Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ohio Researchers Advance Heat Reclamation Technologies

Posted by timothy on from the from-warmy-to-volty dept.

Downchuck writes "Researchers at Ohio State University claim to have synthesized a new material capable of delivering electricity directly from heat, at an efficiency far better than existing thermoelectric materials. Scott at ArsTechnica has an interesting take: 'Merge this with the new MIT solar dish and you're in business!'"

2 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Re:For those who didn't RTFA: by magus_melchior · · Score: 5, Informative

    And since I can't make hyperlinks correctly on slashdot, I'll try again: thallium.

    Nasty stuff, as its compounds are very easily absorbed through potassium uptake pathways in your body, but behave very, very differently from potassium. I seem to remember a chemist friend telling me that if you deal with thallium, you practically need an entirely separate lab for it.

    --
    "We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
  2. Re:Technical point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not possible to make electricity directly from heat. It is possible to make it from a difference in heat between two points

    heat != temperature

    But you are right that you have to have a cold reservoir to get any work from the system. But heat in thermodynamics is not the same as temperature, and it generally denotes the amount of transfered thermal energy between two systems of differing temperature.

    I'm assuming that the cold reservoir is the cooler temperature air surrounding the device.