Professor Erich Kisi, one of the inventors of the block and now CEO of MGA Thermal, said his term were working on thermionic converters, which produce an electric power input from heat when they hit upon the idea to shift their work to energy storage.
“The [most important] ingredients for the bricks are the aluminium particles which provide the latent heat, that melting energy that we’re talking about,” Kisi told Reuters. “They will melt and solidify many thousands of times during the life of the block, but remain in position. They are held in position by graphite, in this case. We have other systems, but graphite is the main body.”
The inventors compared the process to heating a chocolate chip muffin in a microwave. The matrix is the cake component (holding the shape when heated and rapidly distributing heat) while the aluminium particles are the chocolate chips (melting and storing thermal energy through the solid to liquid phase change). This process...