Company Claims New Chip Converts Heat To Electricity

Dster76 writes to tell us that the startup, Eneco, has invented a solid state energy conversion chip which they claim will be able to convert heat directly into electricity or reach temperatures of -200 C when given an electrical current. While such a device could revolutionize many aspects of computing I'll keep my skeptic hat on for the time being.

Comments

eno2001 Claims Stomach...

[eno2001]

..converts salsa to crap. That is all.

Re:eno2001 Claims Stomach...

[operagost]

Really? My liver and kidneys convert beer into water!

Re:eno2001 Claims Stomach...

[eno2001]

Correction... They convert beer to water, salt and urea. Per Wikipedia:

Healthy urine is a clear aqueous solution, varying in colour from dark yellow to colourless depending on the dilution. The main constituents of urine are water, salts and urea. Urochrome is the pigment that gives urine its color. Urea is one of the three nitrogenous waste products. The other two are creatinine and uric acid. Urine also contains various inorganic ions, including sodium and chloride. Lighter urine color usually indicates higher water consumption.

Re:eno2001 Claims Stomach...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

That's a T4$ Hangover!

Heat to electricity? It's like my Powerbook, only in reverse!

Re:eno2001 Claims Stomach...

[Warg! The Orcs!!]

then it's a Koobrewop

Re:eno2001 Claims Stomach...

[ed333]

You forgot about the conversion of ethanol to acetaldehyde in the liver...

Re:eno2001 Claims Stomach...

[AndrewNeo]

So what does a P-P-Powerbook! do?

Re:eno2001 Claims Stomach...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhh, please!
The kidneys are filtering center. NOT a conversion center. Urea is produced in the liver.

• kidneys remove excessive water from the blood
  
• there is almost no urea out of beer - urea is mostly a product of amino acids metabolism, no AAs in beer

Argh, sorry, I had to do that....

Re:eno2001 Claims Stomach...

[WilliamSChips]

Turn e-e-electricity! into h-h-heat!

Re:eno2001 Claims Stomach...

[Fordiman]

It maxes out at about 27% efficiency, according to their own website. According to wikipedia, vapor-compression 'fridge cycle systems and turbines, which max out at 60% carnot under optimal conditions, and generally hang out in the neighborhood of 40% under working conditions. Meanwhile peltiers run around 15% carnot.

Since I can only assume that this thing's efficiency is carnot based (power-efficiency would give lower numbers, and thus lower investments), 27% doesn't seem like a huge leap in tech. Near doubling peltier does wonders for keeping a CPU cool, but utilizing waste heat? You're better off running water through the hot side of your air conditioner / fridge and into your water heater to save yourself a few joules.

Re:eno2001 Claims Stomach...

[Anonymous Coward]

50% water, 50% into extra tires for your flabby gut

Amd vs Intel

[Nushio]

Assuming this technology proves to be true, which one of the two titans would adopt it first?

Re:Amd vs Intel

[hAckz0r]

Lets just think about this for a minute. CPU's generate heat, which is not a 100% efficient process. The device is 20-30% efficient even then. To get by on using an inefficient power source the CPU would have to be as efficient as possible. Once it is efficient enough to run on reduced power it will generate less heat, and thus less electrical power. See where this is going? It can't be a perpetual device if it runs at a net loss. If it can't be the only power source for the CPU why build it in? At best it will only convert SOME of the waste heat to run some other part of the computer. Cooling comes to mind because the power to run the cooling is directly related to the heat generated, but turning a mechanical fan would take perhaps more energy than the device could generate at that given temperature. The device itself needs cooling to work. It does not sound to me to be practical even for running that. At best it will require an external source of BTU's and cooling to power the device for a small payback in terms of electrical power.

What would make a difference if such a device could work for all wavelengths of radiation converting all nearby sources of light, radio, static RF, and heat into usable power. Not just a "solar cell" but a radiation rectifier. Even at 20% efficiency there would be plenty of energy to harness if the spectrum was wide enough.

Re:Amd vs Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

I am telling you this is the Alien technology the I.S. Government has been hiding from us all.

Wait until you are all proven wrong and look like complete ASSES of yourselves. ;)

Re:Amd vs Intel

[GIL_Dude]

If it works at all, then maybe it can supply enough power to run the LED lights on some case mods?

Re:Amd vs Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Has it not occurred to you cretins that if the thing is converting heat into electricity it will be COOLING the heat source? Not, where might one use a putative 'cooling chip' in modern IT?

Re:Amd vs Intel

[nuckin futs]

whoever it will be, it seems like Apple will already be in on it.

Re:Amd vs Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Not, where might one use a putative 'cooling chip' in modern IT?

You mean that beer can holder that pops out when you press that square rectangular box at the top of the PC?

Re:Amd vs Intel

[Rei]

Has it occured to you, dear reader, that heat will be conducting through this much more slowly than through pure copper, as in a heat sink?

This is just a more efficient method for producing electricity in the manner of thermoelectrics (so-called "Peltier" chips). It's great news, don't get me wrong -- but it's not something you'd want to put somewhere where your rate of heat transfer is critical. This is the sort of thing that you'd have on, say, a heat exchanger to recover energy from exhaust gasses, or on a radiothermal battery on a spacecraft. To do cooling with this thing, you'd want to be putting power *into* it.

Re:Amd vs Intel

[Salmar]

Whoa, you're going way too far. You assumed they would want to use heat as the CPU's only source of power. That would quite obviously never work. I don't think grandparent was thinking about that, only to reduce heat and increase efficiency. I think that's also what Dster76 was thinking when he wrote in to /. with the article. But think: if AMD had their hands on this technology, they could design chips with twice the heat output (before the heat-sink device) and still maintain comparable power efficiency. They could topple Intel as the manufacturers of the fastest x86 chips ever made.

Re:Amd vs Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, it's a shame there are no 'heat exchangers' in a modern computer! I wonder what that great big radiator assembly clamped to the CPUs in my Powermac do?

Energy conversion devices

[erroneus]

I don't know why the notion should be so foreign. If someone told you they created a solid state device that could convert light energy directly into electrical energy would you believe them? Yeah, probably, because you have seen these in action already. They are on just about every calculator out there now. But there was a time when they were just an idea and the topic of fiction.

The notion of using heat is so different? Surely the technology is quite different I'm sure, but I would not be quite so quick to be skeptical.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[xation]

The notion that this could solve a lot of problems that currently trouble many hardware designs is why people are skeptical. Its almost too good to be true. Exploding laptops anyone?

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody doubts it can be done, see Peltier. They're not terribly efficient (I thought they were 15% efficiency capable, but I guess not..)

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Zork the Almighty]

There is nothing that this chip could do that could not be done by simply making current designs more efficient. In fact, the use of such a chip necessarily wastes energy.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Qzukk]

They're not terribly efficient (I thought they were 15% efficiency capable, but I guess not..)

Maybe the -200C chip comes with it's own 1 megawatt reactor? ;)

Re:Energy conversion devices

[russ1337]

Almost right - its actually the Seebeck effect

Thermoelectric effect
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Peltier-Seebeck effect)
Jump to: navigation, search
The Peltier-Seebeck effect, or thermoelectric effect, is the direct conversion of heat differentials to electric voltage and vice versa. Related effects are the Thomson effect and Joule heating. The Peltier-Seebeck and Thomson effects are reversible (in fact, the Peltier and Seebeck effects are reversals of one another); Joule heating cannot be reversible under the laws of thermodynamics.

Seebeck effect:
The Seebeck effect is the conversion of temperature differences directly into electricity.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[rolfwind]

People are quite right to be skeptical or they will be fleeced every time a con artist announces a promises a great sounding technology. (BTW, this isn't the first time I read about someone promising similiar solid state chips on /.)

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

That said, just because someone is a skeptic doesn't mean we are impossible to convince. Just show us the tech - put up or shut up, that simple. I think that is a fair test.

Afterall, it's good enough for skeptic James Randi with paranormal claims, it's good enough for me.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[networkBoy]

No, but it would need one ass of a heatsink.
Assuming they doubled current efficiency (~15%)
pumping -200C means the hot side is going to be damn hot.
If room temp was at 0C (to make things easy)
-200c means the hot side is at +200C +70% or: 340C

and efficiencies rapidly roll off below -50C, also these devices usually can only pump a delta of about 30-60C
-nB

Re:Energy conversion devices

[cascadingstylesheet]

>The notion of using heat is so different?

It seems like it might be. You extract energy from differentials. Heat has a nasty tendency to equalize, spread out, come at you from all directions. It's actually not all that easy, and tends to be very lossy, to extract energy mechanically from heat differentials. And electricity usage itself generates heat.

Something just sounds fishy about this; like a scheme to power your car with it's own exhaust.

But what do I know? I'd love to be proved wrong on this :)

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Nos.]

True to a point. Until we find a way to make our CPUs run cooler, isn't it better to have something like this chip to at least recover some of that wasted energy than to use more energy (a fan) to cool it?

Re:Energy conversion devices

[tylernt]

The notion of using heat is so different?

Indeed, thermopiles have been around for a long time. Converting heat into electricity using a solid-state device is nothing revolutionary.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kfg]

Something just sounds fishy about this; like a scheme to power your car with it's own exhaust.

No, you can't run your car that way, but you can use the exhaust to turn a fan to turn a compressor to force induction to increase power.

Well call this a "turbocharger."

KFG

Re:Energy conversion devices

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

Another device doing this is called a thermopile. I would link to Wikipedia as well but there is only a stub there. It is not very efficient but is useful when you need to generate electricity without making any noise.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[purpledinoz]

This isn't new... Solid-state heat pumps already exist. It's a matter of how efficient they are. Note that when they say they turn heat into electricity, this only works when there's a temperature differential. I believe this effect is called the Peltier effect. Look it up on google.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[MillionthMonkey]

If someone told you they created a solid state device that could convert light energy directly into electrical energy would you believe them? Yeah, probably, because you have seen these in action already. They are on just about every calculator out there now. But there was a time when they were just an idea and the topic of fiction. The notion of using heat is so different? Surely the technology is quite different I'm sure, but I would not be quite so quick to be skeptical.

The Earth receives high energy, low entropy photons from the sun. It reradiates low energy, high entropy photons back into space. These reradiated photons are not very useful in a 300 K environment, which is in thermodynamic equilibrium with them. This is similar to how you'd find it much harder to extract work from sunlight if you were on the surface of the sun, an environment in thermodynamic equilibrium with that light. (Yes I know everything would melt you nitpickers but the point remains.)

The reason those calculators work is because they are exchanging energy with the sun's surface and they are not in thermodynamic equilibrium with it. On the earth's surface, if you try to make a solar cell to catch low infrared from objects on our own planet, you'll find that your cell radiates away the photons you are trying to capture, just by being at room temperature.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Rick_bush]

In physics (in fact coming up in the next physical science class is a topic on energy) there is a demo put out by Pasco that converts the difference between hot and cold into electric current. This is called the Peltier Effect, nothing new. In fact the solid state module can be bought from Marlin P. Jones (http://www.mpja.com) and Associates. This module is also the ones used for solid state cooling of a CPU. This works both ways to heat or cool depending on which side of the module you use (depending on the polarity of the current, one side heats the other cools) it will heat or cool. By the same token the same module can be heated on one side and cooled (Ice water works best) and it produces a current. I mean really this is not new.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[wsherman]

The notion of using heat is so different?

Converting heat directly to electricity would mean the second law of thermodynamics was not universally valid which would be a major discovery (right up there with relativity and quantum physics). Converting a temperature gradient (or temperature difference) into electricity (even with a solid state device) is nothing new unless you can exceed the efficiency limits of the second law. Equivalently, converting electricity into a temperature gradient is nothing new unless you can exceed the efficiency limits of the second law.

Nothing in the article suggests that they are exceeding the efficiency limits of the second law so they don't have a truly major scientific discovery.

Incidentally, if they could exceed the efficiency limits of the second law (in either direction: converting a temperature gradient to electricity or converting electricity to a temperature gradient), then that would be equivalent to converting heat directly to electricity.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Moofie]

It can be done. The question is, are the yields useful? Is it more efficient than, say, a steam engine?

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Moofie]

There's nothing magic about a turbocharger, though. It does enable the engine to burn more fuel for a given volume of air (since the mass of air in that volume is higher), but there's no such thing as a free lunch.

It's even possible for a turbocharger to improve fuel economy, with appropriate tuning. Having said that, if your car could do 0-60 in seven seconds before your turbocharger, you're going to burn more fuel to get a 5 second run. The additional energy comes from additional fuel, not from turbocharger magic.

I'm sure you knew that, but I'm equally sure that some other folks might not.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[not already in use]

I see your point, but this is obviously a bigger technical challenge, with much bigger implications. As much heat energy is wasted in both electronics and fuel burning vehicles, we're talking about a technology that could single handedly solve issues that we've been faced with for years, that only become bigger issues as time goes on.

Solar energy is nice as an alternative energy source, but this technology would increase efficiency regardless the energy source.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Trespass]

'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof' is itself an extraordinary claim. ;P

Re:Energy conversion devices

[modecx]

How about powering a car hybrid style with a little steam boiler that surrounds the exhaust, and a motor that interfaces with the standard drivetrain? Last I heard, BMW was working on this as an alternative to engine/electric hybrids, and with great success.

All you need, at a minimum are a few pipes to act as heat exchangers, a motor to convert steam energy into torque, and a valve to control it. A person with good mechanical skills and access to a lathe and a mill could work this solution out in a little time, and if that's not powering your car off the waste heat from exhaust, nothing is.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kfg]

I'm sure you knew that. . .

Sure, that's what the compressor is for. But turning the compressor is "magic" in the sense that it does not require the burning of any additional fuel to accomplish it. That which we simply call a "supercharger" (a turbocharger is just a turbine driven supercharger) is gear/belt driven by the engine and does require the burning of extra fuel to turn the compressor.

The problem with the car analogy in this case is that although gasoline can be burned to create heat you are not going to run that equation backwards in your car, so you cannot directly use the "waste" heat of the exhaust directly as engine fuel. If it were an electric car, however (yes, electric cars exhaust heat, just as your computer does. Enough heat to burn your fingers. Yes, I've determined this empirically. No, I don't want to talk about it). . .

KFG

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Profane MuthaFucka]

That's the kind of thing someone who has an unproved extraordinary claim would say.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Trespass]

Which is a subset of 'people who have a different working definition of extraordinary' than the observer.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kiatoa]

Sorry. Doesn't work that way. The application of this chip will push the temp of the device being cooled up even higher. If you care about the life of your semiconductor devices you will be trying to get them to run as cool as possible. Yes, even semiconductors wear out. Look up electromigration. Take any scenario and apply the thermoconversion device to it (heat direct to elec. is not new btw, don't all geeks make a copper/iron thermoelectric candle powered radio as a kid?) and compare with an equivalent cost best of breed heat sink and the theroconversion device will lose because the chip being cooled will be running hotter. It is the same thing as those guys who think they can put a steam or stirling engine into their cars and get better gas mileage. Sure you can do it but it doesn't make economical sense.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[cheater512]

You could use it to power your fans! :)

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's just that "Eneco" looks like a variant of "Initech."

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Shads]

That was pretty much my thought, "this is just a super-peltier". If its true then they've basically discovered a way to make a better peltier imo.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Extraordinary evidence is needed to counter Occam's razor. If you are proposing something which is more complicated than the simplest explanation, that's an extraordinary claim.

For example: Explain a missing cookie.
1) I ate it. Yummay.
2) It was eaten by an interstellar traveller.

