Since the last update, I’ve been working on the insulation blanket. My method of spot welding 6 mil poly with a modified soldering iron turned out to be way too slow / hard to control the quality. A robot could probably make it work but I have trouble getting the timing by hand. I build a new poly welder which seems to work in tests, I just have to bring it to the hall where I’m building the blanket (I needed a big clean space with no wind so outside wasn’t going to work.) This new welder is still a spot welder, but it makes a 150 mm weld when pressed for 5 sec, so it goes much quicker. 3 amps seems to be the sweet spot for a good weld that doesn’t cut through.
In other musings, carbon capture will be necessary in the future and the simplest was to do this is burn biomass, collect the exhaust, and sequester that CO2. Or you can make biochar, which would be about half as effective (still releasing some CO2) but it’s easier to sequester biochar than gaseous CO2. Our previous work on ATS (algal turf scrubbers) could be a way to do this without taking land away from farming or wilderness preserves. The algal turf grows fast, 3-10 times faster at making biomass than a forest or cropland. It can be harvested and collected in a wet slurry pretty easily. Dewatering it is hard, but if the slurry is aerobically digested, there is no need for dewatering. The biomethane can then be collected and stored. If the power plant is integrated with an air liquification plant, liquid oxygen can be made from air when renewable power is cheap. Then when electricity is needed (calm dark days) the power plant can burn liquid oxygen and biomethane which will produce an exhaust of pure water and CO2 for sequestering. I calculated that to convert all the worlds natural gas to biomethane from ATS you’d need about an area of ocean the size of New Zealand… or maybe 2 New Zealands depending on how productive you could get your ATS. But for the moment, we’ll continue with the greenhouse project. One thing at a time.
Sun Aquasystems 