Thermoelectric Generator With No Moving Parts

Savage-Rabbit writes "These guys have produced a working prototype of a thermoelectric generator. The thing uses extremely cold and hot liquids to achieve a heat transfer through a semiconducting material. This produces a voltage in the semiconductor who can produce up to 50-100 Watts which is actually enough for this thing to have practical uses. This generator could for example be useful in the chemical industry where many production processes generate a lot of excess heat that normally is simply lost. With a thermoelectric generator some of that lost energy could be recovered."

Comments

Time to market?

[syukton]

When do I get my full-body suit of this stuff, so that I may run my Pentium (tm) class laptop without plugging it into a wall every hour?

Efficiency: 1%

[jfengel]

They claim:

a generator that gets 3 litres per minute (0.8GPM) of 75C (167F) hot water, gives about 50 Watts when also supplied with the same flow of cold water used for cooling.

They also claim to produce about a 20C drop in temperature. Theoretically that's 4,200 Watts (it takes a lot of energy to raise a liter of water 1 degree). So their efficiency is only 1%.

I hope I've done the math right; high school chemistry was half a lifetime ago.

Bottoming-cycle engines...

[Spamalamadingdong]

is the term you are looking for. Fuel is apparently still too cheap to make them worthwhile for things like cars; people would rather pay for the extra gas. AFAIK, even heavy trucks are still not using turbocompounding to squeeze the extra few percent out of their diesels. This is odd, because I read about Caterpillar designing a near-adiabatic diesel with turbocompounding around a decade ago, yett there's nothing on the market (but at least they're talking about it).