Number 2 is obviously more complicated than number one. If you expect me to believe number two, you must not only prove that the interstellar traveller ate the cookie, but you must also prove that you did NOT eat the cookie. And you must prove that you are not an interstellar traveller.

That's some pretty extraordinary evidence.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Moofie]

"But turning the compressor is "magic" in the sense that it does not require the burning of any additional fuel to accomplish it."

Well sure you do. The stoichiometry of the combustion doesn't change. You don't get more motive power out of a given volume of fuel. You just burn more of it per piston stroke to get more power.

Now, there are a BUNCH of performance optimizations you can do to change the shape of your power delivery curve, and get some desired combination of improved fuel economy and improved power, but you're not dramatically increasing the thermodynamic efficiency of the motor (which would take magic).

A turbocharger changes the set of performance trade-offs you can make, but it's not free power.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kfg]

Yeah, I thought of bringing that up in my above reply, but I'm not exactly a huge fan of the increased mechancial complexity of systems like that.

I've posted a number of times before that one of the chief advantages of the combustion/electric hybrid is the elimination of mechanical complexity.

KFG

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to sound like a dick, but do you really think any of us are unaware that motors generate heat? I guess to be fair you did get forced into replying to a person that apparently doubts that some amount of use can be gained from waste heat because it sounded like perpetual motion or something, so maybe I should be able to see your position. I just have a hard time imagining that anyone could spend more than five seconds running even a small motor and not notice, that yes, it does generate heat. That should probably have been learned at like age 3 or 4, unless the person is old-enough that the ubiquity of electric motors escaped childhood toys. That and learning that you can generate electricity with mechanical energy using that same motor should have been an additional two minutes and one tongue away.

Anyway I have digressed into missing my childhood.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[slashkitty]

You're so wrong. It's all a matter of how much it has to cool. if it has too cool 1 gram of water to -200C, 200C * 100/15% * 1g = 1333 grams it'd need to warm 1 1/3 liter of water only 1 degree.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Vellmont]

if you try to make a solar cell to catch low infrared from objects on our own planet, you'll find that your cell radiates away the photons you are trying to capture, just by being at room temperature.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say it radiates just as many of the same frequency photons as it receives?

Re:Energy conversion devices

[squiggleslash]

If you expect me to believe number two, you must not only prove that the interstellar traveller ate the cookie, but you must also prove that you did NOT eat the cookie. And you must prove that you are not an interstellar traveller.

Now, hold on a moment. _Proving the first and the last of these should prove the second...

...unless you're trying to claim that it's possible to eat your cookie and have it eaten by an interstella travelled. That's an extraordinary claim to make, and I hope you have some extraordinary evidence to back it up!

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Nefarious Wheel]

>>The notion of using heat is so different?

>It seems like it might be. You extract energy from differentials.

Very true, and any thermocouple solution has to pump the heat somewhere.

Seems like I read somewhere long ago that thermionic cooling could be achieved in a different way than the simple thermocouple, however. Something about using an ion stream to break up the boundary effect of a hot surface in air, allowing better convective dissipation of the local bubble of hot gas that tends to act as an insulator. Would a mild ion source directed at the hot chips achieve better cooling by getting more use out of the existing air flow? And if it could be a board-mount device aimed at the cpu/gpu, it might solve some space and noise problems. Anyone able to shed some light on this?

Oh, and cars are often powered, in part, by their own exhausts -- not directly, of course, but there's this thing called the "turbocharger"... it's not so much a rat farm approach (Pratchett/Vetinari) but the approach that reduces the amount of expensive heat lost in the overall process.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Vellmont]

There is nothing that this chip could do that could not be done by simply making current designs more efficient.

On some level, that's true. But this device (assuming it works, is economically viable, etc) can be used in combination with making more efficient designs. Your argument is like saying "I shouldn't save money on buying used clothes because I'm saving money with food coupons". There's no reason you can't do both at the same time.

In fact, the use of such a chip necessarily wastes energy.

How can it "waste" energy? If it produces electricty, you could use the electricty to power fans which would otherwise be powered by the system.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Vellmont]

The application of this chip will push the temp of the device being cooled up even higher.

I don't see any reason why this has to be true. Can you explain why this chip would increase the temperature of the device being cooled?

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kfg]

Well sure you do. The stoichiometry of the combustion doesn't change. You don't get more motive power out of a given volume of fuel.

I don't think you caught that in the above post I was comparing energy taken from the flow of exhaust gases to energy taken from the turning of the crankshaft.

I can bake potatoes on my exhaust header. When I do so the potato becomes part of the system. It does not decrease my fuel milage or require an increase in engine efficiency. It is the inefficiency of the engine that does the job. If, however, I drove a generator from the output shaft and used that to power a heating element in an electric oven it would require the burning of more fuel.

In the former it is not "free" energy. It came from the burning of my fuel, but it is energy that I would have otherwise thrown away without doing anything with it.

And that is what these people are talking about when they say their device could be used to turn a computer's cooling fans. It isn't something for nothing, but it is more something without anything more. It doesn't increase the efficiency of the CPU, but it does increase the efficiency of the system.

KFG

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Moofie]

"I was comparing energy taken from the flow of exhaust gases to energy taken from the turning of the crankshaft."

Same energy. The back pressure from a turbocharger increases the work done by the engine system upstream.

The turbocharger is not powered by waste heat. As a matter of fact, header temperatures typically increase when you add a turbocharger.

If you take Engine A, and optimize its fuel delivery for a given requirement (say, max peak power), and then add a turbocharger and tune it again for max peak power, you will consume more fuel to produce max power in the turbocharged engine. You will probably burn slightly more fuel (very, very slightly more fuel) to produce the normally aspirated engine's max peak power with the turbocharged engine, but that is more a function of how the engine is tuned.

"And that is what these people are talking about when they say their device could be used to turn a computer's cooling fans. It isn't something for nothing, but it is more something without anything more. It doesn't increase the efficiency of the CPU, but it does increase the efficiency of the system."

That is indeed their claim. I am skeptical.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kfg]

I hate to sound like a dick, but do you really think any of us are unaware that motors generate heat?

I'm afraid I have to answer that with a "Yes, I thought it was at least possible."

I guess to be fair you did get forced into replying to a person that apparently doubts that some amount of use can be gained from waste heat because it sounded like perpetual motion or something. . .

I do not always succeed, but at least I always try to answer at the same level I am given. This can often make me look like a dumbass; sometimes because I am the one actually not up to the level of the OP and I'm trying to exceed my grasp without realizing it for some reason or other (i.e. I am a dumbass), but often because I'm doing the "Golden Book" version (but it isn't polite to call the OP a dumbass).

And experience has taught me that there are any number of people here whose experience of technology extends only to software. A few of those don't even believe that electric motors are technology.

KFG

Re:Energy conversion devices

[jftitan]

Exactly...

I don't see how it is a waste of energy, when it is the chip itself converting wasted energy to useful energy. I already see some ass clown patenting this chip, or the IP of this chip for use with CPU/GPU fans. As the processor gets hot, the heat sink pulls that heat away from the processor, in which a motor is directly connected to the chip to take the new heat/electrical energy to power a fan, to which it cools the heat sink. As the heat builds up, the chip generates more energy for the motor, which speeds up the fan. As the heat sink cools, less energy is converted, and the motor slows the fan down. (Direct trade off?)

  I don't see a 'waste' of energy in this logic. This actually makes since, because many buy stronger power supplies, because of the CPU/GPU power consumption, along with the additional amount of fans needed to keep the system cool.

  Eventually this same technology(technique) can be applied to power supply fans as well. Thus requiring less power out of the PSU.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Plutonite]

Or you could use the "recovered" energy to power the processor fan, thus creating an automatic temp.control(if it is hot, fan will get juice, otherwise fan dies).

I still doubt they will ever produce enough power for a nice 3000RPM bad boy like the one buzzing in my case now.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Peltiers are just thermocouples/thermopiles made of semiconductors. They are inefficient mainly because the material they're made of is a good enough heat conductor that it conducts most of the heat they've pumped back across the temperature gradient. Absent that they should be able to reach carnot cycle efficiency. Meanwhile, if you are willing to feed 'em the extra power (or accept that they generate

You can get cooling down to cryogenic temperatures just by building a pyramid of peltier cells (with progressively fewer couples in each layer), all interconnected electrically. This was done 'way back when they were first invented.

This device is a more efficient vacuum-tube version, using nanostructure field-emission needles for the cathodes and built in a microscopic form-factor using integrated-circuit manufacturing techniques. It does the same thing, but using electrons in vacuum. (The heat kicks them off the emitter with a momentum high enough for them to pass through a field to a more-negative collector plate.) A vacuum is a GREAT insulator, so the efficiency is much better. (Or pump heat by applying a voltage to encourrage the electrons to jump off the needles at thermal vibration peaks, cooling them, and smack into the collectors, heating them.)

Also: Since it is apparently built of metals and ceramics rather than semiconductors you can run it very hot - like at the focus of a solar concentrator. That can beat photovoltaics by a bunch.

I've seen reports of this device before. I presume this one means either they need more funding or they've just solved a manufacturing problem, bringing them a step closer to commercial rollout.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[joto]

Apart from the fact that the heading makes you believe it violates the laws of thermodynamics, I agree. Obviously, what the chip does is exploit a temperature gradient to create energy, not heat per se. And that is neither a new or foreign idea. A coal or atomic power plant also generates electricity by exploiting differences in temperature. And lots of piezoelectric devices exist that do pretty much the same thing. So I guess the reason the investors were interested has something to do with cost-efficiency, which the article failed completely to convey.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kfg]

As a matter of fact, header temperatures typically increase when you add a turbocharger.

Certainly. You're burning more fuel per stroke. That's what you installed the turbocharger to do.

If you take Engine A, and optimize its fuel delivery for a given requirement (say, max peak power), and then add a turbocharger and tune it again for max peak power, you will consume more fuel to produce max power in the turbocharged engine.

Certainly. You're burning more fuel per stroke.

You will probably burn slightly more fuel (very, very slightly more fuel) to produce the normally aspirated engine's max peak power with the turbocharged engine. . .

Exactly. Whereas with a gear driven supercharger you will have to burn an extra 5 hp worth of fuel to stay even. That's why people put up with the viscisitudes of turbochargers in the first place. They're "free." Compared to superchargers.

That is indeed their claim. I am skeptical.

At this point I haven't a clue why. I heat my home with an open flame. When my heat is on and I hand wash clothes, I dry them over that flame. My gas bill does not go up when I do so. Is there something here you would dispute?

KFG

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Moofie]

"Exactly. Whereas with a gear driven supercharger you will have to burn an extra 5 hp worth of fuel to stay even. That's why people put up with the viscisitudes of turbochargers in the first place. They're "free." Compared to superchargers."

OK, no. You've dramatically changed the boundary conditions for the power cycle of the engine. They are not "free" compared to gear- or belt-driven superchargers...they operate on exactly the same principles. Whether the crankshaft has a pulley on the front that drives the supercharger, or the pistons have to increase the pressure in the headers to drive the turbocharger, there is no "free". The energy to compress the air comes from increased fuel burn per piston stroke.

"extra 5 hp worth of fuel" is a null concept. One particular supercharger setup may be different than one particular turbocharger setup, but the setup is EVERYTHING. You can't just take a certain fuel delivery profile on a certain engine block, bolt on a supercharger, get some numbers, replace the supercharger with a turbocharger, get some different numbers, and compare them. The optimizations and performance characteristics are just not the same.

Does one particular engine design lend itself more towards turbochargers than superchargers? Maybe. Does that mean that superchargers are inferior, and it certainly doesn't mean that superchargers in general are less efficient. They're just different.

"At this point I haven't a clue why."

They're saying they can get useful amounts of work out of battery waste heat. I am skeptical. I will remain so until I see decent schematics of their work cycle, or get one on my test bench so I can play with it.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Anonymous Coward]

(Yes I know everything would melt you nitpickers but the point remains.)

I think you mean "everything would melt [comma] you nitpickers...", unless you mean to imply that it is the nitpickers who would...

AAAARGH! IT BURNS!

R.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Anonymous Coward]

He was close enough, and you know it. It's listed right there together in what you posted.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kfg]

They're saying they can get useful amounts of work out of battery waste heat. I am skeptical.

If you allow me to change the boundry conditions you will find that I have made many, many posts not simply being skeptical that overall efficiency of the system is not increased, but actually decreases.

But that's another story.

KFG

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Profane MuthaFucka]

There is a possibility that both claims are true. 1) You ate the cookie, and 2) An interstellar traveller ate the cookie because you are the interstellar traveller who ate the cookie.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Ungrounded Lightning]

On deeper reading of this I see that they've "solved the problem" of maintaining a vacuum by "replacing the vacuum with a properly selected semiconductor material". (The reporter seems to have hashed things up so it's hard to be sure what they're talking about - as usual. B-( )

That sounds like they're trying to build a semiconductor equivalent of the true-vacuum device I described above. Perhaps something like a field-effect transistor using bulk, undoped, semiconductor material for the "vacuum" and perhaps a schottky barrier junction (or a doped region) for the "thermionic emission cathode". A "P-I-P" diode perhaps, with the thermal agitation lifting the electrons from the potential well to launch them into the undoped region?

(I should stop guessing and look up their patents.)

Much of the heat conduction in solids is done by electron motion rather than mechanical vibration transfer. So a bar of undoped semiconductor should be a better insulator than the heavily-doped P and N type silicon that makes up the structure of a peltier cell, leading to higher efficiency in a "semconductor thermionic" device.

Darn. I thought these guys were working on true cold-cathode vacuum tubes at integrated circuit scales, and had solved the three big problems blocking them (cathode construction, ion erosion, and maintaining a clean vacuum).

Vacuum tubes and their close relatives, gas-discharge (plasma) tubes, have great properties (like radiation and EMP resistance) and can do a lot of amazing stuff - some of which semiconductors still can't do, or do well. It was mainly the need to heat the cathode that let semiconductors displace them - and the strucutral shrinkage and continued breakthroughs that let them hold their lead. While the size of the electron wave function means nano-scale vacuum ICs will probably hit a density wall at a slightly larger feature size than semiconductors, vacuum ICs still have a lot of potential. If somebody had solved those three problems I mentioned I can imagine a partial revival, with vacuum ICs leveraging the semiconductor manufacturing processes and displacing semiconductors in at least some applications where their properties give significant advantages.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[boron boy]

The heatsink you have on your CPU is really good at sucking the heat away from it. It was designed to take the heat off of your CPU and dump it into the surrounding air as fast as possible.
This heat->power chip thingo is designed to convert heat into electricity. Yes it might cool your CPU a little bit, but nowhere near as fast as a good heatsink.

Of course after reading the article I noticed there is a cooling mode for the chip where rather than generating electricity, you actually feed it electricity, and it cools down the chip a lot more. That might be more efficient (and practical) than current heatsink-fan technology, but I'll wait till I see it with my own eyes.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Anonymous Coward]

He was close enough, and you know it. It's listed right there together in what you posted.

Well if by close enough you mean the exact opposite, then yeah.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[superiority]

IANAP, but I believe the laws of thermodynamics prevents efficient conversion of heat into work. This talks about it some more.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[From A Far Away Land]

"Seebeck effect:
The Seebeck effect is the conversion of temperature differences directly into electricity. "

Not to be confused with:
The Slashdot effect is the conversion of a temperate webserver, directly into a pile of slag.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[mr_matticus]

The better function for this kind of technology, should it ever be refined to the point of being useful, is to do away with alternators. The fuel economy savings of driving one less mechanical accessory would certainly be worthwhile on most cars.

