 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Hey, hello, and welcome to Stand the Energy Man on Statehood Day here in Hawaii. It was 60 years ago this month that Stand the Energy Man rolled into Waikiki and made Hawaii home. So this is a special, special week for me. Anyway, we're glad to be here today talking about energy and a topic that actually is kind of mysterious to a lot of folks. And I convinced Brian Willbins from Burns and Mack that we should probably spend a little bit of time talking about how you turn heat into air conditioning because it just seems like a magical sort of system. So we're going to talk about how to do basic air conditioning first, and then we'll talk about some more advanced stuff where you actually take heat and turn it into cold. To start off with though, Ryan and I do work together on an Air Force project out at Hickam, and I'd like to show a quick video. I'm going to bring this video in from time to time and get a lot of visibility on it because I think it's a great intro to renewable energy microgrids, which we firmly believe is the future, especially here in Hawaii. We're already committed to 100% renewable energy by 2045 on the grid and also reducing our transportation fossil fuels in similar timeframe as the grid. So anyway, if we can roll the video, we'll talk about some microgrids. There are over 300 million people in our country and the vast majority rely on large scale centralized power grids for their energy. But the infrastructure is aging and it is vulnerable. Natural disasters, cyber attacks and other threats can leave large swaths of the country without power. Fortunately, there is an alternative. A renewable energy microgrid represents a different path for the future. Renewable microgrids generate power from sources like solar, wind, hydrogen, waste to energy and geothermal. That power can be stored within the localized system using technologies such as advanced batteries, hydrogen, flywheels, pumped hydro and others. These microgrids can provide reliable and efficient energy transmission, especially to critical facilities like hospitals, airports and military bases. Unlike our current large scale systems, microgrids eliminate single points of failure and are therefore more resilient to disasters, threats and power outages. Our current energy infrastructure loses a lot of money. Grid outages cost up to $33 billion annually. They are expensive to build, expand and maintain. And they're inefficient, losing more than half of the initial energy to factors such as line loss, spending reserves and theft. Microgrids solve these issues and greatly reduce transmission loss and maximize efficiency. They also reduce carbon emissions and eliminate imported fuel costs, keeping money within our local economy and even create new local industries and jobs based on clean renewable energy. Our energy grid was built over 100 years ago. When energy needs were simple with the increased complexities of energy demands, power sources and transportation. Now our old grid struggled to keep up. We required new ways to generate, store and deliver energy. Renewable energy microgrids are a potential long term solution that will provide safe, clean, reliable and efficient energy for generations to come. So that's a little glimpse of what Ryan Woobins and his shop and our shop work on. And the real takeaway from that is microgrids are not common and there's actually quite a few definitions about what a microgrid is out there. But what makes what we're doing so valuable and unique is that when you get to a certain penetration level of intermittent renewable like wind and solar that's not always there, clouds come over, wind stops blowing, it turns into nighttime. You need to have energy storage and the balance of batteries to other energy storage in your mix on a renewable microgrid is really a lot trickier than most people think. It's a challenge that really no major utility has conquered yet. So we're trying to do it on a smaller scale and hopefully inform the larger utilities, some of the possibilities they have to maybe sector up their grids and have dispatchable power based on renewable energy microgrids. So Ryan thanks for being on the show today and talking about some stuff that I know that I don't truly understand and that's air conditioning. It's as a fine arts major. It's all a mystery to me. I just throw the switch and it goes but it's always intrigued me because I've heard as I talk to some of the companies that we work with, some of the contractors that we have this waste heat and we can use it to heat buildings, we can use it to do this, and we can do air conditioning with it and I go, really? How do you make air conditioning out of heat? It's just like counterintuitive to me, I just don't get it. So I actually thought today what we could do is we could talk about basic air conditioning first because it's a pretty straightforward concept but still one that's hard to get your head around because we think of water as a fluid and it boils at 200 something degrees and it freezes at 32 degrees and we're familiar with that cycle and that doesn't seem to do much for you in air conditioning cycle but when you change that fluid to a fluid or an element that it does boil at a much lower temperature and it does turn into a gas at a temperature close to what we have as ambient here, you can actually do some really cool stuff with it so maybe you can help me explain that so