New Thermocell Could Turn 'Waste Heat' Into Electricity 181
dryriver sends this quote from Phys.org:
"Harvesting waste heat from power stations and even vehicle exhaust pipes could soon provide a valuable supply of electricity. A small team of Monash University researchers ... has developed an ionic liquid-based thermocell (abstract). Thermocell technology is based on harnessing the thermal energy from the difference in temperature between two surfaces and converting that energy into electricity. The new thermocell could be used to generate electricity from low grade steam in coal fired power stations at temperatures around 130C. This would be implemented by having the steam pass over the outer surface of the hot electrode to keep it hot while the other electrode is air or water cooled."
TAANSTAFL! (Score:3)
How do you keep the other side of the item cool? The waste heat goes somewhere?
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From TFA:
This would be implemented by having the steam pass over the outer surface of the hot electrode to keep it hot while the other electrode is air or water cooled.
Re:TAANSTAFL! (Score:5, Informative)
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It's being circulated already in the power plant's existing cooling tower.
And if the thermocell is installed somewhere else?
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It's being circulated already in the power plant's existing cooling tower.
And if the thermocell is installed somewhere else?
Then...that'd be bad engineering?
The entire point of the design is to use it in situations where you have waste heat. You're cooling your equipment anyway, because the laws of thermodynamics are a bitch. But now you're pulling a little bit more energy out before it heads to the cooler. So it's not a free lunch. You've already paid for the lunch; this is just grabbing an extra french fry on your way out the door.
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There's waste heat in a jillion different places where there's no existing cooling tower.
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And in some of those places this would work, and in others it wouldn't.
Then you agree that the first sentence of TFA (and even vehicle exhaust pipes) is blatantly ignorant drivel?
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That's really not something we can say based on the info given. Could the technology work, in theory, on a vehicle exhaust pipe? Yes. But how much does it cost? How much does it weigh? What's its power production at the temperature differential between car exhaust and ambient air with an electrode the size of an exhaust pipe? How quickly does it wear out?
The info we do have says 0.5 watts per square meter of electrode, given a 130-degC hot side. That isn't much. In fact, it's tiny. So it's likely
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Your objection applies to any heat engine. If the temperature drop is high enough it justifies pumping the water.
Re:TAANSTAFL! (Score:5, Informative)
Let me introduce you to the convection cooled heatsink [jaycar.com.au]. No moving parts, powered entirely by the dissipated heat itself, it just has to have sufficient surface area for the job (and they scale up more easily than actively cooled systems).
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yeah... because gravity and air is in short supply? The air and gravity create the air movement.
Last time I checked power stations were in the Earths atmosphere and so were car exhaust pipes. The car also has the added advantage of moving through the air, adding to the movement.
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Air can be in short supply.
Especially if aerodynamics are a concern -- even on a car.
(And since we're talking incremental efficiency improvements: Yes, aerodynamics are a concern.)
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"But energy is needed to circulate the air or water."
Not really, I know a while back a similar technology was proposed as a replacement for the alternator in cars (not sure it its still in development though). It would be placed along the exhaust on one side and some air cooling fins on the other. No additional energy requirements, and no real increase in weight because it would REPLACE the alternator.
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and some air cooling fins on the other
But what cools the air cooling fins? (Don't say, "Moving air", because that doesn't work. Proof? Your muffler is very hot even after driving very fast.)
not sure it its still in development though
There are two possibilities:
1) Big Business bought the tech so as to suppress it, or
2) it wasn't practical.
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But what cools the air cooling fins? (Don't say, "Moving air", because that doesn't work. Proof? Your muffler is very hot even after driving very fast.)
In that sort of universe, food does not cook. Automobile radiators do not work.
In any system, equlibrium is sought. A high temperature surface will transfer it's heat or energy to a lower temperature system. Higher energy to lower energy, there is the possibility of doing work any time a higher energy exists. A simple system is a wind turbine. The wind contacts the blade, and the blade extracts some of the energy of the wind, the blade rotates, having picked up that energy, and the wind has been slowed do
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2013/04/18/business-carney-banks-bail-in.html
Thay actuall don't work of the car is not moving and the fan is not spinning. That's the point; Be it air or water, the cooling medium needs to be moving. If the generator is stationary something has to move the cooling medium and that takes energy. Hence the question of how much net energy can coe out of such a system if attempted on a large scale.
