Waste Heat to Electricity?

Darwin_Frog writes: "Recent advances in thermionics at MIT lets waste heat generate electricity, thus pushing entropy one step further down the chain. These devices work at a temperature around 250 deg. C, instead of around 1000, so cars can augment the alternator by using the waste heat in the exhaust system to produce power for onboard electronics and A/C."

Comments

Nice but not the end of entropy

[SysKoll]

According to the article, this "breakthrough" is a reverse Peltier junction with about twice the efficiency of current semiconductor thermoconverters. Nice, but nothing revolutionary.

I think it's quite excessive to claim this will reduce entropy. Although I agree that if it's economically deployed in, say, cars, it will supplement the alternator.

Could this new junction actually replace the alternator for producing electricity in a car? Let's see: assume a car has a 100 HP internal combustion engine. That's 75 kW. Two third of this is wasted in heat. Typically, the radiator gets about half of this heat (the other half is dissipated away in radiant heat or through the exhaust. Assume further that 20 percent of this can be recovered and converted to electricity (for a really efficient semicon pile). That's 75 * 2/3 * 0.50 * 0.20, or 5 kW. That's more than a good SUV alternator. So this could actually work, provided it's reliable and not too expensive.

You'll need a battery for the short runs, though.

--SysKoll

Use on Hybrid cars?

[BlueJay465]

My question is how much more gas mileage could this technology squeeze forth given an array of these attached to the heat producers of a vehicle, like the engine or the brake pads.

Another thing is how do these "thermal diodes" compare to a Peltier Element in heat conversion to electricity?

is it more efficient than turbines?

[Pyromage]

this truly is the fundamental question: can this be made to be more efficient than a turbine/generator combo?

If this can be more efficient than a turbine, we can have solid-state power plants. Nukes are nothing more than a complex method of boiling water to push a turbine: if we can replace the water, we have an order of magnitude less waste! Not to mention that the core stuff is much easier to deal with than heavy water. Plus, with no pumps or pipes to break, it becomes even safer than it already is.

Or other things, say laptops? PDAs? Naturally all these kinds of applications are XYZ years off, but just imagine what would happen when we get the effiency of these things up? I'd bet that boiling water to turn a turbine is real low efficiency: if we cut out the turbine step alone, that should increase effiency by a whole lot.

This is truly cool shit.