Articles to 2014-12-07

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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

I’m not much impressed by the editorial quality of Elsevier’s journal Applied Energy, and with Elsevier it’s not the only one. There are several jarring occurrences of "MW/h" in Pearre et al. interspersed with the correct "MWh". (I grudgingly accept the American convention of two fraction bars in one term, as in "$/MW/h", but it has to be done consistently.) Is it not time to strike Elsevier off the list of reputable publishers?

Without doubt, Raman et al.’s engineering achievement is no mean feat and has extended the realm of the possible considerably. Nonetheless all they really offer is cooling at or to the ambient air temperature, the same thing an open window and a bit of a draft will also achieve. Also the most oppressive heat is that at high humidity and typically overcast skies, not the dry heat under a very clear sky they require for their radiation sink. As to hot surfaces, a bit of shadow and insulation is the cheaper solution by far. So a nice gimmick without an application in sight.

Yang et al.’s generator may be quite clever, but their (unstated) power density in W/kg for the whole apparatus has to be tiny. As the cost per kg of machinery has a rather inflexible lower limit and a limited life time, this means the cost can’t be low either. That’s the reason, why efficiency counts even for free energy sources, and I doubt this will ever go beyond their proof of concept. Another nice gimmick, but that’s where it ends.

About Rosenberg & Nadel and their ritual pounding I stand with Conard and find them high in speculation and low in proof.

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