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2013/04/18/business-carney-banks-bail-in.html
Thay actuall don't work of the car is not moving and the fan is not spinning. That's the point; Be it air or water, the cooling medium needs to be moving. If the generator is stationary something has to move the cooling medium and that takes energy. Hence the question of how much net energy can coe out of such a system if attempted on a large scale.
While the transfer of energy is more efficient when the fluid to which the heat is being transferred, motion is not specifically required. There are many heat sinks that have no fans on them. When you put ice in a chest, along with soda or other liquids, the ice still absorbs the heat from the soda. No air movement needed.
Equilibrium will be reached.
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When you put ice and soda in a chest the ice is in contact with the soda. The heat from the soda is absorbed by the much colder ice. The ice is chilling the soda not the air. The best way to cool soda is a mixture of half ice and half water as there is no insulating air and complete contact with the cooling medium. Stagnant air is a thermal insulator. That is how foam insulation works; It traps air in small pockets so that it can not move around and transfer heat.
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Air running over cooling fins DOES work, otherwise we wouldn't use cooling fins. Your muffler does not have cooling fins.
An aircooled engine does, though. We have an air cooled piston engine in our light aircraft. If air moving over the fins didn't cool the engine, it would in short order turn into molten aluminium and fail - which evidently it doesn't because it can last several thousand hours.
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We have an air cooled piston engine in our light aircraft.
You forgot that light aircraft have propellers which are always spinning (forcing air over the pistons) when the engine is running.
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But what cools the air cooling fins? (Don't say, "Moving air", because that doesn't work. Proof? Your muffler is very hot even after driving very fast.)
So your proof that cooling fins won't work is something that doesn't have cooling fins...
Also, did you ever wonder how hot your muffler would be if it wasn't exposed to moving air?
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
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Agreed. Same with solar cells.
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earth cooling.. outside window, have a stream, have winter outside.. whatever.
though at 130c you could run a steam turbine too, no? and afaik that's more efficient than usual tec's(peltiers).
these new tec materials seem to pop up every few years. about 10 years ago there was some talk about something that could be put on the exhaust tubes of the car and have enough juice from that(being 10cm10cm slab) to run the AC in the car. haven't heard since nor seen it.. dunno if that one had some construction impract
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i believe the idea is that the exhaust from a steam turbine is still hot enough to collect additional electricity by using this.
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Exhaust from a steam turbines are on the order of 40-50 C. This works because the condenser actually operates in a vacuum (created from the thousand-fold volume decrease from steam to liquid water). And this makes more sense than wasting steam (since you would want to condense it anyways to save water).
Really, there is no magic technology with thermoelectrics. And with any heat engine, what matters is the delta-T and entropy. Unless you waste water, you are bound by the Carnot cycle. And anybody who has wor
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Then it would be more efficient to run another closed-cycle turbine based on ammonia or something. Peltier-style stuff is *really* inefficient.
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Ammonia has the nasty properties of being poisonous and corrosive.
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I don't recall anything significant 10 years ago, but CalTech had improvements in Peltiers reported just last year:
http://phys.org/news/2011-05-high-performance-bulk-thermoelectrics.html [phys.org]
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I could totally use a version of this - I would wrap it around the exhaust riser on the diesel, and then cool the other side with incoming cooling seawater before it entered the cooling heat exchanger. The difference would be 400C inside vs 22C outside, and might be able to generate some more energy from the waste heat.
I also considered running ammonia through this hot spot and making it an adsorption refrigerator, but that can generate some interesting (chinese) pressures, which can be a hazard.
Of course,
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Well yeah, you put the boiler on one side and a refrigerator on the other.
I would like to know if this is more efficient than your regular Peltier module..
News at 5: Ocean water temperatures suddenly rise while middle America experiences heatwave and use Air Conditioners in record numbers, polar ice caps reduced to a few ice cubes.
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I would like to know if this is more efficient than your regular Peltier module..
I think you mean Seebeck [wikipedia.org]. Seebeck is heat->elec, while Peltier is elec->heat. Seebeck generators are silent, compact and reliable, but they are also notoriously inefficient. They are much less efficient than a heat engine using the same temperature differential.
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I was under the impression that a Peltier could go both ways, and it uses the Seebeck effect for it
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Exhaust temperatures can reach 1300C in high performance cars.
500+ is easily obtainable in your average runabout.
