'Thermoelectrics' Could One Day Power Cars

sciencehabit writes: "Fossil fuels power modern society by generating heat, but much of that heat is wasted. Researchers have tried to reclaim some of it with semiconductor devices called thermoelectrics, which convert the heat into power. But they remain too inefficient and expensive to be useful beyond a handful of niche applications. Now, scientists in Illinois report that they have used a cheap, well-known material to create the most heat-hungry thermoelectric so far (abstract). In the process, the researchers say, they learned valuable lessons that could push the materials to the efficiencies needed for widespread applications. If that happens, thermoelectrics could one day power cars and scavenge energy from myriad engines, boilers, and electrical plants."

Comments

power cars? technically no

[noh8rz10]

technically, you would still need an energy source (gasoline, natural gas, batteries) to power the cars. thermo electrics could make it more efficient by recycling waste heat. but the thermoelectrics themselves would not power the cars.

Re:power cars? technically no

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My (admittedly pretty hazy at this point) memory of heat engines is that their theoretical peak efficiency depends on the thermal delta they manage to achieve. Exactly the same resource that thermoelectric materials scavenge (albeit at miserable efficiency) into electricity.

Anybody who actually has some grasp of the matter want to chime in on where and why you would use thermoelectrics (and how efficient they would have to be) rather than simple insulation or one of the various waste-heat-recovery systems that transfer some amount of the heat remaing in outgoing exhaust gases into incoming working fluids?

Is the thermoelectric advantage purely that, assuming material reliability is OK, they are a 100% solid state, trivial to scale from 'handle with tweezers and magnification' to 'pretty large', and their output is easy to transfer and useful for all kinds of things after just a little DC-DC cleanup, or are there actually situations where they might be absolutely more efficient than insulation and heat recovery, rather than just easier to tack in almost anywhere in a design that you have a few extra cubic centimeters and expect a temperature difference?

Re:power cars? technically no

[Guspaz]

1. I realize that they're currently at 5%, the whole point of my scenario was examining what sort of changes a large increase in efficiency would produce... that's the whole point of the article, after all. Efficiency would need to be somewhere around 50% to justify replacing ICEs with thermoelectric engines. Is that possible? I've got no idea, TFA gives zero layman-friendly information about what sort of efficiency improvements are foreseen.

2. Supply isn't as big a problem as the incredible safety issues. I acknowledge in my post that the idea is totally insane, which is why I doubt that, even with a big improvement in efficiency, you'd probably never see RTGs used outside of military applications.

3. That's not necessarily a problem. They conveniently provide power that can be used for active cooling. Cooling them in a vacuum is an issue (hence the giant heat dissipation fins), cooling them in an atmosphere isn't as much of an issue.

I suspect that sufficiently efficient thermoelectrics might find their way into military UAVs, which could remain airborn for extended periods of time, for example. Or as an alternative to shipping diesel to remote outposts (although they're currently looking into robotic trucks to solve that problem).