Obviously, the near future would involve a smaller, less demanding alternator rather than eliminating it completely. But imagine using the heat produced by a car's engine to power the electrical system of that car. It's almost free energy.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kfg]

The better function for this kind of technology, should it ever be refined to the point of being useful, is to do away with alternators.

That is at least barking up the right tree. I think the computer stuff is just fishing for a way to move a lot of units for profit, whether it makes any real sense to do so or not.

But imagine using the heat produced by a car's engine to power the electrical system of that car.

Imagine a flame tuned for optimum efficiency powering an electric motor. Cost, efficiency and power are questions. I'll play with this in 1/10th scale (and on my boat) if they ever become real. Nothing like getting your hands on shit and seeing what it really does and costs.

KFG

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Vellmont]

This heat->power chip thingo is designed to convert heat into electricity. Yes it might cool your CPU a little bit, but nowhere near as fast as a good heatsink.

I don't see any reason why you can't do both. The heatsink is really designed to channel heat into the air very quickly. This device isn't exactly a cooling device, it's used to create electricty as 20-30% efficiency. Why not have this thing between the CPU and heat-sink? I'm sure it would call for some different cooling mechanisms than just a normal old heat-sink, but there's no reason why a new design couldn't keep the CPU at the same temperature.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[iphayd]

Or the interstellar traveller ate you after you ate the cookie.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[boron boy]

For the same reason you wouldn't put a block of wood, a piece of cheese or some bubblegum between them. They would all restrict the flow of heat from the CPU to the heatsink, rendering it ineffective. The only thing you want between you CPU and the heatsink is a thin film of thermal conductive paste.

But then again I'm an activist, what would I know.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[mrchaotica]

The way these things work is by exploiting the difference in temperature on the two sides of the device. In other words, if both sides are the same temperature (e.g. room temperature), no electricity is generated. If one side is at absolute zero and the other is as hot as the surface of the sun, lots and lots of electricity is generated (you get the picture).

Anyway, what it means is that if you stick one on a CPU, it'll never cool the CPU to ambient temperature because the rate of electricity generation decreases as the temperature difference decreases. Of course, neither will a heat sink. So what's the difference? The heat sink is more efficient at it, especially if you're actually using the electricity generated to do any work -- the resistance would increase, making it more difficult for current to flow, and therefore causing less heat to be removed from the CPU.

The way you would actually use this kind of thing to cool a CPU would be to do it in reverse: apply current to it so that it would create a temperature difference, put the cool side against the CPU and the hot side against a heat sink. The total heat generated will be greater, but the CPU will actually be cooler because it's trying to cool to the temperature of the cool side of the device, rather than ambient temperature. The heat sink will become hotter, of course.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Vellmont]

They would all restrict the flow of heat from the CPU to the heatsink, rendering it ineffective.

That's why you'd need a different design. I'm not a thermal engineer, and I presume you aren't either. But it's not really that unbelieveable that a cooling design could be implemented that would be able to do both at the same time.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[bugbu]

If this stuff converts heat to energy, then can I use it to save air conditioning electricity bill during the summer? I live in Texas and I pay more than $150 per month for the air conditioning most part of the year. After heat in my room is converted to energy my room should become cool and comfortable. I may even be able to sell the energy created back to Austin Energy and get negative electricity bill!

Re:Energy conversion devices

[mrchaotica]

Of course after reading the article I noticed there is a cooling mode for the chip where rather than generating electricity, you actually feed it electricity, and it cools down the chip a lot more. That might be more efficient (and practical) than current heatsink-fan technology, but I'll wait till I see it with my own eyes.

You'll still need a heat sink because the temperature on the other side of the device (the one not cooling the CPU) will increase more than the amount the cool side decreases (because both the CPU and the electricity applied to the device contribute to the total energy of the system). In other words, let the temperature of your CPU when cooled by a heat sink be t0. If you use this device to cool the CPU to t0 - x degrees, then the temperature on the other side (cooled by the same heat sink that was attached to the CPU before) will be t0 + x + y degrees, where y represents the less-than-100% efficiency of the device itself.

However, there is a reason to do this: you can get the CPU cooler than it's possible to do with a heat sink alone. In particular, it can get the CPU to run cooler than ambient temperature (which a heat sink can only approach asymptotically). Extreme overclockers use this technique sometimes, but the downside is that you have to start worrying about condensation killing your electronics.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[modecx]

Well I dunno. I think complexity wise, the two systems would be very comparable. Pretty much every part of the system would have an analogue to the other. The one true advantage electric hybrids have over other methods is that they can do regenerative braking without adding any additional mechanical complexity.

The steam system would probably be a bit lighter and could produce better torque at operating temperature, but it might not work so well in freezing conditions, and it would have to be refilled regularly, unless it's fitted with a bulky and heavy condenser so that you have a closed-loop system. If our battery technology was better and lighter, a vehicle could take better advantage of regenerative braking, and it would be no contest. However, I think a diesel/steam hybrid could be just as viable and reliable, and maybe even a bit more efficient for light urban driving, as the state of technology exists today.

Plus, who wouldn't love having a steam whistle on their car? Mmmm.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[xactuary]

"Just show us the tech - put up or shut up, that simple."

I'll settle for the Scientific Method. Let me know how that "put up or shut up" thing works for you.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[mpaulsen]

At this point I haven't a clue why. I heat my home with an open flame. When my heat is on and I hand wash clothes, I dry them over that flame. My gas bill does not go up when I do so. Is there something here you would dispute?

I don't get it. Are you arguing that evaporative cooling does not occur in the situation you describe?

Re:Energy conversion devices

[ceoyoyo]

Suppose you have a CPU with a heat sink on it. Now you add a power generating chip between the CPU and the heat sink. Since this chip generates electricity it must be opposing the flow of heat. Therefore, heat will flow less well when the chip is present. Thus, heat will build up more on the CPU side than it would without the chip.

You can think of it like a hydroelectric dam (or water wheel) if you like. Water flows, then you stick something in the way -- in order for the paddle wheel or turbine to generate electricity it must oppose the flow of the water -- forcing it to do work.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kfg]

No, I am not. In fact I've written here before about using evaporative cooling to chill water jugs in the desert.

Where does the heat from the cooled object go?

KFG

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Profane MuthaFucka]

That sounds really hot.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[admactanium]

Something just sounds fishy about this; like a scheme to power your car with it's own exhaust.

funny you should mention that because bmw made an announcement recently that does just that. obviously, it doesn't run the entire care off the heat generation from the exhaust, but it converts some of that wasted heat energy into propulsion. here's the car and driver article about it. it's called the bmw turbosteamer. your analogy is unintentionally apt because both systems use previously-wasted heat output to supplement the main power source. despite the fact that it hasn't been done before, it makes sense in both cases.

heat is generated regardless of the efficiency of the process. cpu's and gpu's are going to create heat. if chipmakers can get the cpus to generate less heat per cycle, then they'll make them run faster, thus negating the benefit in efficiency in device's heat signature. i mean, we're already seeing this. so if heat is going to be generated by necessity, any process that can give us a net gain by converting that heat into useable energy is a good thing as long as it's not hideously bulky. basically, it's turning your laptop into a toyota prius without all the smugness. i guess i'm not understanding the derision of this concept.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Vellmont]

So what's the difference? The heat sink is more efficient at it, especially if you're actually using the electricity generated to do any work

So what? So make a better design of the combination of these two devices that can remove heat from a processor at the proper rate. It's not like the only option is to stick this between a CPU and a current heat-sink that hasn't been designed with this device in mind.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[The_Mr_Flibble]

I used to run one on my machine to cool it but the computer kept freezing up.

No, the motherboard and cpu actually turned into a block of ice.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called a tranducer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transducer

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing like getting your hands on shit and seeing what it really does and costs.

Does: dirties hands, stinks, decomposes.

Costs: food, time, methane in the atmosphere.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[James McGuigan]

3) you shared the cookie with the interstellar traveller

(I didn't realize that sharing was such an alien concept)

Re:Energy conversion devices

[nospam007]

>The notion that this could solve a lot of problems that currently trouble many hardware designs is why people are skeptical. Its almost too good to be true. Exploding laptops anyone?
--
You mean as an additional way to get electricity out of Sony batteries?

Re:Energy conversion devices

[julesh]

Which has precisely what relevance to this article, which is about a process where "the energy of a hot metal [causes electrons to migrate] to a cold metal and in the process create an electronic charge"?

Re:Energy conversion devices

[gamlidek]

"Yes, even semiconductors wear out."

This is totally untrue. I mean, I was watching an old Star Trek rerun just the other day and they came across an ancient derelict spacecraft where the computer system _still worked_... People and their "facts" these days...

/gam/

Re:Energy conversion devices

[tom17]

Incase anyone is still reading this thread...
Moofie is right here. KFG, you are wrong, sorry.

Given that the turbo is driven from exhaust gas pressure rather than the heat in the system, explain to me how it is magically free?. Granted, your example of "using the heat from an exhaust is free" is valid - to a degree - but the pressure/gas flow driven nature of a turbo means that extra work has to be done to drive it.

I challenge a proof on this..

1. Get a normally aspirated engine on a dyno, do some runs to get fuel usage for power output etc.
2. Now bolt a turbo on to said engine but do not feed it back into the induction, feed it into a suitable* restrictor.
3. Now run the engine up again. Do you honestly believe that it would still have the same efficiency? not a chance, it would use more fuel as more work is needed to drive the turbo due to increased backpressure and pumping losses in the engine.
4...
5. Profit!

*Restrictor should be the correct size to imitate the pressures you would see in the intake manifold if the turbo was indeed feeding a real engine. This if course would be hard to achieve as this will always change depending on engine rpm, so it would have to be a rpm controlled variably sized venturi - maybe a bit ott for such a demonstration :)

Re:Energy conversion devices

[I Like Pudding]

I don't see any reason why you can't do both.

Thermo FUCKING dynamics.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[xsonofagunx]

3000RPM eh? Bad boy? Pshaw... I had a 7200RPM Thermaltake Dragon Orb a few years ago. Granted, it was really high pitched and fucking annoying to have in my bedroom, but 3000RPM ain't shit :)

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Sensible Clod]

The Article claims 20-30% absolute efficiency. Doesn't sound unreasonable to me.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[johnny6vasquez]

Why not?

You have a source of heat energy being radiated into the atmosphere as quickly as possible in order to reduce the possibility of damage to the engine components. Currently this energy is dumped as quickly as possible by the radiator. If it is captured by a steam engine, that is energy that has already escaped the capacity of the engine to use it, and is now useable to the vehicle.

Case in point, BMW turbo-steamer.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[xsonofagunx]

The thing is, [as far as my understanding goes] the PSU only generates as much power as is required from it - you're not really wasting any energy costs by getting a 600w PSU over a 400w PSU. You'll pay more for the higher wattage PSU, but that's only a one-time thing, and in any case, buying a cheap generic PSU is a bad idea. I've got a Thermaltake PurePower PSU and I have absolutely no worries about leaving my computer on during a lightning storm*. Sure, I paid out the ass for the PSU considering I could have gotten a generic one for like 1/4th the cost, but would I trust it during a lightning storm? Probably not.

Lots of people count their PSUs as a 'must have' but 'unimportant' part of their computer - but an exceptional power supply can prevent a lot of lock-ups, random crashes, and death of parts [CPU, Mobo, RAM, video card etc.] which would plague someone who just put out the bare minimum for their PSU.

*- I don't recommend anyone leaving their computer on/plugged in during a lightning storm, just sharing my personal experiences.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[I Like Pudding]

That's why you'd need a different design. I'm not a thermal engineer, and I presume you aren't either. But it's not really that unbelieveable that a cooling design could be implemented that would be able to do both at the same time.

He doesn't need to be a thermal engineer; what you're saying is fucking retarded. A thermocouple requires a temperature differential to produce electricity. The greater the differential, the greater the current generated. A heat sink removes temperature differential. The greater the differential removed, the greater the cooling. Are you beginning to see the problem here? You can't arbitrarily combine two diametrically opposed things and expect shit to work. Am I getting through yet? Do I need to break out the crayolas and draw you a fucking map?

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Anonymous Coward]

"but 3000RPM ain't shit"

it is if it's 120mm fan. those suckers can blow a lot of air at 3000 RPM.

your dragon orb was 60mm, that's why it had to spin so madly.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[I Like Pudding]

This is possibly the least efficient way to cool a processor ever conceived. A thermocouple is like a dam, except with heat. It doesn't generate much energy unless there's heat buildup on once side. Heat buildup is exactly what you do not want in your processor. I'd be amazed if a chip didn't break outright set up like this.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[ThosLives]

Correct; I encourage everyont to look up comparisons of brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC) for turbocharged (or supercharged) vs. naturally aspirated engines. For identical power outputs (but lower displacement on the turbo version), the turbo version will most likely have a lower BSFC.

You can't look at things like fuel economy of automobiles because that's a complex system effect; to isolate the performance of the turbo only you have to look at the BSFC.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Trespass]

I would assert that the cookie was actually a fig newton, and a cookie is just a cookie, but a newton is fruit and cake.

Therefore there never was a cookie, QED.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[mpaulsen]

Where does the heat from the cooled object go?

In the scenario you described, the heat (energy) from the cooled object is latent heat in the water vapor. The air temperature in your room is not as high as it would be if you weren't drying the clothes.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[rochi]

what he's saying is, instead of the heatsink (which sends heat into the surrounding air) use something that has high thermal conductivity to move the heat from the cpu to this chip (I think)

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kfg]

I shall now dispose of my air condtitioner and cool the room by putting a pot up to boil.

Why is the temperature of the water in the pot not 200C? Why do I scald my hand if I hold it a foot above the pot?

KFG

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Moofie]

Um, OK. You lost me here.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Moofie]

Excellent. My coursework was in jet engines, which are rated in terms of Thrust Specific Fuel Consumption. It makes perfect sense to me that there's a parallel concept in internal combustion engines, but since I've never done a rigorous study of the problem I didn't have the vocabulary. Thank you for clarifying my point.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Moofie]

Are you being intentionally dense?

If you boil a pot of water, you dump a bunch of waste heat into the room, raising the air temperature. The evaporative cooling that will come from the evaporation of the water that condenses from the steam you let into the room is going to be less than the temperature increase you created by putting waste heat into the room.

You can't cool a room by opening the door to your refrigerator. There is no such thing as free energy. "waste" heat is called "waste" because it cannot be used to do useful work. Could you power a cooling fan with a Peltier device? Sure, but it's more efficient to just use mains power.

You can't replace your alternator with a wind turbine on the outside of your car and make your car more fuel efficient. That idea on /. a while ago to power streetlights with a treadle system in the street did not capture "wasted" energy. The Second Law doesn't care how clever you are. There is still no such thing as a free lunch.

If these guys have a device that works similar to a Peltier cooler, and is more efficient than a Peltier cooler, that would be an interesting development, and is certainly not a hard thing to imagine. But a more efficient Peltier device isn't likely to replace batteries, which is what they're alleging.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kfg]

Are you being intentionally dense?

Apparently you would call it that, yes. I would call it provoking thought toward self realization of the answer. Therein lies learning. I am not authority.

If you boil a pot of water, you dump a bunch of waste heat into the room, raising the air temperature.

Of course. It was the person to whom I was responding who claimed I would cool the room.

You can't cool a room by opening the door to your refrigerator.

Nor with my air conditioner if I don't vent heat outside. That heat can be used to do work, however.

