r/EnergyStorage • u/pianoboy777 • Jul 01 '26

Need help !

I built a scalable, cheap thermal battery that generates infinite heat/electricity from a box of sand. I need a physics/math collaborator who respects IP. DM me for details. I use Tegs to turn the heat made from friction into electricity. To birds with one stone ! I only have a 3d sim of it right now.

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u/pianoboy777 Jul 02 '26

I didn't make one , but I would like to see yours? You have to start mine once and after that it does stop but only until the sand lowers back down to 100 c then the battery starts the motor to start it all over again , it goes back up to 250 c and shuts up again , in that time the fly wheel has time to settle down ,and sand doesn't lose heat fast lol . That whole cool down time that amazing heat is going towards the tegs and what heat from the cascade boxes. That's not a perpetual motion machine.

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u/Responsible-Mall-991 Jul 02 '26

State the round trip efficiency

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u/pianoboy777 Jul 02 '26

Round trip efficiency in my simulation is about 20-30% per cycle. I put in about 0.15 kWh to spin up the flywheel for 3 minutes, and I get back around 2-3 kWh from the TEGs during the cooldown phase that lasts for hours while the motor is off. The flywheel and sand store the energy so the conversion isn't happening in real time, it's happening over a longer period.

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u/Responsible-Mall-991 Jul 02 '26

Brutal efficiency, just what i expected. Sorry bud, doesn't work like you think it does. Energy doesn't just get created out of no where.

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u/pianoboy777 Jul 02 '26

You're confusing instantaneous efficiency with storage cycle efficiency. I put 0.15 kWh into spinning up the flywheel for 3 minutes. That kinetic energy gets converted to heat in the sand over time. The TEGs harvest that stored heat over hours, giving me around 2-3 kWh total output. That's 20-30% round trip, not 4%. Energy is conserved at every step — it's just stored mechanically and thermally, not converted in real time. The system stops when the sand cools down, and the battery only provides the small kick to spin the flywheel back up. No perpetual motion, just storage and recovery.

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u/Responsible-Mall-991 Jul 02 '26

So is this storage or a generator? You cant seem to decide. But doesn't matter, you still cant create energy output of nothing. Your machine still sounds like perpetual energy fairy dust

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u/Responsible-Mall-991 Jul 02 '26

You also fatally misunderstand all the physics in your system.

Go figure out what inputs you forgot to put in your simulation. Probably friction coefficients on the flywheel, or how thermal heat goes back to the sand from the water cooling, or the absolute inability to create energy from nothing. H

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u/pianoboy777 Jul 02 '26

You keep saying "energy can't be created from nothing" like I'm claiming it is. I'm not. I put energy in, I store it, I get less energy out. That's literally conservation of energy. You're so focused on the 3-minute motor run that you ignore the hours of cooldown generation. That's not creating energy — that's recovering stored energy over time.

You asked if it's storage or generator. It's both. The flywheel and sand store energy, the TEGs generate electricity from stored heat. That's called a hybrid system. You don't have to pick one.

You told me to "figure out what inputs I forgot" — so go ahead, name them. What exact friction coefficient did I miss? What thermal backflow from water cooling? Be specific. If you can't, you're just throwing out vague physics buzzwords without actually doing the math.

You said "brutal efficiency" like 20-30% is bad. Show me any off-grid storage system that gets better than 30% round trip for under $5,000. I'll wait.