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Depends... If it generates enough power that the alternator is no longer needed, then you would lose that weight, and regain the HP used to drive it ( or be able to have a ever-so-slightly smaller engine ).
Plans announced to install in Washington DC. (Score:5, Funny)
Greatest source of hot air in the country. Expected to solve the energy crisis.
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But then the whole town would become USEFUL, and that would create a paradox that would tear space time apart.
Little known fact (Score:2)
We already suffer a glut of energy [oregonlive.com], but I suppose this might serve as a nice little accessory for your backyard distillery...
Re:Little known fact (Score:5, Informative)
We already suffer a glut of energy [oregonlive.com]
A temporary and localized surplus is not what "glut" usually refers to. Hydro-power surpluses from spring rain have been around as long hydro-power. That is not proof that we have too much capacity.
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Capacity we have plenty of, just like food and water and everything else. Distribution and who's in control are the outstanding issues that need to be dealt with.
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Not only that, with energy you need a "glut" all the time so that you can handle unexpected shutdowns, demand spikes - or for hydro - droughts. Just like our food supply, we certainly don't want shortages.
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Odd that they wouldn't use the excess electricity to pump water up into a storage reservoir for future generation. That's what BC Hydro does.
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They can't as during Spring there is to much water behind the damns due to snow melt and rain. They are full. Also many of them are not designed for this mode of operation (such as having large resevoirs of water to "pump up"
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That story was for 2012 (posted in April of 2012), there's no mention of 2013 conditions. Just FYI.
I don't know the current conditions (a great pun actually, hydro power).
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Hmmmm (Score:3)
Did Congress repeal the Laws of Thermodynamics?
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
Did Congress repeal the Laws of Thermodynamics?
Yes. And because that makes us all criminals now, it means the NSA snooping is quite legitimate...
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No. If you have a machine that's 50% efficient, where does the other 50% of the energy go? That's right, heat. If you can recover 10% of that heat as electricity, your machine is now 60% efficient. Even if you could recover the theoretical 100% of the waste heat the total energy efficiency is still only 100%, so it doesn't violate the laws of thermodynamics.
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Wait, if you're recovering 10% of the heat, you're recovering 10% of the 50% 'wasted'. So you're really only 55% efficient in total.
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You're absolutely correct, thanks for pointing out my error.
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If you're considering trying
Nuclear steam (Score:2)
Re:Nuclear steam (Score:5, Informative)
For efficient conversion of heat to you MUST have high temps. Modern pressurized water nuclear reactors run at about 150 atmospheres -- corresponding temperature of 315 C / 600 F. There is no way to avoid this with liquid water as the working fluid. Contain 150 atmosphere of pressure at all times dominates the design of the reactor. Some newer designs use different working fluid. E.g. a LFTR reactors (drawing board only) using a Brayton cycle based on helium or nitrogen gas and a 700 C temperature source -- no high pressure used in the the nuclear vessel.
Also look at the design of the power generation cycle in a power plant. There is a relatively small high-temperature turbine that generate 2/3 of the electricity and a much larger secondary turbine that generates 1/3 of the electricity. The lower-temp output of the first turbine is the input for the 2nd turbine.
Re:Nuclear steam (Score:4, Interesting)
The most efficient nuclear power stations in operation today are the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGRs) in the UK. They use CO2 as a coolant circulating through the carbon-moderator core at over 600 deg C with a generating efficiency of about 41% conversion of thermal energy to electricity compared to steam-moderated PWRs at about 34%. The low cost of uranium fuel per kWh generated means the extra efficiency doesn't help that much in terms of price of electricity generated or operating costs.
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But the reduction in capital costs thanks to not having to contain 150 atmospheres of pressure might make it far more cost-efficient.
However, the carbon moderator core at over 600 C scares me. What if oxygen gets in there? Burning core, reminscent of Chernobyl. Very scary.
Can't they use something that won't burn for the moderator?
I'm trying to think of something, water makes a good moderator, but you can't use it at 600C without the pressure coming back to haunt you.
Lithium would probably eat too many ne
Re:Nuclear steam (Score:5, Informative)
However, the carbon moderator core at over 600 C scares me. What if oxygen gets in there? Burning core, reminscent of Chernobyl. Very scary.