There is no such thing as free energy. "waste" heat is called "waste" because it cannot be used to do useful work.

Therefore I cannot bake a potato on my exhaust manifold and If I hold a pinwheel over it it will not spin.

The Second Law does not say you cannot use heat to do work. It says that you cannot use the heat of a closed system in equilibrium to do work. A system cannot be improved to %100 efficiency. You are certainly allowed to improve the efficiency from 10% to 20%. You will get more work for same amount of energy.

Wasting heat is called waste heat because you are wasting it. Not because it cannot be used.

I can use the waste heat from my car exhaust to fill a tissue paper hot air ballon; and it will rise. It will not cost me an extra iota of fuel. I am not getting something for nothing. I am burning fuel. I am, however, raising the efficieny of my fuel use from 25% to 25.000001%. This is still considerably less than %100, so I am not trying to power my car with a fan on the front bumper.

Plants do not suck energy out of the Sun. They do not, however, violate the Second Law either.

And I am free to concentrate the heat from my CPU into a cup of tea rather then dispersing that heat into that air. It doesn't cost me any increased motion in as much as a single electron to do so. There is no violation of the Second Law. The CPU radiates into the tea, the tea radiates into the air, the air radiates into space, warming the entire universe slightly and becoming unavailable to do work.

But in the meantime I have a hot cup of tea.

KFG

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Moofie]

"The Second Law does not say you cannot use heat to do work"

Of course not. However, you cannot exploit a temperature differential between a warmish computer battery and the room, and get a USEFUL amount of work out of it. (I'm using work in the technical "energy per unit time" sense, not in the "I had to go to work today" sense). I would be very, very surprised if you get longer battery runtime by running your cooling fans off of the trivial amount of electricity generated by these types of devices.

Could I be mistaken? Might this company be on to a revolutionary new way to generate electricity? Absolutely! Anything is possible.

However, until I see evidence of such, I will remain (what was that word? Oh yeah.) skeptical. We're not talking about heating your tea, or baking your potato on an exhaust header that you might notice gets a little hotter than your laptop. We're not talking about drying your clothes or boiling water to cool your room. Those were all examples you raised to argue with me, and I don't really understand why.

I do not accept the claims in this article at face value. I do not believe they are doing anything other than trying to drum up money from investors who understand physics poorly.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[mrchaotica]

So, no matter how you arrange it, if you're doing work it'll be less efficient. This is a simple, obvious concept! Let's use an analogy: imagine you're pushing something. Does it take more work than not pushing it? Obviously, yes. Now, imagine any kind of arbitrary mechanism between you and the thing you're trying to push, designed to make it easier. Is the amount of effort required still non-zero? Yes! Do you get it now?

Anyway, the bottom line is that this can only remove as much heat as a heat sink if and only if the amount of electricity it's generating is equal or less than zero. And even then it won't be as efficient, because its construction is inherently designed to be insulating, rather than conducting.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Vellmont]

So, no matter how you arrange it, if you're doing work it'll be less efficient.

Assuming that's true, you only need to design a heat sink or radiator or whatever to be better than the old thing at removing heat.

In your analogy, you just find a guy that's stronger. Now do you get it?

Re:Energy conversion devices

[kfg]

We're not talking about heating your tea, or baking your potato on an exhaust header that you might notice gets a little hotter than your laptop.

I have blisters on my fingers.

Might this company be on to a revolutionary new way to generate electricity?

No, because the principles which they are using are not only already well known, devices are already available. All they are claiming is an engineering advance that reduces cost of manufacture, just as the engineering of batteries has advanced without any revolution. Their claimed efficiency is about that of a good battery as well. Nothing that innately makes my mind boggle. You put energy into it, you get about 20% of that back in another form. Not exactly an Earth shattering claim.

Those were all examples you raised to argue with me, and I don't really understand why.

I don't really understand why you don't understand that heating water is generating electricity. It's one of the conventional methods.

I would be very, very surprised if you get longer battery runtime by running your cooling fans off of the trivial amount of electricity generated by these types of devices.

I would certainly be surprised if it's all really worth the expense, yes. They'd have to be damned cheap. That has nothing to do with violating any laws of physics. I feel much the same way about solar cells and they don't violate any laws of physics either. One of these would just be a solar cell (although not a photovoltaic one) if you put it out in the Sun. Do you have a problem with the idea of a photovoltaic solar cell driving a cooling fan? I've got a stupid hat over there that does that (hey, don't blame me, my mother bought it on a cruise ship. Got my Canadian flag umbrella hat the same way, although that one was a promotional give away. Mom comes home with some weird shit).

I do not believe they are doing anything other than trying to drum up money from investors who understand physics poorly.

I do believe the suggestion that these things could be used to drive computer fans from CPU/battery waste heat is an attempt to drum up money , but that is not the real use for these things in the first place and occurs down on their own list.

The real use is to convert propane/firewood/kerosene/what have you into electricity without moving parts. The revolution is in the cost per unit, not the physics. I'd love to get ahold of some of these things and see what I can do with them. I could probably spend days finding all sorts of nifty little things to do.

But I ain't buyin' any until they're cheap.

KFG

Re:Energy conversion devices

[iamacat]

At this point I haven't a clue why. I heat my home with an open flame. When my heat is on and I hand wash clothes, I dry them over that flame. My gas bill does not go up when I do so.

Resulting evaporation, does however lower the temperature of your house, which would drive your gas bill up if it got too cold for your comfort.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[iamacat]

You can't cool a room by opening the door to your refrigerator

You can, if you either only need cooling for a portion of the day or you ventilate the back side of refrigirator to outside.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Captain Digital]

Bear with me please - I'm not a scientist...just a graphic designer. If a vacuum is a great insulator, why wouldn't it be possible/practical to encase your CPU in one - or even your entire computer's case become a vacuum-sealed box? I know heat is a big element in computing, but so is noise. If I could get rid of my computer's fan noise, I'd be one happy camper. Any ideas on this? While I'm at it, I wouldn't see the "heat converting" chip as a solution to energy problems, but if were efficient enough, why couldn't it work in much the same way as a turbocharger on a gasoline-powered automobile...essentially taking the excess heat and turning it back into power.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[mpaulsen]

I shall now dispose of my air condtitioner and cool the room by putting a pot up to boil.

Putting a pot up to boil will, in fact, keep the room cooler than if you do not. Assuming, of course, that the burner is operating either way.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't a heat sink replacement, it would be placed between the processor and the heat sink. The devices does not create electricity from heat, it creates it from a difference in temperature between the two sides. The processor keeps one side hot while the heat sink cools the other side. So basically, it is eliminating a small amount of heat energy and creating electricity that can be used to power the fan on the heat sink or for another purpose.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[xsonofagunx]

yeah, but we were talking about processor fans, and [afaik] there really aren't many 120mm processor fans

Re:Energy conversion devices

[rolfwind]

The scientific method is just a formal version of put up or shut up, if you haven't noticed.

Re:Energy conversion devices

[Man Eating Duck]

why wouldn't it be possible/practical to encase your CPU in one

You wouldn't be interested in that, the point of cooling is to remove the heat from the chip. An insulator would keep it in, you want a heat conductor instead.

Computing?

[PreacherTom]

Revolutionize computing? How about revolutionizing LIFE. If true, this would be larger than controlled fusion.

Re:Computing?

[BoberFett]

Heat to electricity? Bring on global warming!

Re:Computing?

[c-reus]

everybody get yourselves a Prescott and that will generate all the electricity you will need.

Brilliant!

[PsyQo]

If we all implanted such a chip in our handpalms we could watch pr0n and save the world at the same time!

Re:Brilliant!

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Shave the cheerleader, save the world.

Re:Brilliant!

[SmlFreshwaterBuffalo]

Even better! Combine the following: Induction-powered flashlight and Fleshlight.

Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[Josh Lindenmuth]

The device sounds legit (it certainly doesn't break any laws of physics), but Eneco's plan for its longterm usage is just loopy. They say they'll initially try to improve battery life by coupling it with processors to recoup energy lost as heat. Great startup plan, but then it goes downhill ... from the article:

Brown also sees the chips ultimately replacing batteries altogether. He argues that by linking the modules to a microburner - a catalytic burner that produces between 275 and 600 degrees centigrade you can heat the chips and generate enough power to run the device.

In theory this approach would be far cleaner as the burners that Eneco is planning to employ use Ethanol

So in other words, Eneco plans to replace our laptop batteries with small Ethanol burning stoves that run hotter than a car engine? How would this ever fly, given people are worried about their current laptops catching fire? Also, who wants to fill up their laptop with gas every couple days? Energy coming from the grid at least in theory can be from renewable sources (wind, solar, tides, etc.). Why push Ethanol, a fuel which cannot be used on a large scale (and arguably requires more energy to produce than it provides)? The only reason I can think of is that they are trying to ride the "Ethanol investing wave" that hit markets over the past couple years (and appears to be waning).

Hopefully investors will see through the zany longterm plan and focus on the merits of the product, it really does appear to be valuable across a wide range of industries.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[anonimouskiller]

actually ethanol from soy or sugar cane is a very clean energy source, and it doesn't require more energy to produce than it provides. Brazil has been using ethanol for more than 2 decades now, it's still cheaper then gasoline and polutes less. although the 'stoves in the lap' idea seems kinda dumb.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[marvinglenn]

The device sounds legit (it certainly doesn't break any laws of physics),[...]

No... it exactly DOES break a law of physics (specifically thermodynamics). The 2nd law of Thermodynamics.

Specifically, it reduces the entropy of the system. The heat going into and supposedly being consumed by the device has a higher entropy than the electricity coming out.

It would be great if the 2nd law was wrong and they disproved it, but until then this looks like a scam for investors. If it's not a scam for investors, they need to publish a research paper where the phenomena can be independently tested and observed. If they publish properly they will protect any patent position they wish to pursue. If they go the route of 'trade secret' then they reek of yet another perpertual motion investor scam.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[Niebieski]

Why push Ethanol, a fuel which cannot be used on a large scale (and arguably requires more energy to produce than it provides)? (emphasis mine)

Just try to leave grape juice on the table for two weeks. How do you think we "discovered" wine in the first place?

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[Josh Lindenmuth]

No, it does not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, all it does is increase the efficiency of the system. This principle has been demonstrated for over 150 years. For at least the past 20 years they've had diodes that could convert heat into energy, they were just expensive and not very efficient (in high school physics I experimented with them almost 20 years ago). This device reduces the prior technology's costs, and increases the heat-to-energy efficiency to 20-30% from miniscule percentages before.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[Anonymous Coward]

"In theory this means you can stick the module on the side of a boiler, for example, and the external or cold side will still be very hot, but it'll be sufficiently cold compared to the side actually in contact with the boiler that there is a differential capable of generating a significant amount of electricity."

The article suggests this still needs a "cold/hot" sides, i.e. a temperature differential. So to me it at least sounds plausible... so where does it reduce the entropy of a system? Maybe I missed something while skimming the article.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[sickofthisshit]

And how much energy went into growing the grapes and making it into juice? More or less than you get from burning the ethanol, after distilling it from the mash?

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[kfg]

The magic bullet for portable devices is the instant recharge.

KFG

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[marvinglenn]

Looking at this closer, from TFA:

[...]Eneco is a development stage company that claims to have invented and patented a "solid state energy conversion/generation chip" that will convert heat directly into electricity or alternatively refrigerate down to -200 degrees celsius when electricity is applied.

[...]the energy of a hot metal over comes the electrostatic forces holding electrons to its surface. These free electrons then pass across a vacuum to a cold metal[...]

The two above quotes are mutually exclusive. I'm starting to see that this looking like very sloppy article writing. The one thing I can say with confidence is that the writer probably doesn't have any engineering or scientific degree.

If the first assertion is true, they're violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics. If the second assertion is true, they just reinvented a peltier device or thermocouple. My two canned responses are "*sarcastically* yeah right" and "*sarcastically* big whoop", respectively.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

You wouldn't want several of them running in an enclosed space either.

I really don't see this in helping make longer running computers. I think they'll just get faster. If people wanted longer running computers, they can buy notebooks based on lower voltage chips. They run slower but with some current models, you can get twelve hours of operation in a 3lb package.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Though they are not instant, they do make these things called batteries which can be changed within 10-15 seconds usually.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[Moofie]

"If they publish properly they will protect any patent position they wish to pursue."

Cogent alliteration for the win! Gold star!

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[Goaway]

There's nothing contradictory in those two statements, unless you're objecting to the use of "heat" instead of "heat differential", which is just sloppy writing and has little to do with the functioning of the actual device. And I was under the impression that they were claiming exactly to have re-invented the peltier device, only more efficient.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[Zork the Almighty]

Their plans certainly do sound zany. They should be looking for places that *have to be hot*, temporarily, before the excess energy is discarded. My house is full of them: dishwasher, oven, washing machine, shower. Assuming warm weather (ie: I don't want to heat my house) the excess heat from these devices could be recycled into more electricity for me. Granted that's not a lot of savings, but the potential of having a chip is that you can put this functionality anywhere at very low cost. I bet commerce and industry is full of examples where a 20 or 30 percent recovery rate would produce worthwhile savings over the lifetime of the device.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[rujholla]

The first thought that I have when I read this was a better solar energy collector than photovoltaic cells? But reading through this it doesn't seem to be on more than one or two peoples minds. So... I must be wrong -- can someone explain why this wouldn't be a better way to convert sunlight to energy?

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[jibjibjib]

A lot less than how much went into thousands of years of forest to produce the equivalent amount of fossil fuels.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[kfg]

Yes, but with batteries you have to carry spares, while with instant charge devices you only have to . . .carry a fuel tank.

I distinctly said "magic" bullet. I was not disagreeing with OP, simply pointing out the particular illusion being sold. Nasty habit of mine explaining how the trick is done.

This is not to say that illusion cannot be without value, however, in the right context.

KFG

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[bcrowell]

Energy coming from the grid at least in theory can be from renewable sources (wind, solar, tides, etc.).
Realistically, most of the world's electricity comes from fossil fuels. Ethanol, unlike fossil fuels, is a renewable resource, and burning it doesn't produce greenhouse gases.

Anyway, just because this device might sound impractical for fueling a laptop, that doesn't mean there wouldn't be any application for it. One thing I think would be cool is that -200 C is low enough to make oxygen and nitrogen condense. That would be a fun thing to be able to do without needing a big, expensive mechanical refrigerator. Another possibility might be to use it as source of electricity in wilderness areas; it would be a lot simpler mechanically than a gasoline-powered generator, and wouldn't make any noise or noxious exhaust.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[RevMike]

Ethanol, unlike fossil fuels, is a renewable resource, and burning it doesn't produce greenhouse gases.

I'm being a little pedantic, but burning ethanol does produce greenhouse gases. If the ethanol is produced organically, the same amount of greenhouse gases were absorbed to create the biomass in the first place, so there is a net zero. But it is possible to process fossil fuels into ethanol...

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[stardude82]

The first thing to remember is, this is a battery replacement and not a cure all for energy generation. Batteries are horribly inefficient in storing energy and thats on top of the whole burning hydrocarbons, converting it to electricity transporting it to the power socket and then converting from AC to DC. You end up using close to 2-4% of the energy you start with. What they have, from looking at Articles in IEEE and Journal of Applied Physics is a simple chip which uses a phenomenon different than the Peltier/Seebeck effect, as some one else mention thermionic emission, to generate a voltage. Also reading the articles, the efficiency of a single device is pretty horrible around 3-4%. Now, however if they make some sort of multi-segmented device (or holding out something from the papers), that might raise up to 5-10% which puts it in range of regular Seebeck thermoelectrics, but in probably a much more compact and and therefore cheaper setup. The papers talk about using InSb, HgTeCd, PbTe, andInGaSbAs. If that's the case, you can probably make some pretty good headway in usable energy density compared to a battery, which Also, again, we're talking about some sort of fuel cell not an open flame and the area of which will probably be very small and probably get as hot as a regular Li-Ion batter would.