we've got to I'll give you a shot to just start talking about it then we'll bring up a graphic and then we'll run through that graphic and call it up whenever you want to. So we've talked micro grids a number of times and that's that's fun I can talk about that all day it's great I think you're gonna test my electrical knowledge today. Well we're gonna stretch out, I'm certain by the end of the period for sure. Electrical engineering to the AC world but they're related and that's why that's why we talk about it too the micro grids that their best are using all their resources they can when we talk about waste heat even a generator or our common electrical use as I'm producing power I'm producing heat and I'm taking it from somewhere else just as your car engine gets hot that that's heat wasted by that fuel because it wasn't turning the wheel it was pumping out heat instead something else got hot and then it comes from somewhere. A micro grid when it's done really well to become really efficient will take that heat and use it somewhere else I think we've talked about you know maybe maybe using heat in Alaska to heat your building and it's not as useful here in Hawaii. Well that's a real simple transition you take the heat and push it to someplace where you need heat exactly that's pretty straightforward yep so that one's easy that one's easy now we're a little bit tougher because we're trying to use heat and I like your name was it make heat cool again it's always been rather cool being chemistry but yeah so it is possible let's let's scale back and talk about conventional air conditioning first and and the general premise in chemistry that that all of these are going to stem off of is that when water right now water when a liquid transforms evaporates into a gas it's taking heat with it it's if you if you think about a water droplet that's sitting on on your skin maybe after you get out of the water or out of the shower and then you start to feel cool what's happening is those droplets of water they're grabbing the heat that's around them and jumping up and becoming gas when you when you take that energy when you absorb that heat and switch to gas that energy has to come from somewhere there's always an equilibrium amount of energy if you within the universe as we've talked before well first law from a dynamics right energy is either created or destroyed it just changes form yep so as you take heat and become a gas cool is somewhere else and that's where it came from so when you get out of the water the skin has all of our even as you sweat and you start evaporating you start to feel cool that is the basic premise of what we're going to talk about with air conditioning today so it's the same idea if you can keep rolling back to that but we're gonna add some additional steps because we don't have we're gonna start with heat it's not gonna be quite the same can't just throw water on a hot pipe and think that's gonna make us cool air it is not quite that simple so so suffice it to say that the terms heat and cold are relative I mean right now we're at 75 degrees or 72 degrees here in the studio and it's comfortable and and everything feels nice and but if it was 32 degrees we'd feel cold and and water would be freezing and things and if it was 110 degrees we'd be sweating and it'd be hot but with different chemicals or different elements there's different boiling points and you know like steel is solid at room temperature at this temperature but you heat it to 2,500 degrees and now it's maybe liquid and liquefies and probably if you get it to 8,000 degrees and vaporizes and turns into a gas but it takes a lot of energy to get it there but I actually set it on the table and it melts so the idea of temperature is relative and different chemicals are different and different elements we can exploit that by putting them into closed systems and applying pressure or releasing pressure or applying heat or applying cold so is that is that pretty fair it absolutely is so we can change the properties of the chemical or we can change the the pressure around it so water boiling at 100 is is only true at one atmospheric pressure we go in much higher in the mountain ranges we'll start to see that that boiling point drop drop so we got a lot of variables we get a play with and we'll go and attack chemistry and use that to our advantage well one thing we just always will talk about and even on the show today is that energy doesn't come free we need to realize that that is we're creating heat we're taking cool from somewhere else vice versa but also there's times where we're inputting energy so I think we could start and look at just your window AC unit okay and talk about that process and how that goes through and where that energy input is okay it's not a one for one and we just don't get free cool air from from hot air okay we'll throw the graphic up now we'll talk to the graphic a little bit and and this is basically a simple window air conditioner unit in a real basic closed loop form so why don't you talk about those different components and what you're doing and what's happening so you look at this picture and your room where you're sitting would be considered on the left side which would be good as that's the cool air and then that that the big side of the air conditioner sitting on the right side where the heat is going outside the window yep consider the blue is actually the whole loop would be the the chemical