Some types of fusion can bypass steam generation and use what’s creatively called Direct Energy Conversion. If the fusion products are charged particles they can be passed through a magnetic field to separate them based on charge and collected onto plates. When you look at the electric potential between the plates you’ve effectively created a voltage, no steam necessary. It’s also theoretically possible to do the same with some types of fission products too.
There’s a whole bunch of mechanisms, largely depending on the fusion architecture and the atoms being fused. For tokamak reactors the circular nature lends itself well to what you describe, though usually it’s energy being imparted into the ions to keep them contained and away from the walls. In the ‘standard’ deuterium-tritium fusion model (the easiest to perform) fusion produces a helium nucleus and a neutron, where the neutron gets most of the energy. Since a neutron can’t be contained by magnets it impacts the chamber walls. This heat is wicked away by, you guessed it, cooling water which turns into steam. In order to use a direct energy conversion strategy you need a fusion reaction that produces no neutrons, but we’re not there yet.
I like piezoelectrics and kinetic generators. The only two methods of generating electricity I know of that don’t involve steam other than solar panels.
At least, I think they’re different… Is a standard copper wire+magnet generator pizeoelectric? Or is it simply the operation is similar in that you generate electricity from moving things together? Like the difference between tiny little things in your shirt that generate electricity as you move around vs those flash lights you shake to charge.
Piezoelectric effect is when you vibrate certain crystals and they give off electricity. It’s also reversible. You can feed them electricity to generate sound. The beep-boop sound from small electronic devices is usually from a piezo speaker, because they’re dirt cheap.
You don’t get significant amounts of power out of it, though.
Also photovoltaic is reversible as well! Put light in get current out, put current in, get light out. But the diodes that get good light for the currents we use are shit for generating the current we like from the light we have and vice versa. Also! Most diodes are these types! That’s why we make their casing black, otherwise the light will interfere with computation!
Yeah. The one thing I ever saw that has me excited for a product that could exist, is that they can power a simple OLED display. And since an OLED display can be paper thin, they could put one in a t-shirt and you could have an animated design on your shirt instead of just a static picture. And that would be dope.
Of course, you’d need more than just the display, and i don’t think the little generators that can be sewn into a shirt would be enough to power the computing device that would be necessary to drive the animation for the display.
my personal experience with this is that I was talking medication that made me nauseaus. Did I learn to not smoke when nauseaus? No, but I got a bucket now
Water and steam just too goddamn convenient. Super high latent heat so it can move a ton of energy with a quick phase change, works at reasonable pressures and temperatures, stays liquid all the time when you want it to so pumps work, and it’s so readily available as to be damn near free. Super cool!
also almost non-corrosive, non-toxic, doesn’t damage ozone layer, zero global warming potential, non-flammable etc (lots of organic rankine cycle fluids fail one or more of these. tradeoff is utilization of lower temperature sources)
Very strong GWP, but it does this cool thing where it condenses when it hits colder air and falls back to the ground in liquid state, thus removing itself from the atmosphere…
Solar photovoltaic is the only one i can think of that isn’t just a fancy way to make steam
EDIT
ok let’s clarify to say a method that isn’t related to movement of a fluid that spins a turbine. So not windmills (air is a fluid), not hydro, not geothermal, etc.
Yeah but those heat engines don’t rely on spinning things inside a magnetic field. Heat on one side, less heat on the other side, and you have current. No motors.
But not all electricity generation is based on boiling water. Wind, hydro and tidal don’t need to generate large amounts of heat to make steam that spins a turbine, they just use natural movement to do so.
On a serious note: that’s exactly what we’re doing with lighters. At least some of them use piezo elements and not the sparkly wheel thingy to ignite the gas. And it’s real fun to zap yourself with it.
There were talks of using them in sidewalks, but it doesn’t really make much sense really. Piezo almost always only works as energy recovery, which isn’t nothing but you will need the infrastructure which also isn’t nothing.
Even if we used piezo, the movement of the hammer would still have to come from some power source, which would still be the same sources like moving steam, water, or wind.
it’s a special case there, because for frequencies in question mechanical quartz resonator has much higher Q than any electrical resonator you can practically build. that is, mechanical properties of piezo crystal stabilize voltage oscillations
Squeezing can be converter to electricity with pizeo electric. Heat difference can be converted into electric directly with peltier devices. Both of these are very inefficient ways to make electricy.
Aerokinetics/hydrokinetics as well. With steam, we’re creating the source fluid that turns the turbines to make electricity. Those source fluids can also exist as wind/tides/rivers naturally.
The peltier effect can be used to generate electricity from a thermal gradient. It’s not very efficient, though. There’s a reason mechanical means of electrical production predominate.
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