Hello, I have thought of something that would improve solar energy collection but I do not have the skills to calculate this or see the (very possible) flaws in it. Thanks in advance. AskEngineers

Sorry for talking down to you but I wrote this trying to explain it to laymen....which is not going well...

You take your solar collector, photo electric cells in colder areas, focussed mirrors in hotter areas.

Then You take a heat pump...you what a heat pump is? it is basically an inside out refrigerator using air as the gas to be compressed....If you compress air, it will get hot....so you will lead that heat via some great heat conductor towards your heat storage tank. This tank will be filled with something that needs a large amount of energy to turn from a solid into a liquid..so you can store a large amount of energy without raising the temperature of it....Water is like that (the energy to turn solid water into liquid water is enough to heat that same water to 50 ish degrees C) but probably at a higher temperature (some help from some chemically smart person could be useful here,) . By compressing this air even more and letting the heat go into the heat storage, you will eventually get to liquid air. You store this in a pressurised tank (like a big diving tank)..

So what do you have by now? Heat storage and Cold storage...all you need is something to turn it into electrical energy when you want it to....

You are gonna need a Stirling engine for that, they can use the difference in temperature to work the bigger the difference in temperature, the more bang for your buck...

You could just use the liquid air tank and the heat storage to react against each other to give you electrical energy at any time you want.

Daytime operation is different from night time operation...and this works even better in a place like a desert with a high daily amplitude ....

Right....Day-mode You use the cold storage (liquid air will turn into cold.if you let it evaporate..) against the high ambient temperature...creating an extra difference in temperature..aka more electricity while not even using your heat storage tank...you even top that one up with compressed high temperature air giving you even more heat to use during the night time

Night time-mode

You have cold ambient air and a full heat storagetank.....so your Stirling engine starts to operate again..this time with your hot storage against the cold ambient temperature....again electricity galore....and you get to fill your liquid air storage again with the cold outside air.

Rinse and repeat...

I already had a bit of an idea a couple of years ago but I got sparked again by looking at this TED-talk, it is very close to what I am suggesting but she wants to store energy as pressure.. I think turning pressurized air into cold would even be a better option. I posted it at the TED site, her companies site and even on several other sub reddits. No useful answers yet so here we are...

Thanks in advance...

Submitted January 25, 2017 at 02:38AM by matruschkasized http://ift.tt/2jWAXzI AskEngineers