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!'"

7 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, frying ants with a parabolic is cool and all by iminplaya · · Score: 5, Interesting

    But I like this better.

    --
    What?
  2. Finally! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Finally, we have a truly renewable source of energy - we can just harness all the hot air coming from our politicians.

  3. Technical point by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    Bruce Perens.
    1. Re:Technical point by ettlz · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, on this site we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics!

    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.

  4. 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."
  5. Themoelectrics Already Pretty Good by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --

    --
    make install -not war