that we're playing with here which is a chemical that has a low boiling point that's that's the key to how this is going to work without really a bunch of heavy industrial components here so something like free on or something to use a refrigerant yep yep free on is the best one that we realized right away that is that is cheap readily available and has that low boiling point I've heard I think the term that I had most recently heard to free on is that it murders the ozone layer so that's why we we've gone to some other different coolants but it very good at having a very low boiling point okay so what happens is we let's start with a cooler section right now basically this is just a pipe a radiator of pipes in your house that we're pushing a low boiling point liquid through which like the free on what that does it's absorbing though the warmer air within your room and it starts boiling it evaporates and directly into the gas is that low the temperature I don't know the actual temperature for free on but it's considerably low as it boils or it jumps to gas which said earlier it's taking heat with it and it behind it it leaves cool the cooler temperature that cool temperature is sitting on the outside of that radiator on the outside of the pipe so behind that cool air radiator you have on on the right side of it there'd be a fan and it's just gonna blow pushing across across the pipes and that cools the air because the pipes are cool so that that evaporator at the bottom is basically kind of a valve that only lets so much of the liquid through and there's pressure on the on the on the hot side and less pressure on the blue side though and and it's like when you spray a can of paint or something and the can starts to get cold as the pressure is released the can starts to get colder and colder to your hand yep because it's pulling it's pulling heat yep and it's it feels cold to your hand it's it's got a rapid expansion to it as well with the with the volume so that's exactly the same it's as the air cell can is what's happening on the bottom side the reason the pressure was so high on the other side of that evaporator if we continue to up to our compressor we're at the top here we have this boiling free on it's hot at this point and we need to get back into reusing this we want to take that heat and get rid of it so we can go reuse that that free on on the bottom side of our diagram the it's not easy just just getting rid of heat quickly so what we do here is we add the compressor and we play with thermodynamics by increasing the pressure very very fast we can actually force the the free on back down into a liquid form and which is actually rather clever it takes some of the heat out by that point and then we're we'll shove that back through another radiator and blow the coils across that so that he gets pushed out we're stripping it off with the fan and we're still at a much higher pressure but the liquid is now cooled down as as we push that out into the air yeah because the relative air temperature outside is still cooler than that free on when it's when it's in the liquid form yeah that's the neat neat component about free on that's for that relativity piece came in but we're going to take a quick break now we'll be right back with Ron Wolbins and get into the real mysterious part about how this air conditioning system works a little bit more and maybe even getting into exchanging heat for cool hello I'm Dave Stevens host of the cyber underground this is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just going to scare you out of your mind so come join us every week here on think tech Hawaii calm 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons and then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube just look up the cyber underground on YouTube all our shows will show up and please follow us we're always giving you current relevant information to protect you keeping you safe hello and welcome back to stand the energy man here on admissions day in Honolulu Hawaii congratulations to the citizens of Hawaii for was it 1959 we became a state so that's awesome we've made it so far hopefully we can keep it together for a few more years at any rate we're talking air conditioning with Ryan Wolbins from Bernstein McDonald and you know we we're gonna throw that graphic up again for just a few more seconds and we'll talk a little bit more about it this is a closed system loop very much like a window air conditioner and I want to compare it to some of the experiences we have when we when we deal with hydrogen because these same principles even though we're not dealing with freon we're dealing with hydrogen it's the same principles apply when I when I take hydrogen out of my station and pump it into a car under pressure it heats the cars tank up just like on the right side is this graphic and when I push the the or pull the hydrogen out of my storage tanks it looks like the left side because we're dropping the pressure and it's cooling down it's it's pulling heat out and cooling itself down so this is a universal principle with virtually all elements it's just different elements have different temperatures at which they boil and boil off into gas or turn into a liquid or turn into a solid so the trick with air conditioning is picking the right kind of fluid or the right element to throw in this loop that keeps that boiling point real close to what we're comfortable with 70 something