Re:Long term plan ... what were they thinking?

[sickofthisshit]

Also irrelevant. As humans, we have no choice about which ancient organic matter got turned into petroleum.

On the other hand, we do have a choice about whether to take petroleum and refine it to make gasoline, or whether to take petroleum and other energy resources to grow corn and make it into ethanol. Putting one's thumb on the scale by neglecting to account for *all* of the energy inputs to the ethanol making process will make it impossible to correctly choose the most efficient solution.

Where is the energy going?

[jandrese]

Ok, so it converts latent heat into electricity, presumably working like a heat engine with the cold side fixed at absolute zero somehow? If you add energy, it gets even colder and produces...more energy? Is it just me or does this thing sound a lot like a perpetual motion machine component? Either this thing is bogus or the article is misleading as to what it actually does.

Re:Where is the energy going?

[lhbtubajon]

No, you misunderstood. There are two apparent functions that are totally separate:

1) Extract heat and use heat differential to generate electricity.

2) Use electricity supply to cool down to -200.

Either one or the other, but not both at the same time.

Re:Where is the energy going?

[Doctor Memory]

It sounds kind of odd to me. If they're a heat sink when producing electricity, wouldn't running current through them turn them into a heat source? Obviously I didn't RTFA, but that made my bogometer twitch. Seems like some sort of reflexive property is being violated.

Re:Where is the energy going?

[SoapDish]

When the electricity is sent through the device, it simply moves the heat over from one spo to another. At least, that's how I understood it after reading part of the article.

Re:Where is the energy going?

[NotZed]

Yes, it would generate extra some heat - since it isn't 100% efficient. But passing electricity through it makes it a heat pump. You would need a temperature differential to make it cool/warm something (i.e. a heatsink or solar collector). e.g. like a fridge, its cold on the inside, but warm on the outside.

It's already possible using other devices, but not as efficient as this is claimed to be.

Re:Where is the energy going?

[wsherman]

Use electricity supply to cool down to -200 C.

That's not exactly a fundamental science discovery but if it's true it's actually pretty neat.

Oxygen condenses at -183.0 C and nitrogen condenses at -195.8 C so if these things became widely available you could make your own liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen.

Unfortunately, liquid hydrogen is down at -252.8 C so you wouldn't be able to condense the hydrogen gas you got from electrolysis of water to make your own liquid hydrogen and oxygen rocket engine.

Re:Where is the energy going?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Theoretically, the device should get colder with use, as you draw heat from the surroundings, and convert it to electrical energy.

Re:Where is the energy going?

[Anonymous Coward]

Theoretically you need heat transfer (a temperature differential) to do such a conversion to electrical energy. In other words, a heat source and a heat sink.

The article might have been sloppy but I don't think it suggests that this device can generate electricity by simply drawing heat from its surroundings. If this device actually DID do that, the inventor would have won a nobel prize for breaking the laws of thermodynamics, and the world's energy problems would be solved overnight.

Re:Where is the energy going?

[Zaatxe]

Either one or the other, but not both at the same time.

Oh, bummer... I had the hope of cooling my beer from its own heat! We'd live an utopy!

Re:Where is the energy going?

[Kjella]

Unfortunately, liquid hydrogen is down at -252.8 C so you wouldn't be able to condense the hydrogen gas you got from electrolysis of water to make your own liquid hydrogen and oxygen rocket engine.

Well, that's good since otherwise it'd be banned because it allows Osama to build his own ICBM ;)

heat - electricity

[rootEToTheIPi]

I didn't RTFA so...it seems to me that a chip that converts heat energy into electricity could have uses far more important uses than computing.

Peltier?

[Deflatamouse!]

The description sounds like a peltier to me. Apply some current, and the device generates a temperature differential.

Can a temperature differential cause the device to operate in reverse?

Re:Peltier?

[mcnut]

yes, The reverse is a well studied application, though the materials used are slightly different for optimal current instead of optimal temperature difference

Re:Peltier?

[Technician]

He also claims it can work at tempratures way outside the safe range of peltier junctions. From the article;

The result is a solid state energy conversion chip that can operate at temperatures of up to 600 degrees celcius and deliver absolute efficiencies in terms of how much heat energy is converted to electricity of between 20 and 30 percent.

This is only 60 degrees below the 660 degree melting point of aluminum. Using the CPU as a heat source just doesn't jive. Cooling a CPU involves a path of low thermal resistance, not a high thermal resistance of a thermoelectric device.

Thermocouple

[gus goose]

Solid-state device that converts heat to electricity....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocouple

Invented 1821 - Prior art?

gus

P.S. Yes, I know that TC's rely on a temperature differential, not just a temperature... ;-)

Re:Thermocouple

[marvinglenn]

A thermocouple derives energy (in the form of electricity) from the flow of heat from one side to another. That process (thermocouple) is not a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

Re:Thermocouple

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and the effect of thermionic emmission was discovered in 1873. It's how the vacuum tubes in the CRT monitors used by our ancient ancestors used to work.

It has been said that Thomas Edison discovered the vacuum tube by mistake, but didn't know anything it might be useful for, so he patented it and set it on a shelf.

Re:Thermocouple

[blank axolotl]

From the summary in the article, it looks like this new device also relies on a temperature differential (and not just a temperature):
The electrons are ejected from a hot metal plate and condense on a cold metal plate.

So, it's not that revolutionary/counter to the laws of physics. As you say, it's similar in effect to a thermocouple.

Re:Thermocouple

[Goaway]

Do you have any idea what "prior art" even means?

Re:Thermocouple

[julesh]

Yes, except that this is a completely different mechanism, taking what used to be known as a "vacuum thermionic converter" and replacing the vacuum with (what sounds like) a layer of silicon. I don't know how they made that work, but if it does, it'll make manufacturing these things substantially easier...

Re:Thermocouple

[armb]

> P.S. Yes, I know that TC's rely on a temperature differential, not just a temperature

So does anything that doesn't break the laws of thermodynamics. The differential is mentioned in the article, just not in the submitter's summary.

This is new?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Peltier coolers have been around for awhile now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier_effect

What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article and it says you need a heat sink! I was hoping this damn think broke the laws of thermodynamics!

Dupe

[Ancil]

Dupe from at least 2002. Both the slashdot article and the technology.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

If I attach this to my hotter-than-hell laptop battery, will it charge itself?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but it will discharge itself a LOT more quickly.

Similar work been done before

[davidmcn]

A few years ago (6 I believe) a company called Cool Chips LLC (which was traded on PinkSheets.com back then) claimed to have done the same thing. Unfortunately outside of the first round of announcements (which may have even been on Slashdot), nothing more was mentioned. In the comments back then it was hypothesized that an energy conglomerate or oil company would buy Cool Chips out to keep the technology from ever coming to the market. Me wonders if that might have happened, or if some of the primaries from Cool Chips are now a part of this venture.

Re:Similar work been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

They're still there - http://www.coolchips.gi/ - and they hold some patents on the process. They seem to perpetually be about 100 days away from shipping product - have been for years.

Their parent company http://borealis.com/ has lots of technologies that are equally world-changing, and almost equally vaporous.

Re:Similar work been done before

[Shadyman]

See Also Power Chips, PLC, also owned by Borealis.

Re:Similar work been done before

[Bozdune]

I've been on the parent's site, and on a few of its child companies. Lots of big numbers on the books and vaporous revenue. However, their electric motor company site does have an interesting flash presentation on the technology, plus what looks like a dribble of real income, and perhaps even a real application in which the product has actually worked (one must sign an NDA to see a video of it in action). Unfortunately, I don't have the background to evaluate it.

Re:Similar work been done before

[Rahosi]

Cool Chips plc & Power Chips plc are sister companies, which ARE traded on the Pink Sheets (along with other subsidiaries), & very active in the final stages of research. Power Chips need a little more research money and then 90 ~ 120 days later they will enter the final development & manufacture phase. Cool Chips would follow in short order. I made a Power Chips presentation at the Clean Energy Showcase in London today. 75% of Carnot efficiency! Besides being involved with the companies, I am a shareholder. Their websites are regularly updated and the parent company, Borealis Exploration Ltd, releases weekly updates. Try Googling & you will find plenty of info!

Woohoo I have two options

[McNihil]

Burn a fiery death of an exploding battery.

OR

Massive Freezer burn on my lap and thus gonads.

This is truly astonishing.

I do not believe a word of this.

Re:Woohoo I have two options

[multimed]

Burn a fiery death of an exploding battery.

OR

Massive Freezer burn on my lap and thus gonads.

Robert Frost pondered the same thing...kind of. (Not to often I get to use my lit geekiness)

..meanwhile i an underground laboratory

[Anonymous Coward]

Mwaaaahaaaahaaaarrrr
I have managed to construct a solid state device that converts electricity into heat!
It could reach phenomenal temperatures! And no moving parts! Oh, wait..

-200C ?

[wumpus188]

Yep, why not... All they have to do is to invent a material with negative resistance.

Re:-200C ?

[SEMW]

What? No you wouldn't. Ever heard of... Well, a freezer? That's a device capable of turning electricity into a temperature differential, and as far as I know, doesn't break any laws of Thermodynamics. It's called a heat pump. The device in TFA can also act as a heat pump, probably using the Peltier effect.

Re:-200C ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Such as a Tunnel Diode?...

Re:-200C ?

[Moofie]

Well, heck! Why don't you hook two of them thar Peltier things together, and you could generate an infinite amount of electricity! That's even better than the cat-buttered-toast generator idea.

Re:-200C ?

[SEMW]

Not only would you not generate an infinite amount of electricity, you wouldn't generate *any* electricity, because a Peltier device doesn't generate electricity; it's a heat pump, which *uses* electricity to generate a heat differential. You're thinking of a heat *engine*, perhaps, which uses a heat differential to generate electricity; the opposite of a heat pump. Hooking two heat pumps side by side would generate twice the electrity of one, but only if the hot sink and the cold sink had constant temperature and the two sinks did not affect each other at all (not hugely realistic). Hooking two heat pumps together front to back would just be stupid, and would generate less energy than one on its own due to fundamental limitations in efficiency (no heat pump can be 100% efficient even in theory unless the cold sink is at absolute zero). It's a similar story for hooking two Peltier devices together: side by side would generate twice the heat differential if the sinks had constant temperature and the devices don't affect each other (again, not very realistic). Hooking two Peltier devices front to back is not actually as silly as hooking two heat pumps front to back, but is still not as efficient as having them side by side.

(Yes, I know you weren't being serious, but what the hey.)

Carbon Neutral? Really??

[Freestyling]

I would also point out, that even if they were to deploy large numbers of ethanol burning "batteries" the amount of ethanol, and the purity required would mean that the only way to produce the ethanol would be through hydration of ethene. This involves reacting the ethene gas with steam at a high temperature and pressure, needing large amount of energy as well as the ethene as a raw ingredient from crude oil. I really don't see how that can be carbon neutral in any way.

Re:Carbon Neutral? Really??

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

Kinda dumb concept anyway, when you are sitting on an airplane that is going to burn 100+ pounds of fossil fuel to get you to your destination.

Re:Carbon Neutral? Really??

[Anonymous Coward]

Slow down cowboy... first of all, the purity of distilled yeast-produced ethanol is more than sufficient for the purposes of generating heat. And besides, even if it wasn't carbon neutral, the real breakthrough would be harnessing the energy density of a fuel such as ethanol, which would be many tens or hundreds of times greater than even the best Li-polymer batteries

Re:Carbon Neutral? Really??

[julesh]

Slow down cowboy... first of all, the purity of distilled yeast-produced ethanol is more than sufficient for the purposes of generating heat.

Yes, but probably not in the micro-scale catalytic burners that they'd need to use to get this down to laptop-battery size.

And besides, even if it wasn't carbon neutral, the real breakthrough would be harnessing the energy density of a fuel such as ethanol, which would be many tens or hundreds of times greater than even the best Li-polymer batteries

But probably fairly similar to a direct-methanol fuel cell. The only advantage of this over such a fuel cell as far as I see is that (a) ethanol's easier to produce than methanol and (b) it probably doesn't require large quantities of platinum catalyst.

Intel announces new chip

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel announces new chip to turn electricity into heat, I believe it's called Pentium or something like that. It's apparently very very VERY very good at it.

Re:Intel announces new chip

[Technician]

Intel announces new chip to turn electricity into heat

The facts are they are getting much worse at it. Check out the power specs on the two processor Conroe chip the Core 2 Duo. It's less than 65 watts. Now check the competition.. Intel has been getting pretty bad at turning electricity into heat.

Re:Intel announces new chip

[Anonymous Coward]

The facts are they are getting much worse at it.

Yes, thank you, Poindexter, very helpful. It was a JOKE, stop disassembling it.

Re:Intel announces new chip

[slashjunkie]

So, by putting one of these heat-to-electricity chips on the motherboard next to the Pentium 4, surely the net energy consumption of such a system would be near zero?

IQ

[prurientknave]

it seems the iq of the average slashdotter on technical subjects is plummeting. all we have are a bunch of cliche regurgitating, pseudo political gadget freaks

Re:IQ

[mctk]

Remember, ask not what slashdot can do for you, but what you can do for slasdot. (Posted from a brand new Titanium Pentium Turion 1024 bit processer with a 128meg RAM front side BUS chip and ultra-threaded trio-core optical solid state transistor drives.)

Re:IQ

[prurientknave]

omgz rofflecakes! only old people in korea have turions

Re:IQ

[MrHanky]

Well, that's what happens when iPods and OS X are allowed to become the height of cool. Back in the days, Slashdot was about what you can do with technology (using an old 486 running Linux (or even DOS, who cares) to control a percolator through the serial port, for instance), now it's about what technology can do to you, or, rather, to your grandma. It's all about finished and polished products, ready for purchase by the consumer, to be seamlessly intergrated into an experience. Everything has to just work in the way consumers have come to expect from Big Corporations.

So what do you expect? There's no reason why people here still should be interested in how and why things work.

This is the problem with engineering

[QuantumG]

When engineers do science, you just get secretive research leading to unconfirmed claims. Publish your work. Let other people confirm it. When there's a strong agreement as to what is going on the units will sell themselves.

Peltier-Seebeck

[tigre]

See wikipedia for more. Seebeck is the reverse effect.

Yes but...

[Anonymous Coward]

how long will it be before The Machines start using us to produce electricity?

Re:Yes but...

[Technician]

how long will it be before The Machines start using us to produce electricity?

Already hapening..

http://www.haimei.com/mobile_phone_accessory/manua l_charger.htm

http://www.the-gadgeteer.com/review/shakelight_nig htstar_led_flashlight_review

http://www.jakeludington.com/gadget_envy/20050707_ hand_crank_led_flashlight.html

http://www.ambientweather.com/emra.html

The summary is bogus

[paladinwannabe2]

This does not violate the second law of thermodynamics. What it does is turn a heat differential (i.e. two objects of different temperatures) into a source of electricity as heat flows between them. Its purpose is to make systems more efficient- for instance, your laptop produces a lot of waste heat, and if we could recapture some of that lost energy it would improve your laptop's battery life. It also has the reverse effect of pumping heat (like an air conditioner) when electricity is applied to it.

