Firebrick systems powered by renewable energy could be used for up to 90% of industrial process heat applications, the Stanford study says. Meeting that demand in the U.S. would require firebrick system capacity of 2.6 TWh, with a peak discharge rate of 170 GW.
The main advantage of using what is basically dirt is that it’s dirt cheap. You need a metric fuckton of this stuff so the cheaper the material, the better. Also, molten metal is difficult to handle.
Fine, but given … everything, it seems like you could do some smaller system with channels in the bricks for conduction, it’s the hot air that bothers me, that’s not great to try to use for conducting energy everywhere, you get turbulent effects.
How else would you heat up a huge pile of bricks? This is for industrial applications or grid scale heating systems. They basically all use hot air.
They use hot air warmed by gas burners.
Since we’re using electricity here, and this was mentioned in the study linked elsewhere, they used ceramic heaters.