Ohio Researchers Advance Heat Reclamation Technologies

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!'"

Comments

Yeah, frying ants with a parabolic is cool and all

[iminplaya]

But I like this better.

Geothermal plug in

[SubComdTaco]

From the article: "the material is most effective between 450 and 950 Fahrenheit" So simply plug this into a geothermal source, instant energy solution until Earth's core freezes.

Themoelectrics Already Pretty Good

[Doc Ruby]

Even though that article linked from the summary says that typical engines in cars get about 25% of the gasoline's energy content into car motion, it's actually about 20%. That's a lot of wasted energy: about 4:1 waste:use.

But lots of combined cycle plants (like CCGT gas turbines) reclaim a lot of their waste heat into more power. Taking a maximum mechanical power extraction of 60% of the gas' energy up to 85% by heating steam, which is an additional 25% of the original mechanical power.

CCGT reclamation tech is probably not practical for vehicles, so this new material is a welcome advance. Especially if the researchers get the zT from its new 1.5 high to its predicted 3.0 or so. But in fact DARPA has funded Trinh Vo at Lawrence Livermore National Labs to grow nanowires that already have a zT at 3.

More of that kind of material research is very welcome, because at zT 3, these materials can replace freon refrigerators with the same electrical efficiency. Since freon refrigerators require lots of energy to build, and then to recycle, replacing them with a simple material that can scale to any size (including very small, as in microelectronics), means a vast sector of modern industry, including transportation, could switch. If making the material is less energy intensive, and less reliant on a limited critical resource than the freon refrigerators or the CCGT reclamation systems, global energy efficiency could take a giant leap.

A leap that could be just around the corner, in Ohio.

Re:Technical point

[Doc Ruby]

The Technology Review article about the tech is more specific about the material's heat/electricity conversion efficiency. Evidently the current zT:0.87 material is about 6% efficient; the zT:1.5 material already achieved therefore is about 10% (about 10.3448276%) efficient. A zT:3.0 device is about 21% (about 20.6896552%) efficient.

10% of the 60% of gasoline's energy content wasted as heat is 6% of the gasoline's energy. If the car got the average 20% fuel efficiency, that extra 6 points would be 30% more than the original 20%. A zT:3.0/21% would be 12.6 points extra, or 63% more than 20% to 32.6%.

A 30MPG car today would get 39MPG tomorrow with the current version material. It would get 48.9MPG with the forecast zT:3 material.

What I'm really interested in seeing is how embedding the higher zT materials inside fuelcells boost their efficiency. Because fuelcells aren't heat engines, they're not limited to the Carnot Cycle's 40% max efficiency. They already get 50% efficiency or greater at "native" voltages (like 1.48V), where their max theoretical efficiency is 83%. But still, much of their 17%+ inefficiency is generating heat. So they can be even more efficient with heat reclamation, perhaps in practice actually approaching that 83% efficiency.