Re:The summary is bogus

[TheGavster]

My big question is, how do you get the cold sink on a laptop? Are we putting this device between the CPU and the cooling aparatus? It seems like the thermal gradient there is a little small to be of much use.

Very silly idea

[Ancient_Hacker]

"Thermionic energy" sounds really wizzy, until you think about it a bit. You are trying to get electrons to boil off a hot surface and plonk themselves onto a cooler collector plate. Which means you need a hot emitter, a cool colector, and in between something that will pass electrons, but not too much heat. Basically, a losing proposition, as anything that passes electrons is almost by definition an excellent conductor of heat. Try to think of somethign that conducts electricity but insulates heat. Hard to come up with isnt it?

There are thermionic devices already around, you're probably looking at one. Vacuum tubes and CRT's are thermionic devices. Not very powerful ones--a typical tube only boils off microamps of current at under a volt, while requiring several watts of electrical power to heat the emitter. Not very impressive.

Re:Very silly idea

[Overzeetop]

Actually, that's exactly the situation for a Peltier cooler (Seebeck (sp) device if run in "reverse" to get electricity). The mismatch in electrical vs thermal conductivity is, in fact the key, if I remember. I played with them for a while, trying to get a working model for a countertop cooler (candymaking/culinary uses), but never really got the time to perfect it withing the application parameters normally encountered in residential kitchens. Fun little things, but brutally inefficient.

Re:Very silly idea

[Subsound90]

see them talk about is sending current through this device and being able to cool it down to -200 C without any bulky heat exchangers. If it does that I would stick a few in my car, a few -200 C would be fine to run the AC without any refrigerants. Heat into electricity isn't far fetched, but hard to do economically at smaller scales. I think it's bogus till I have some one independently show it works. There have been a lot of huge claims and nothing to back it up with recently. It's not to say it's not a good idea or it will never work, I'm just in the camp of I would like to see it to believe it.

Re:Very silly idea

[PeterAitch]

Just a couple of very basic observations:

Vacuum tubes have already been mentioned, since they pass electrons (of sufficient energy) but can easily be designed to have little thermal transfer to the collector (because a suitable shiny metallic surface will be a bad emitter). They may not be a useful engineering concept in this context, though, for the reasons already given concerning their efficiency for this application. Oh, and don't forget the bias if you want to collect a useful number of electrons.

Also, if a significant number of electrons do manage to "plonk" themselves onto the collector, they will eventually heat it up. Even if it's a good radiator, it may still need additional cooling.

My (limited) experience of start-up companies is that they are always economical with the truth (but not with their promises) and never deliver what they promise in the specified timescale. Rather like many much bigger hi-tech companies...

Re:Very silly idea

[julesh]

Which means you need a hot emitter, a cool colector, and in between something that will pass electrons, but not too much heat. Basically, a losing proposition, as anything that passes electrons is almost by definition an excellent conductor of heat. Try to think of somethign that conducts electricity but insulates heat. Hard to come up with isnt it?

Well, it does sound as though that's the problem they've solved. Reading the article, it sounds as though they've found some kind of semiconductor that works as you describe.

Thermocouple

[steveo777]

This is slashdot, so by the time I've typed this it may be redundant, but we've been using thermocouples for a long time to measure temperture based on the electricity they generate. Mostly they go into thermostats in homes and also are used in digital thermometers.

I read part of TFA but it just sounds like a better thermocouple.

Show me a production, working product. Otherwise, I'll wait for someone to come up with a way to 'catch' entropy.

Manufacturing costs will make or break this

[Orange Crush]

Hey, if they can manufacture lots and lots of these things (and cheaply) this will make a really big splash. The Peltier Effect is one of the Really Neat Things(tm) in thermodynamics, IMHO. I wonder how well this would work in a solar-power setting. There's one project currently in the works with big reflector dishes aimed at sterling generators. This can allow the same sort of rig, but with entirely solid state equipment.

Re:Manufacturing costs will make or break this

[OnesAndNoughts]

FTA: The chips are so small that packaging them together in a module is tricky and the focus of the development effort is currently in this area.
Stikes me they'd be better off trying to get this technology on the same die as the CPU/GPU/WhateverPU. Be an interesting fabrication problem but should be more efficient that adding to the component count, double-stacking "Chips" and other such shenanigans...

Peltier

[Peet42]

It's called a Peltier device, and has been around for decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier-Seebeck_effec t

Destops?

[Joe The Dragon]

What are the planes for use in a desktop as they have more heat then a laptop?

Re:Destops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't anyone think of the Grammar Nazis?!

thermodynamics

[bcrowell]

According to the laws of thermodynamics, the conversion of heat to other forms of energy requires access to thermal reservoirs at two different temperatures, and there's a limit on the possible efficiency of the process, which is 1-T(low)/T(high). Their press release doesn't seem to be claiming anything that violates this, so it's not obviously voodoo science or anything. However, any such heat engine is only going to be useful when (a) you have cheap access to hot and cold reservoirs, (b) the temperature difference is fairly high, and (c) the efficiency of the heat engine is superior to the other practical heat engines that you have to choose from, or there's some other practical reason why this particular heat engine is better for your application.

Re:thermodynamics

[human spam filter]

Yes, you are right the efficiency is 1-T(low)/T(high). As others pointed out, devices like this are also known as Peltier elements or thermocouples, depending on how they are used. If you want to use a thermocouple to convert heat to electric energy, you usually use several of them in series in order to increase the voltage. The problem is that thermocouples are made of metals, which are not only good at conducting electric current but are also good at conducting heat. So if you have thermocouples between a hot and a cold pool, a lot of heat will just be conducted through the metal and not converted into electric energy. I don't know maybe this company has found a way to design their devices such that the heat conduction is minimized, which would greatly increase the efficiency. I'm just guessing.

Re:thermodynamics

[julesh]

If you actually, you know, read the article, you wouldn't need to guess. They've placed a layer of semiconducter between the hot and cold plates that acts as a thermal barrier while allowing electrons to pass.

Human battery

[MECC]

"Brown also sees the chips ultimately replacing batteries altogether."

Especially if implanted in people. From birth. In vast crops...

Second Law of Thermodynamics

[paladinwannabe2]

The problem is that converting heat energy directly into electricity violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not unlike perpetual motion machines. Thus anyone claiming that they can convert heat into electricity is lying, stupid, or discovering new laws of the universe. What this device does is convert heat differentials into electricity- similar to a steam generator, but without the moving parts. In order to make electricity it needs something hot on one side of it and something (relatively) cold on the other. It makes electricity while heat flows through it.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[kfg]

The problem is that converting heat energy directly into electricity violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. . .What this device does is convert heat differentials into electricity. . .It makes electricity while heat flows through it.

You are confusing heat with temperature. Temperature is the energy content. Heat is its flow. This device converts temperature differentials into electricity; with heat.

KFG

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[dougmc]

The problem is that converting heat energy directly into electricity violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Exactly so, and that's what I thought the moment I saw the summary.

However, it's possible that they've just created a more efficient thermocouple/heat pump/etc. equivilent, and the person writing the story didn't realize that heat had to flow from somewhere to somewhere to create electricity.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[djh101010]

The problem is that converting heat energy directly into electricity violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not unlike perpetual motion machines.

Can you explain how heat (infrared photons, right?) is different in this regard than visible light (as in a photovoltaic cell)? I'm not busting your chops here, I just don't understand why the wavelength of the light matters in this context.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[k1773re7f]

Thermocouples definiately do not violate SLoT. I in fact have used thermocouples and thermopiles to power low drain electronic circuits. It does require a bit of heat. And not all heat is converted. But it can happen and *does not* violate Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[LWATCDR]

No this device doesn't.
I read the link. It looks like an improved thermocouple. It uses a heat-sink and a heat source just like an RTG.
As one person said to discredit the story "it is like powering your car with it's exhaust". A gas turbine engine does exactly that.
This wouldn't be a perpetual motion machine since it would still require a power source. What this device does is simply recovers some of the wasted energy from the hot chip and feed it back into the battery.
The only "questionable" part is this mystery semiconductor that conducts electrons a lot better than it conducts heat.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Moofie]

Just ask MC Hawking.

Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it,
to have you all jumping, shouting saying it.
Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder,
in a system that is closed, like with a border.
It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness,
proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress.
"What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming,
it seems I gotta start the explaining.

You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me!
Yeah, you know me!
Yeah, you know me!
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[not already in use]

A perpetual motion machine would assume 100% energy efficiency. This technology does not claim, nor come close to claiming this.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[DerekLyons]

The problem is that converting heat energy directly into electricity violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not unlike perpetual motion machines.

Hmm... I guess thermocouples are a figment of my imagination? After all, nobody has ever built a device powered by them.
 
 

Thus anyone claiming that they can convert heat into electricity is lying, stupid, or discovering new laws of the universe.

Says the guy who just pronounced something vital to many space missions of the past, present, and future.
 
 

What this device does is convert heat differentials into electricity- similar to a steam generator, but without the moving parts.

I don't know if you simply don't know how steam generators work - or if you are merely a pedantic idiot who simply doesn't know how steam generators work. (I suspect the latter.)

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[volpe]

Agreed on the temperature differentials part, but I don't think I agree with the characterization of temperature as energy content and heat as its flow. Heat is the thermal energy content. It need not flow. An object that isn't at absolute zero contains "heat". Temperature is the average kinetic energy of the constituent particles. A brick at 100 degrees C contains more heat than a grain of sand at 100 degrees C, even though they are the same temperature. And that statement about heat is a statement about a static condition, with no flow involved.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Aidski]

Heat is always flowing. Things have an energy state (and for thermal energy that's essentially its temperature), but that's it. static heat really doesn't exist. It's conducting, radiating or convecting, or else you wouldn't be able to measure any heat. Also, constant temperature doesn't mean there's no heat flow, it means flow in = flow out (to put it simply).

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[wsherman]

Can you explain how heat (infrared photons, right?) is different in this regard than visible light (as in a photovoltaic cell)?

That's an interesting question. I have some ideas but I have to admit that I'm not sure.

If the energy distribution of the photons has a higher average than the kinetic energy distribution of the material the photons interact with, then this would be a temperature gradient of sorts. Infra-red photons from black-body radiation would be likely to have the same energy distribution as the material they were interacting with (assuming the emitting material is at the same temperature as the absorbing material). On the other hand, visible light has an energy distribution that is higher than the kinetic energy distribution of a material at room temperature.

In the case of radio waves (or electromagnetic induction generally), it seems that radio wave photons would all be "aligned". In that case, knowing the alignment would allow the energy conversion / extraction. That is, the second law doesn't limit conversion between "ordered" (non-heat-like) forms of energy.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[LeDopore]

An easy explanation: if your cold reservoir is as hot as your hot reservoir, you'll be emitting exactly as many infra-red photons as you're absorbing. Solar cells couldn't work (even in theory, with ideal materials) if they were at the temperature of the surface of the sun, since they would radiate as much energy as they absorb.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[kfg]

Mea Culpa. Forty whacks to the back of the head with Sears & Salinger for me; an "I corrected KFG on something basic" button for you.

KFG

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[dremel]

Can you explain how heat (infrared photons, right?) is different in this regard ...

I'm afraid that heat is not "infrared photons". Heat is a measurement of the Brownian motion. Useful energy is available from temperature differentials.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[hacksoncode]

Because infrared radiation is not heat, it's infrared radiation. It can be produced by hot things, and it can make other things hot, but it is not, itself, "heat".

Heat is the energy contained in random motion of particles. The key here is *random". If you extract energy from pure heat that's just sitting somewhere, you're reducing the entropy of the hot thing, practically by definition. In order for this to not be a violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics, you would have to create even more entropy somewhere else. The easiest way to do this would be to generate more heat than you removed, but then you're up against conservation of energy. There are other ways to create entropy, though, so it's not technically impossible.

The reason you can grab energy out of heat moving from a hot location to a cooler location is that that net motion is not random, so you can increase the entropy of the system by randomizing the non-random element.

Note: yes, all the above is a dramatic over-simplification.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Vellmont]

In order to make electricity it needs something hot on one side of it and something (relatively) cold on the other. It makes electricity while heat flows through it.

I'm not sure I understand where it says this isn't exactly what's occuring. The hot side is whatever your heat source is, the cold side is the atmosphere, water source, or some other large heat sink. The article references making laptops more efficient (running fans off the heat produced by the processor). There's nothing I read that somehow infers they're violating thermodynamics.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Anonymous Coward]

Because heat is not "infrared photons." Any substance with temperature above absolute zero does radiate away energy, and most of this energy radiated is in the infrared region for room temperature objects. However heat, itself, is not radiated photons, even though it can be transfered that way.

The amount of radiation is proportional to the fourth power of absolute temperature of object, so for cooler objects (around RT) the radiation is very low and heat is transfered mainly by conduction and convection, which involve direct contact and energy exchange between molecules. Any device that rely on radiative heat transfer must operate at much higher temperatures (that is, it must extract heat from a high temperature object, the device itself need not [and rather not] be at high temperature.) This is also true for any device that converts radiated heat into some other form of energy: if heat cannot be efficiently transfered, it also cannot be efficiently converted to something else. Therefore solar panels can convert radiated heat directly into electricity (sun is hot enough to efficiently radiate away heat), while a device operating from a low temperature source must utilize some other kind of principle (or suffer a huge efficiency loss.)

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's right. Heat in itself can never be a source of energy -- you need a heat differential. To quote the first line of the Wikipedia article you linked: "In electronics, thermocouples...can also be used as a means to convert thermal potential difference into electric potential difference". If you don't have a thermal potential difference, the thermocouple does nothing, even when there is heat present.

In other words, if you put a thermocouple in a box that has uniform heat -- regardless of how hot -- it will not generate electricity. But if you put one in a box that is not uniformly hot (i.e. has a heat differential), it could generate electricity, although in the process it would move the box toward uniform heat.

The radioisotope generators you mention run on the same principle: The radioisotopes heat up the inside of the generator, setting up a heat differential between the inside and the outside, which the thermocouples can use to generate electricity. When the isotopes run out, the inside and outside of the generator settle to the same heat and the thermocouple stops generating. Even though there is still heat present, there is nothing you can do with it.

While the device from the article operates on heat differentials, the summary says it operates directly on heat, which is why people are skeptical.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[ozbird]

The only "questionable" part is this mystery semiconductor that conducts electrons a lot better than it conducts heat.

Their patent on the solid state energy converter mentions that they have been experimenting with indium antimonide (InSb).
They also hold a patent for a way to make N-type semiconducting diamond, which may hint to where they're heading with this (or not.)

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[bugg]

Warm bodies tend to emit some sort of electromagnetic radiation - infrared is a common one associated with heated things. But it's only a very small amount of work that happens this way - which should be obvious, if you've ever thought about why a Thermos works.

To get noticable power from hot things in general, you'd have to do more than capture the infrared. You'd have to take advantage of the motion of the molecules.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I'll let other people tell you why infrared photons have little to do with heat and instead point you to this that might be of interest.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[SpaceCracker]

So, if I were to take some heat source (CPU, motor, volcano, etc.) and restrict the heat dissipation to the environment such that it flows through some conversion device, I could actually tap into this energy flow. This should be conceptually similar to hydroelectric power plants that convert the water's potential energy change to electricity.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[wass]

There's no reason why you cannot convert heat into electricity, it's been done for quite some time. Ie, it can be done indirectly by using heat to boil water, which turns a turbine, which spins a magnet inside a coil, inducing an EMF. It's been done directly too, thermoelectric materials have been known for about a century, where an applied voltage along a material induces a thermal gradient, or vice versa.

