the turbines that generate electricity. In gas-fired power plants, the turbines are activated by the heat, generated from the compression of gas and its subsequent heating.
Unlike them, the SCMP reported, the new generator uses carbon dioxide in a supercritical state, meaning the compound is subjected to a certain pressure and a certain temperature, which makes it behave simultaneously like a gas and a liquid. The state is called supercritical, hence the whole generator is called a supercritical one. Conveniently, waste heat from sintering in steelmaking plants could reach as much as 700 degrees Celsius—so the inventors of the new generator connected it to one steel works, and to the grid. Even more conveniently, the supercritical state of CO2 does not, in fact, require this high of a temperature.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday November 30, @09:29PM
Careful now, don't underestimate China. There is an impulse to be scornful, belittling, and dismissive of rising powers, and the comments I've seen so far have that tone to them. Admittedly, the reporting is poor quality, making it impossible to figure how significant this particular advance is, or even if it is an advance. State propaganda requirements may have queered the article. On the other hand, translation from Chinese to English could have been bad, and mangled the meaning.
With the anti-educational and anti-intellectual MAGA movement in the US in power and doing all they can to shred US science and education, I seriously wonder if Chinese research is poised to surpass American research. I keep seeing stories of Chinese research. Just the other day was one about particle physics, in which a new detector in China is making the first measurements of its kind, helped by the particles emitted from two of their nuclear power plants. Public transportation in the US has been poor for decades. Not so in China. Could the first orbiters to Uranus and Neptune be Chinese, while MAGA dances on the graves of NASA and the Department of Education? On the stupid conspiracy theory front that scares MAGA is the the notion that China bioengineered COVID. Well, damn it, if MAGA is so afraid of that, why the heck don't they push for more biology and medical science in the US? Never mind, we know why. It's because MAGA is that stupid, and also disingenuous, quite willing to make noise about wacky conspiracies of all sorts as pretexts and justifications of their bigotry that is so central to their personalities and thinking, such as it is. The enemies and rivals of the US must be pleased no end with MAGA.
Could a Chinese flavor of Linux surpass both Windows and MacOS? A mainland Chinese takeover of Taiwan could really pinch Western science and tech, what with so many of our chips being made there. There's been some awareness of that, and maybe, enough has been done that if Taiwan is cut off the West will have alternatives.