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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."
It's an Icelandic company, so they're developing in an environment where there's plentiful hot water (geothermal). I'm wondering if you could get enough hot water from rooftop water-heating panels. Not the thoroughly expensive photo-voltaic, the much simpler black pipes full of water sort. They're surprisingly efficient even in colder climes: my in-laws in the North of England get most of their hot water from a set. The combination might make this very useful for isolated buildings, even outside of volcanic hot zones.
This is just a Peltier device in reverse. Instead of using a forced flow of electrons to drive heat from a cold surface to a warmer one, it is using the flow of heat from a warm surface, through the Peltier element, to a colder surface to drive electrons, generating current.
Seriously, at my university, thermocouples are covered in a sophomore year mechanical engineering class and lab.
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.
Not to mention all the heat lost in even more common things such automobile engines.
I figure, if they used cool water from the Hudson for the cold side, and warm, um, liquid from the urinals for the hot side, they could get the lighting for night games for free!
Though they might want to lower the prices on soda and beer, just to keep things flowing.
Does this mean I can water cool my Athlon and keep the computer powered off the waste heat?
Bleh!
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.
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.
I have a request. I need something that works with body temp and here's what I'd do:
Flip the power breakers off the night of my honey's favorite movie and tell her that the backup generator works off body heat. Oh course it'd be my luck that she'd tell me to start doing jumping jacks....
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
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).
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist