April 6, 2022
Brilliant example of Innovation. Moving our energy grids away from fossil fuel comes with many challenges, among them the storage of energy at the yearly/seasonal scale. There are several existing solutions already developed, based on different principles. But pushing these solutions further is raising other, new challenges: using more rare materials creates further environmental damage and generate politico-economic incidents. Some tech may be dangerous at large scale, or too costly, or have a too large footprint.
These researchers came up with a solution based on safe and simple (on paper&bench - so far) principles.
This story instantly reminded me of TRIZ. Obviously the use of a phase change is principle #36.
I haven’t participated into a TRIZ project in almost 20 years (actually I’m just realizing I have never heard of it being used around in Australia?). I have always been impressed by the deep research background behind it. The laws of technical systems evolution are very intriguing - like everytime the concepts discovered by Darwin are applied to other objects than biological life.
I need to deep-dive again to check how this example could be mapped accurately to a TRIZ process.