degrees maybe Fahrenheit and run it through this cycle pressurize it on one side it gets really hot but not as hot as but it's hotter than what we have for ambient temperature and running it through that radiator or heat exchanger on the right cools it back down a little bit run it through that that squeeze valve called evaporator on the bottom and it actually when the pressure is released off on the left side it's it starts to chill out again and then we blow that cold air into the room and take the a little bit warmer gas now and put it back in the compressor and keep it going through the cycle so this is a really basic air conditioning system and it's really pretty easy for even a guy like me to follow but we're going to go a step up here and I don't have a graphic for it I actually looked for one but even the graphic was too complicated for me to put on the screen where I thought we could explain it and it was too hard to draw but it has the same basic principles except that they're they're more involved there's there's more loops than just a single loop there's actually a couple loops and a couple stages to it but you can actually use the hot bleed air or air that's waist heat from another process like a big engine or something and you can use that heat to do similar work that the compressor does in other words to get that side back into a gas you can heat it up and and and get the conversions to go between gas and and liquid again so Ryan I'll let you try and take it from there I know that you're an electrical engineer not a mechanical engineer but you're way smarter than me so I'll let you lead the discussion here yeah we'll let the the level of science try and kick in and see what we can get out right so what we're talking about now is is is flipping from adding that compressor previously that compressor was our external energy that we were adding into the electricity we had to put in there right to get that that cooling or that that compression effect back on to the the fray on so that we could push it back through and get it back into the liquid form what we'll use now instead of using the electrical compressor we're gonna add a second stage on so we're gonna have like two loops of cooling that go on here and in the end we will take our hot air and hot medium and and and come back out with like a chilled water or something we could use for our conditioning it should be known that this is rather old technology but it's really only effective at a much larger scale you're gonna see see this on a house I think there are even RVs that they use this because some of their their motor heat is so high that they can they can handle this this type of loop but maybe one day the technology will change and we can have something like this use more on yeah not to not to go too far off track but I rented an RV once on the mainland or in Alaska and made a trip and the refrigerator ran off of propane I mean the coolant in the refrigerator was the propane so you could burn the propane on the stove and they also use the propane as a refrigerant in that same site type of cycle and it actually was a very cheap way to run the refrigerator yep and appliances are sold that way so your refrigerator the one we have here the one that you saw in Alaska is the same idea of what's in your window unit it's just we put in a box and we turn the temperature down even more right insulated better than we insulated our single wall house here so an absorption absorption chiller the idea is we have a hot product and we're gonna use a medium most commonly used a lithium bromide I think that's essentially salt water in a way and what we'll do is we'll take this lithium bromide and we're gonna run it into our hot water and the lithium bromide at this time is considered a weak solution so it's got a lot of water in it too as we run it through that I'm getting very hot what will happen is that the lithium bromide will split off because the water is going to evaporate because we're dealing with really hot at this point a high pressure 700 degree temperatures so we're driving out the water we're gonna set it on to another side of our tank we're gonna drive down this this at this point strong lithium bromide solution and we're all at a very high pressure we'll send the lithium bromide off and we'll take the water on the other side as it is already evaporated and we're gonna try and cool it to where we can start using that really that hot that steamy air I'm gonna take a peek at another diagram here okay to try and try and cheat a little bit okay so this this this water this hot water is is dealt with on this high pressure side we had a cool water loop tank that we're here we're gonna have to talk about a little bit but that that was allowing us to condense the water back to where we could use it and run it back through our low pressure system loop what happened with the sodium bromide now let's follow that back down a little bit and we're taking that through a heat exchanger that's gonna drop its temperature a little bit and push that through a low pressure tank now that we changed the pressure that's going to expand and cool as well okay so we're cooling on that side which created the cool water that we used up above that I said we were just gonna kind of magically appear with but what's happening in this low pressure tank now is we are creating a cooling effect on this bottom side because we had that expansion on the low pressure side on the other side of the tank where we are doing the same thing where we are pushing water back down over our what which will then be our cool side and having that a separate loop it's the it's a separate loop you know so now this water side which was the condensing and evaporated side is very similar to what we are showing before that's where you're going to expand and you're instead of blowing air across it these are typically coils that your spraying water showering water like a children unit yep so this this low pressure tank is is really actually very cool in temperature and the sodium bromide is doing something really cool where it's taking on a lot of it's taking on water very fast because it likes to take on water it doesn't like to sit in its in its what I say the heavy concentrated form very much so it's gonna accelerate the water being pulled into it which helps move everything through the system so it's I probably butchered that in a few ways but we're playing with thermodynamics in two different stages we're playing with pressures in addition to the temperatures and we're forcing one to separate another and in that form we can essentially do what we did on the other format but we weren't using an actual compressor that time we're using the case so let me ask you some questions and maybe that'll help everybody kind of see it these are two separate loops they don't they don't cross over but they go through a common area where there's heat exchange in that process right you have two separate loops going through the sun on the one side you've got the bromide lithium bromide solution but on the other side you have it a different element running through that loop right so you're kind of using two boiling point two different kind of boiling points to to get that real hot lithium side cool to a level and then another system that takes it the next step and takes it for more of an ambient temperature into the refrigeration piece is that a fairly good comparison there are two separate loops going like this but when we get them back to the tanks they they they intermix and that's where the magic is happening when we're on our upper high pressure tank we're bringing in and pouring across a a low concentrated lithium bromide with water so we are mixed on this loop that's coming in on the on the other side as we get it hot that's where we we separate out into two different loops again because we're on one side of the tank it's just a barrier sitting in the middle of the tank and we're gonna let the hot water go to one side we're gonna let the lithium bromide just fall down that that's as simple as that there's we're not not sitting in there separating by any mechanical device and then they're gonna split back out and we'll use them we're crossing every which way because I want to get my water back on to the other side of the low pressure tank and we're doing the same thing down here on the low pressure side okay so we had hot and we did some magic and we bring it down here and we we flipped up the pressure and the temperature again on the low pressure side and we drive out cold air our cold water okay well I hope that's really clear to everybody it's still a little bit of a mystery to me but I think I understand a little bit better and if nothing else we're gonna encourage a bunch of folks to go be chemical engineers and and really learn about how to do this stuff and we'll get some mechanical engineers and maybe maybe you can bring one of your mechanical engineers next time they will I need to bug through the grill we could go through a system a neat place to do this is in a co-gen unit where you use a fuel whether it's natural gas something generate a lot of steam I'm gonna drive that steam through a turbine that generates electricity that's where I start to have fun I'm gonna give the steam to somebody else it's just got cooler and they're gonna use it for boiling products or water maybe you're a factory that needs to boil some stuff but I still got this leftover heat now I can drive that through you and maybe a slower speed turbine and get some more energy out of it and then go back through my I still got enough heat at the bottom at the end of the day to run through an absorption shiller so I just got electrical power I got heat I got maybe a little bit more electrical power and cooling all out of one system that's awesome so that's key kind of the key to the whole reason we're talking about this is it goes back to sustainability taking that energy which is a finite just changes form kind of a commodity and use it as best we can the best way in the best form we can whether it's electricity or heat or cold or steam for expansion generation compression so the same principle that you see in air conditioning and these absorption shiller units is really actually similar to steam engines and Rankin cycle and the other temperature thermal kind of engines that give you mechanical power out of different pressures and different temperatures and boiling point of different chemicals it's really fascinating I wish I was back in high school again and can start my chemistry career all over and learn this a lot better but I hope you find it interesting we'll try and do some more clarification later but until next Friday I want to thank you for joining us thanks for being with Robert and Cindy here in the studio and thanks to Ryan Williams from earns and Mack for helping us out until next week Allah see you next week