The real question is efficiency, and that you cannot just convert ALL waste heat into usable energy (ie, work) as that violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Essentially to make this thing work, you need a hot reservoir (ie, the battery or whatever giving off excess heat) and you need to dump some of this heat into a cold reservoir (ie, another face of the laptop). You can glean some work out, and of course the higher the efficienty, the less waste heat goes right to the cold reservoir. But you MUST dump some waste heat there, how much depends on the details of the process.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[timeOday]

Why don't you just read the article? There's an insulator between two layers of metal, one must be hot and the other cold (i.e. less hot). So, yes, there is a temp gradient involved.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Nf1nk]

And the whole thing works see thermocouple http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocouple or more to the point thermopiles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermopile these have been around for ages and heck you could make them at home. this chip is likly an optimisation of these concepts

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[sfurious]

Note: yes, all the above is a dramatic over-simplification.

Dramatic over-simplification it may be, but thanks. Despite vaguely knowing the rules about calculating the maximum efficiency of a heat engine (or at least having been taught them at one point), I don't think I've ever really got the why side of things before reading your explanation.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[cool_arrow]

I think you're right. This may be a more efficient Peltier by virtue of the semiconductor material. One of the problems associated with getting a temperature differential across a Peltier thermoelectric generator is that both the hot and cold sides need to be electrically isolated. In other words, the best way to conduct heat to and from these devices is to use metal. Most metals are good electrical conductors and if you used them you would be shorting the leads coming off the device. So the trick is to conduct and dissipate heat efficiently without conducting electricity. Not so easy. There are many materials/techniques used to do this. http://www.peltier-info.com/manufacturers.html

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[kfg]

Also, constant temperature doesn't mean there's no heat flow, it means flow in = flow out (to put it simply).

Ya ever notice that space is a very effective heat sink?

KFG

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Midnight Thunder]

The problem is that converting heat energy directly into electricity violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not unlike perpetual motion machines.

Can you explain how heat (infrared photons, right?) is different in this regard than visible light (as in a photovoltaic cell)? I'm not busting your chops here, I just don't understand why the wavelength of the light matters in this context.

The other problem I have with the orginal comment, ignoring what the second law of thermodynamics may or may not say, is that we already have solutions that convert electricity directly into heat (electric stoves, radiators, etc), so I find it very difficult to believe that the opposite shouldn't be possible. If we are unable to reverse the process, then I think it is more a lack of understanding of the real processes going on than anything else.

The other thing is that unlike perpetual motion machines, there is a clear source of energy input, a clear source of energy output, and an acceptance that this is not a 100% efficient process. Perpertual motion machines make the promise of free energy, which this is clearly not.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[adisakp]

FWIW, if you read the article, they are not making energy from a random distribution of heat energy, but rather by a using a temperature differential. Since the generation of the electricity (across the differential) results in a corresponding change in thermal entropy, energy is conserved and no laws are violated.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[GWBasic]

Basically, using one of these chips in a laptop is an analogy for putting a turbo in a car. The tubro uses the force of the exhaust to pump more air into the engine; and the chip would use the heat of the CPU/GPU to extend battery life.

What I really want is one of these that can work at room temperature. Just imagine a laptop that gets cold when it gets really busy!

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Anonymous Coward]

"God" already invented the perpetual motion machine. It is called the universe. Just look at an atom. The electron will move around a nuclear forever without any extra energy applied. Bigger examples? Try Earth around the Sun?

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Shanep]

"Hmm... I guess thermocouples are a figment of my imagination? After all, nobody has ever built a device powered by them."

Cool! Can I buy one of these for my mp3 player? It's an iRiver H340. I currently get about 16 hours playing time with the Li battery. How long could I get out of an RTG? 16 years? Will I live long enough to enjoy it?

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Anonymous Coward]

Mea Culpa. Forty whacks to the back of the head with Sears & Salinger for me; an "I corrected KFG on something basic" button for you.

And the "I can't admit a mistake without trying to trivialize said mistake" button for you.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Khashishi]

Heat is not infrared photons. Heat is random motion of microscopic particles. Infrared photons are electromagnetic radiation, just like visible light.

The confusion comes from the fact that heat can be transferred via radiated emission from one body to another. If you shine light on something, it will get hotter. Hot objects emit light, with peak wavelength dependent on the temperature. For temperatures less than red-hot, the object will emit mostly infrared.

It's probably possible to capture the infrared light emitted from a hot object and turn that into electricity with some kind of photovoltaic, but your photovoltaic would have to be colder than the hot object, or else the photovoltaic will emit its own infrared and lose energy. So you end up needing a temperature gradient; you'd probably be much better off with a Peltier.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Eivind]

For what definition of "effective" ?

Dropping a square meter of radiator into the sea is a hell of a lot more efficient than having the same square meter of radiatior in the hard vacuum of space.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Thomas Miconi]

Heat is the thermal energy content. It need not flow. An object that isn't at absolute zero contains "heat".

In everyday language, sure. But not in scientific language.

From the wiki article: "In physics, heat, symbolized by Q, is defined as energy in transit."

Heat is the amount of thermal energy that is flowing between two bodies at different temperatures. The "thermal energy content" (roughly) is temperature itself. GP was quite correct.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

i tought the movement of heat/temperature was called convection.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[LWATCDR]

I wounder if deionized water would work. It is highly conductive of heat and an electrical insulator. The trick would be to keep the water deionized.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[retrosteve]

Nope, it's possible --

I thought that it wasn't for a microsecond too, since heat is at the bottom of the entropy curve.

But then, a steam engine (converts heat to motion) and a steam turbine (converts heat to A/C electricity) are both possible. They're just net heat exporters, as any conversion will be.

Converting heat to a more useful energy is necessarily inefficient, but can still work.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[angel'o'sphere]

The problem is that converting heat energy directly into electricity violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not unlike perpetual motion machines.

Well, I guess in future I will use my mod points and mod everyone who uses the words: Second Law of Thermodynamic to overrated. Why don't you at elast visit the web site of that device? And first of all why do make si stupid claimes liek the sentence I quoted?

You are wrong. Period. The device works exactly like a solar cell. Fast HOT electrons get catapulted out of their band, and captured on the other side of a tunnel barier ... and electrons are electric energy, aren't they? (I made it simpel so you can get it) I strongly suggest you visit wikipedia and read a bit about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

angel'o'sphere

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[volpe]

In everyday language, sure. But not in scientific language.

I'm talking scientific language here, not everyday language.

From the wiki article: "In physics, heat, symbolized by Q, is defined as energy in transit."

Wikipedia is great for learning something that you know nothing about, but not good for use as a citation in order to resolve highly detailed disputes. "Energy in transit" is an extremely vague definition, and includes electric current, a high velocity bullet (even a very cold one), and a truck filled with gasoline rolling down the highway. If you check the references in that article, you'll note that there is a wide disparity of definitions, among them is the following:

        * Heat is a form of energy possessed by a substance by virtue of the vibrational movement, i.e. kinetic energy, of its molecules or atoms.[6]

The "thermal energy content" (roughly) is temperature itself.

No, it's not, unless you think that a 5 pound brick at 90 deg C has less "thermal energy content" than a drop of water at 95 deg C.

GP was quite correct.

Well, you can ask the GP what he thinks, or you can just read his response.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[volpe]

Trivializing? Sounds to me like he was making a big deal about it, rather than trivializing it.

Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics

[Spunk]

Hell, you can ask Michael Jackson.

ahh that's nothing

[lubricated]

I've had a chip in my computer that converted electricity into heat. It was called a p4.

Re:ahh that's nothing

[dcam]

prescott?

Ha! Take that, Al Gore!

[Frequency Domain]

I assume that this thing has to work by converting thermal energy to electrical energy, hence removing it as thermal energy from the environment. If the technology actually works well, then there should soon come a day when all the hybrid cars out there are using this for even more of a boost. Between reducing carbon emissions directly, and leaching heat out of the air, we may find ourselves introducing the next ice age!

hello?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone ever hear of the "Peltier Effect Junction"?

Correct.

[paladinwannabe2]

That's exactly what they are proposing. Yes, the gradient is too small to be much use- but if these chips are cheap enough (say, $5), and make your laptop batteries last 5-10% longer and run slightly cooler, it will be worth putting them in. Supposedly they can be easily mass-produced, but they need to be very cheap to be worth using.

Thermocouple ?

[Bugmaster]

Um, did these guys just invent a thermocouple ? Those things have been around for quite some time, and are used to generate power on satellites (using a radioactive heat source, because in space, who cares ?), and to make small, inefficient refrigerators that can fit in a car... And of course, to measure temperature pretty much everywhere.

Powered by ATI

[El_Smack]

Sweet. Now my new video card can power my house instead of just heating my office.

not bogus, not necessarily "disruptive technology"

[jetpeach]

So the technology is definitely hyped up in the article, but this is not bogus like oh so many of these types of articles on slashdot are. I'm in an electrical engineering PhD program and the ideas presented in the article are sound (i.e. there isn't any breakage of the 1st law of thermodynamics and no magic magnets involved!). The obvious question is what is this material that replaces a vaccum, this "properly selected semiconductor thermoelectric that is thick enough to support a significant temperature differential between the emitter and the collector in order to achieve efficiencies of practical interest" as this is the key to the technology. If they indeed have found a material to do this this is a very interesting technology that probably will make it into our consumer products, and possibly "soon".

I'm sceptical

[sinij]

If these guys are so brilliant to invent this solid state device why are they not so brilliant to see it potential uses. Let's see - portable nuclear generators since you no longer need to worry about turbines and cooling, combustion engine efficiency will skyrocket if you can recoup even portion of 60% of combustion energy wasted on heat , refrigeration and air conditioning will be trivial.

This chip, if it works = free energy for everyone, everywhere, and they work about battery life for laptops... wtf?

Re:I'm sceptical

[Anonymous Coward]

This can provide an efficiency boost in some applications, small power generation in others, or what-have-you... but this isn't exactly free energy.

This is essentially a more efficient thermocouple, which, if true, is good. You still need a heat sink and a heat source to make a temperature differential though.

Recouping the small portion of normally wasted heat might increase your overall gas mileage by an equally small amount.

Prior Art

[The Mighty Buzzard]

IANAL but I'm fairly certain the patents held by Borealis Technical Limited for their Power Chips line already covers this.
Have a look: http://www.powerchips.gi/

Re:Prior Art

[syukton]

I thought that website looked familiar to this one: http://www.coolchips.gi/

Switch back and forth between the two, it's kind of spooky. I realize that they're probably the same company but the logo, the layout, everything is the same. It stands to reason though that a chip that can be used for extremely efficient cooling could be used in reverse for extremely efficient power generation.

Re:Prior Art

[julesh]

IANAL but I'm fairly certain the patents held by Borealis Technical Limited for their Power Chips line already covers this.

Looking at it, it seems both of them have taken a fairly old concept (a hot metal plater separated from a cold metal plate by a vacuum creating a potential, which has been known about since the 19th century) and have developed it in different directions:

PowerChips have switched from a metal plate to some kind of improved emitter that increases the electron transfer across the vacuum.

Eneco have substituted the vacuum for a layer of exotic semiconductor.

So, I'd (a) guess that there isn't likely to be a patent conflict between the two techniques and (b) suggest that Eneco's approach is more likely to be useful commercially because it doesn't rely on creating a small device that contains a vacuum (which is notoriously difficult).

It can and does work.

[LWATCDR]

The problem is that you need a difference in heat. The device must have a hot side and a cool side to work. It is called a thermocouple and they are used in RTGs.
So to have it work you would need a big radiator or even better a tub of liquid nitrogen.
I have wondered just how much power you could get from putting thermocouples into a car radiator. Lots of heat and an airstream to cool it. Feed the power back in the a motor to boost mileage.
Never doing the math I would guess the weight of the motor would probably eat up what ever gains you would get.
It is yet another case of no free lunch.

Re:It can and does work.

[ChrisMaple]

If they are actually getting efficiencies near 40%, and the devices aren't too bulky or heavy, you don't use it to enhance an internal combustion engine, you use it to replace an internal combustion engine. Burner, converter, electric motor, and the job's done. No more catalytic converters, mufflers, mandatory pollution tests. No periodic oil changes, starter motors, or alternators.

one way to stop global warming i guess

[Anonymous Coward]

build enough of these chips global warming is over.

Where does the heat come from???

[EmbeddedJanitor]

A regular thermal power station has approx the same heat to energy conversion ratio.

This device does not make "free heat", the heat still needs to come from somewhere. However, if it is small enough and cheap enough it could be used with solar thermal concentrators and overcome all the photovoltaic problems associated with solar to electric conversion.

Re:Where does the heat come from???

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>A regular thermal power station has approx the same heat to energy conversion ratio.

Very approximately. Ballpark thermal efficiency for a coal plant is 40%, some higher and some even lower. This guy's claiming 20-30%.

Re:Where does the heat come from???

[ricree]

Sure, these chips aren't all that efficient in and of themselves, but the thing that makes them usefull is that they can easily and conveniently convert the waste heat from other applications. If chips like these were used along with existing power plants, for example, they could potentially make use of that waste heat to improve the overall efficiancy.

Hmmmmm.....

[IHC Navistar]

Could this 'new' device possibly be a THERMOCOUPLE?!

Artificial heat source. Also, Peltier Device?

[iamlucky13]

You need an artificial heat source in the laptop, and the cold sink is the outside environment. As mentioned in the article, the heat source would most likely be a very small burner operating at a few hundred degrees. The high temperature seems to concern a lot of people, especially those who had their sony batteries explode on them, but it is technically feasible.

However, laptops get hot enough just from their chips operating and batteries discharging at 80% or so efficiency. Trade the battery for a thermal-electic chip operating at 20% efficiency and you'll find yourself with a lot more heat to dissipate.

Since I'm not intimately familiar with their principles of operation, I'm curious how this is different from a Seeback (reverse Peltier) device. Googling around a little bit, it seems most Seeback devices achieve around 5-10% efficiency, while the article claims up to 20% efficiency, so it seems they may be slightly different physical effects. Anybody care to enlighten us?

Geothermal?

[Dillenger69]

This could make for practical geothermal electricity production.
Generators dropped down a few miles into the crust where the temperature is right could revolutionize large scale power production.

Peltier Effect?

[nurb432]

Not that efficient yet, but its well within the realm of possibility

Would be great to use for direct conversion of th heat coming off *waste* nuclear fuel.

why is this revolutionary

[mitymidget]

To be honest if this is so revolutionary then um...why don't I feel it. I remember from High School electronics courses using fire on some combination of wires (Don't remember the metals) creating a small amount of voltage, not usable but it still create it. Now their claim that by giving it some juice they can get it to -200 c...I dont trust that entirely until I can do it.

Also with Intel and Amd trying now to lower the heat output of processors, I think it might be better to use the device to cool the cpu rather than provide energy, or better yet do both ( most users are tethered to their bricks for the most part any way). Oh crap now I've leaked a good idea and won't get any compensation, well maybe getting a lower score for this post.

Efficiency = 1-(T_low/T_high)= 10%

[goombah99]

T_low is probably at best above room tempertature or around 300 Kelvin. let's assume T_high is 57 degrees C or about 330 degrees kelvin. So that gives:
Efficiency = 1-(T_low/T_high)
                                = 10%

So if they have no losses at all and it's a perfect heat engine they can recover 10% of the wasted energy as electricity. In reality I'd wager their losses will be 50% of may they can get back 5% of the heat energy.

It can't actually cause a noticalble dent in the chip temperature since that would reduce the temperature differential and it would stop working.

If you already have a high heat flux with a lot of cooling to hold the temperature at 57 degrees C then this won't change the amount out cooling you need. On the otherhand if you have a very precariously balanced system where reducing the heat flux 5% would make a very large change in the temperature it might conceivable be useful. I'm just haveing a hard time figuring out what the cicumstances that would lead to that are. Maybe some sort of unchilled embedded device that generates lots of power over a short interval.

As a peltier device were not restricted by this efficiency since energy is being supplied to act as a chiller. IN this case it could be a cooler. Just like any other peltier device.

So what's new here? Anyone have a clue/

Re:Efficiency = 1-(T_low/T_high)= 10%

[RevMike]

T_low is probably at best above room tempertature or around 300 Kelvin. let's assume T_high is 57 degrees C or about 330 degrees kelvin...

I'm in the US. What is the thermodynamic efficiency if we use Rankine instead?

bullshit

[timmarhy]

screams of "invest in me so i can do a runner with your VC"

You must be new here

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not revolutionary. Once again, I find myself explaining how technical sounding gobble-dee-gook can be used to get venture capitalists excited about giving you money. Never mind, I'm not going to condescend like that. Your skepticism tells me you can think it through for yourself.

Which is not to say that it's not practical, but notice the article never compared the product to any competing technology except batteries, and there only loosely. They certainly didn't dare try to compare with large scale power plants. There may be a legitimate business case for investing in this, or it may be crap. A news article based on conference that seems geared toward raising money is hardly a source worth making a good analysis based on.

Are you sure it doesn't break any laws of physics.

[musther]

Maybe not the heat -> electricity, but the cooling? So you apply a current (energy in), and this thing cools down, or at least can be used to cool down, it takes heat energy from its surroundings (energy in). So what am I missing, oh yeah, energy out!

Aha!!! here's the killer application

[goombah99]

Okay now I'm replying to my own post. what I said was right. But the application is not for computer chips but for much hotter systems. Namely the application is for burining propane at 600 degrees C and converting that to electricity. In theory the themodynamic efficiency would be max of 50%. They claim that inpractice they might achieve 20 to 30%.
"The result is a solid state energy conversion chip that can operate at temperatures of up to 600 degrees celcius and deliver absolute efficiencies in terms of how much heat energy is converted to electricity of between 20 and 30 percent."

Now 20 to 30% conversion of a stored chemical fuel to electricity RIGHT ON A MICRO CHIP without any mechinaical engine is great. Good energy density even if you are giving up 80% of the energy. The only trick is figuring out how to chill the backside. But if you are only looking for small amounts of power maybe ambient chilling or convection is not so bad. Maybe you could even burn a little more chemical enerfy to power a turbine to cool it off.

Anyhow the uses for this are not microchips but very hot systems. And that's what makes it different from conventional peltier coolers: it's compact, monlithic, and runs so hot it can get good efficiency.

Re:Ha! Take that, Al Gore!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid not. The device requires a substantial heat differential. We can't leach heat from the air with this, even if it does work cheaply (big if, that).

Crank

[gmuslera]

So i put my cpu cooled by that device, and use the generated electricity to power up the cpu. Obviously that perpetual motion machine will not work, but if so, would be like the Crank movie, when if you slow down or drop your activity, you die.

Important Details...

[evilviper]

I think everyone is overlooking the important parts of this...

Assuming it works as advertised:

If it isn't trivially cheap to produce in large quantities, it's worthless... It might find a niche similar to the one photovoltaics have carved out, but like those solar panels, you won't find these built into your notebook computer anytime soon, no matter how effecient.

And even if they are dirt cheap, they're of limited usefulness if they need a high tempurature difference. Sure, your CPU might get up to 90C degrees, but you don't want it covered by something that is going to hold (much of) that heat in, and melt your core. So the only possible location is perhaps a small area parallel to the airflow, where it won't impeed cooling, and therefore will only potentially be able to exploit a small fraction of the escaping heat to begin with.

Topic Stats

[Paradise Pete]

Threads for this topic:

Impossible - 38%
Nothing new - 38%
Other - 24%

If all you've got is a hammer

[jonathan_95060]

"Brown also sees the chips ultimately replacing batteries altogether."

If all you've got is a hammer then everything looks like a nail...

Heat isn't infrared photons

[Solandri]

Heat, in thermodynamic terms, refers to temperature; or more succinctly, the average kinetic energy of the molecules that make up something. Objects that you heat up increase their average kinetic energy. Some molecules also emit photons in the infrared band as a consequence, but that's not what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is referring to as entropy. Entropy is the state of disorder - as the average kinetic energy of molecules flying in random directions increases, its disorder increases.

If your waste heat is localized, then it can still be used to do work. All you need is a reservoir of water or air which is colder. Put a motor between the two and as the heat energy flows from the hot side to the cold side, and you get energy that can be put to work.

The reason this is no big deal is that the energy you get from such a mechanism is simply energy that the original heat generator did not use. i.e. the original generator was inefficiently cooled, and more efficient cooling would've allowed it to do more work for the same amount of fuel consumed. In the case of hot air blowing out of a computer, if the CPU and case had been more efficiently cooled, its operating temperature would've been lower, allowing you to run the CPU at the same frequency at a lower voltage and for less energy in. Except in certain cases (cars, where you want the whole system to be mobile, or CPUs which are all set to run at the same voltage regardless of individual case temp), the effort you put into recovering wasted heat energy would be better spent just making the system more efficient in the first place.

What does the 'efficiency level' imply here?

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:

"The result is a solid state energy conversion chip that can operate at temperatures of up to 600 degrees celcius and deliver absolute efficiencies in terms of how much heat energy is converted to electricity of between 20 and 30 percent."

How about I build a box out of chips and put my heat source inside.

Then I build a box out of more chips and put my first box inside.

Then I build a box out of even more chips and put the second box inside.

Or I just make the very first box out of three layers.

Or how about having just a single quarter-penny sized chip and the heat source, but insulate them well in a vacuum box. Or a box made out of a properly selected semiconducter thermoelectric. Does the efficiency go up to 100% then?

Seebeck effect, not Peltier!

[Anonymous Coward]

I expect most /.'ters to skip the articles and jump to immediate conclusions, but so far everyone apparently has missed the fact that it is a Seebeck reaction, not a Peltier. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier-Seebeck_effec t and you'll see that the Peltier is a conversion from electricity to heat.

nothing new it allready exists

[PermanentMarker]

Perhaps not in a chip before but solid state devices with no moving parts to genereate electricity allready exist and for quite a long time now. If remember well some are used to power satelites And Philips (a large electronic company) has made some inventions in this field, years ago.

Re:not bogus, not necessarily "disruptive technolo

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

I just want to hear an explanation of how they run a thermionic system backwards to produce cooling. And how a ceramic plate (thermal insulator) "makes heat distribution uniform" and "takes the heat away".

Either the guy was misquoted even worse than usual for the business press or the ideas are completely scrambled.

I would have thought Pyroelectric

[Xybot]

..would have thought this technology would in some way utilise the pyroelectric effect.

Re: And what happens to the electricity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so heat -> electricity... then what? We build a giant (and perfect) battery to store the world's heat as electricity?

This technology may make devices more efficient, but the only way to cool the planet is to make heat leave the planet.

Re:Aha!!! here's the killer application

[timeOday]

600 celcius is awfully hot. I wonder what it could accomplish on the exhaust of my car/motorcycle? All that heat, for the most part wasted.

perpetual computing machine

[rhesuspieces00]

That should extend the battery life of my powerbook to about 48 hours.

infrared photons != heat

[Ayanami Rei]

Heat is random motion in a substance.
Infrared radiation is something that a substance with a relatively high tempature emits to equalize it's temperature with the rest of the universe. Of course, they omit other frequencies of photons too. Things that absorb the infrared radiation... or light, or microwaves, get hot indirectly (i.e. your hand).

Targetting a specific frequency of blackbody radiation using a photovoltaic cell is a poor way to convert heat into energy. Most heat in our environment is conducted or convected away by air or other materials touching the hot thing. The remainder is a broad spectrum of radiation, of which a photovoltaic device can only hope to capture of fraction of the total radiated energy (due to small frequency window) and it even does that inefficiently.

None of this is new

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermionic_converter

Thermoelectric converters are almost 2 centuries old and are used in a wide variety of applications today. Thermionic converters have been around for about half a century.

This story is nothing more than an improved version of a type of device which has been in existence and use for decades.

Re:Are you sure it doesn't break any laws of physi

[Kraeloc]

It's called a peltier, and it's already in use (by some) in cooling CPUs. Google it.

That's a lot of excess heat to get rid of

[Goonie]

If their 30% efficiency is accurate, if you used a burner in combination with this chip to power a 25W laptop you'd still have 60 watts of heat to get rid of. That's going to be a rather warm lap...

What would be really nice, instead, if you could scale this up to work with the waste heat of a combustion engine or a fuel cell. It'd give you a nice boost in system efficiency without the complexities of a secondary turbine system.

Isn't 15% a good start?

[Midnight Thunder]

Given that most portable are currently 0% efficient at converting heat into electricity, since they don't implement any conversion, surely 15% efficiency is a good start?

Sounds plausible enough...

[Dr. Zowie]

More conventional thermoelectric junctions use dissimilar metals with different work functions -- the canonical example is aluminum and copper. The electrons are more tightly bound in the copper than in the aluminum, so it costs a little bit of energy to move them from the copper to the aluminum. Generally that energy comes from the thermal field around the junction. Likewise, moving electrons from alluminum to copper gives off a little bit of heat. You can buy Peltier coolers that have hundreds of short aluminum and copper pillars holding two thin plates apart. All the copper->aluminum junctions are on one side, and all the aluminum->copper junctions are on the other. You can use the assembly to move heat from one side to the other (by passing an electric current through it) or to generate electricity (by heating one side with, say, a blowtorch and cooling the other with, say, water). The infamous RTGs on deep spacecraft like Cassini are exactly the same technology, only they use a block of plutonium as the warm side -- the plutonium stays hot as it decays.

The limitation of conventional Peltier piles is that you want to thermally isolate the junctions while maintaining good electrical conductivity -- but aluminum and copper are both good thermal conductors! In fact those two effects are related -- the free electrons in aluminum and copper carry the heat through the metal, so improving thermal isolation (by alloying the metal, f'rinstance) also ruins the electrical conductivity and what you save by not leaking heat you lose by adding electrical resistance.

Semiconductors have controllable electron binding characteristics depending on how you dope them, so it "should" be a simple matter of junction design to make a dynamite thermopile with 'em. Further, the band gap (the amount of energy carried by a conduction electron) can be quite large, so you wouldn't have to carry so many electrons through the junctions to move a LOT of heat around.

I wonder why nobody has done this before?

HERE's the real story:

[Ungrounded Lightning]

HAH! Found it on their web site!

Re:HERE's the real story:

[Ungrounded Lightning]

By the way: IMHO their statement about a 50% efficiency limit from impedence matching is bogus - just as it is in power generation and transmission. You can exceed that easily by abandoning attempts to pull as much power as possible from the cells and accepting a lower energy density in return for greater thermal efficiency. (There will be a limit further out, where the various forms of leakage eat more than you save by reducing internal resistive losses.)

nope.

[JustNiz]

For anything to make power out of heat it has to be in a heat gradient. Its the temperature differential that makes it work, not just its absolute temperature. I can't see how a small chip could possibly experience a sufficient temperature gradient to be effective.

Heat one end to 600 degrees, you'll only generate power until the other end becomes 600 degrees too, which would be pretty quick.

Re:Aha!!! here's the killer application

[cool_arrow]

if you take too much heat off your exhaust your catalytic convertor will cease to function.

Thermocouples?

[Anonymous Coward]

"While such a device could revolutionize many aspects of computing I'll keep my skeptic hat on for the time being. ... snakeoil, peltier, vaporware"

So, don't believe in thermocouples?

My Question

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

infrared photons, right?

I know practically nothing on this subject, but I was under the impression that heat was ambient vibrations (i.e. kinetic energy) in matter, and the unfocussed nature of this energy made it hard to convert into electricity.

I'm also under the impression that, if this invention is efficient to reduce the net heat in the surrounds, it will cut inefficiencies to insignificant levels. Would I be correct in assuming this, and if not, why not?

Can this be used to combat Global Warming?

[MrSmileyJr]

I wonder, if this thing would work, we could just use a bunch of these to "fix" the global warming problems....

Some number on thermodynamics

[pato101]

The device is 20-30% efficient even then. To get by on using an inefficient power source the CPU would have to be as efficient as possible.
The efficiency of the heat->electricity conversion is at most 1-Tambient/Tdevice, because of the second law of the thermodynamics (temperatures need to be placed in Kelvin degrees at the formula). Say the CPU is reaching 60 (Celsius) and the ambient is 15 (pretty cool for an office or a house room), then the efficiency is at most: 1- 288/293 = 1.7%. So the gain of such device is at most marginal.
The 1-Tambient/Tdevice limit is the reason why engines operate at high temperatures (and engineers try to raise the engine temperatures by new materials and better cooling systems). The use of cooling lets having higher Tdevice and thus the efficiency limit is higher but tend to spoil the approach to that limit, so there is a technology-driven optimum in their use.

GOOD for space stations near the star.

[Anonymous Coward]

Put one side to star(most probably sun), other to dark space.. and whoala.. free energy.

How long this device can work without maintenance?

More efficient power stations?

[Goodgerster]

Since this device operates at a maximum temperature of 600 degrees Centigrade, could it not be brought into close proximity with nuclear reactors which operate at about 300 degrees? This would solve the inefficiencies of having water turning turbines. Dependent upon the amount of heat these things can actually convert (perhaps the refrigeration aspect of the chip could be used as a cooling system for excess heat), there would also be no need for large cooling towers, generators, and many other things associated with nuclear power stations.

This special material is called...

[thrill12]

...snakeoil:
a properly selected semiconducting thermoelectric fluid which is thick enough to support a significant temperature differential between the emitter and the collector in order to achieve efficiencies of practical interest -
ie. snake oil

Think of the potential applications!!

[chord.wav]

USB-powered beer cooler mug!!!!

Or a cold beer powered computer!!

Sky is the limit...

Yes! Now We can Burrow to the Centre of the Earth

[jac89]

Anyone remember The Core? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298814/

What's their heat exchange medium?

[Rogerborg]

Snake oil?

New chip?

[liquid_rince]

Unless it's an enchanted vorpal "energy conversion chip" of flame +2, I'm not biting. You need fire to kill the trolls or they'll just regenerate and get you.

NON COMPUTER USES

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

The thing you have to see is that there are a billion NON-Computer uses for this kind of tech.

1. automotive industry. Waste heat off your engine block being used to augment an alternator?
          = a reduction in HP needed to turn alternator, and increase in engine efficiency!

2. Electricity Generation.
      a. Smokestacks could be lined with these to absorb heat (which is better for the environment) and use the electricity to power lighting for the facility?
      b. repeat for Natural gas, Incineration, etc...

3. Solar.
    a. Even if this doesn't make that much e- if it was cheap enough, you could augment solarcells by placing the chips underneath the photovalic crystals to absorb wast heat, and probably get a sizeable gain in eficiency!