Contrary to what you might think, carbon is actually safer at those temperatures. Under neutron bombardment at low temperatures, the Wigner energy can build up, and that is the source of the problems. However, at the operating temperatures of molten salt reactors, solid graphite is quite safe. (You can purchase graphite crucibles good to 2500C.) There is further discussion here [energyfromthorium.com].
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Hello,
An interesting point from the link you gave (thanks) is that if you're using molten salt, the graphite core (and the fuel) is isolated from oxygen by the salt anyway.
--PM
Wrong problem (Score:3, Insightful)
The electricity issue is not a generation issue. We have enough technology to produce more electricity that we need. The problems we have are transmission , storage, and reliability. While we can produce much more energy than we need the challenge is to store it for when we need it, transmit it to where we need it and to be sure that it will not fail. For example, solar farms in the Sahara desert could power all of Europe. The issue is transmitting that power to Northern Europe and storing enough power to last the night. While Some HVDC line are being installed it is not enough to get that power to Germany and north.
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Yeah sure we can generate plenty of electricity. Just toss up another coal fired plant. Yay.
I'm thinking solar. If this technology, coupled with tracking solar concentrators, can be done more cost and radiation efficiently than current solar technologies, then it may be a huge win.
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Re:Wrong problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar does not work well during nigh or storms or at high latitudes. That is what I mean by the storage/transmission issue. Sure the Sahara can generate more solar electricity than we need. Getting to where and when we need it is a different story.
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Really we do need to use less energy world wide despite the growth of population and industry. Our cities are heat islands already and global warming is serious business. No matter how clean the generation process the user ultimately converts all power received into heat. The answer is not in figuring out how to keep creating and storing more and more energy.
It falls back to over population. When we look down at
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If we had a total of 60 million Americans instead of 350 million Americans our energy issues, our pollution issues, and most of our social issues would vanish quickly.
The US does have 350 million people, and increasing every day, so we have to deal with that fact. Are you willing to volunteer yourself and you family to die to bring about your 60 million population cap? I doubt it. Technology allows these population and we will find technologies to continue to support it.
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Why didn't you "volunteer"?
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From the linked Wikipedia article:
Andasol has a thermal storage system which absorbs part of the heat produced in the solar field during the day. This heat is then stored in a molten salt mixture of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate. A turbine produces electricity using this heat during the evening, or when the sky is overcast. This process almost doubles the number of operational hours at the solar thermal power plant per year.[3] A full thermal reservoir holds 1,010 MWh of heat, enough to run the turbine for about 7.5 hours at full-load, in case it rains or after sunset.
A full charge on the solar storage will only last 7.5 hours. Here are a couple of issue with that;
1. Winter nights are longer than 7.5 hours.
2. One may not get a full charge during a stormy winter day.
What is more needed is a way of storing enough energy to last days at a time to get through storms, etc. No insulation is perfect and some heat will be lost over a few days time.
Thermal storage is great for short term storage but sorting enough energy may be beyond it's capabi
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I'm thinking solar. If this technology, coupled with tracking solar concentrators,
How do you keep the cold side cool? The thermocell works on temperature differential. Keep anything in the sun and it will become evenly hot. I think cooling the back side will take more energy than the cell will produce.
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Considering that we are trying to replace nuclear and fossil fuel power plants with green energy, upgrading current plants is not the solution. The point I am trying to make is that at night, during slack tide and during a storm very few green energy sources work. Solar needs sun, tidal needs water flow and wind turbines would be shut down so as to not over speed (even variable pitched blades have limits).
If we had better ways of storing electricity the problems would be a lot smaller.
Thermoelectric Power (Score:2, Informative)
Thermoelectric power has been around for a long time. There is, literally, nothing new about this. The efficiency is still not high enough to make it worthwhile for any sense of scale. They are better off using waste heat the way they currently do, to heat up the incoming cold fluids that get turned to steam through heat exchangers.
On cars, you do not get enough power out of the current materials to make it worthwhile.
Discrepancy between the press release and abstract (Score:2)
The press release: ""The device offers the possibility of a cheap and flexible design suitable for harvesting waste heat in the 100- to 200-degrees Celsius range."
The abstract: "Power densities reached >0.5 W*m-2 in unoptimized devices, operating with a 130 C hot side."
For half a watt per square meter had better be incredibly cheap and flexible considering wind and solar [azimuthproject.org]are about 4 and 10 times more dense, respectively, on a real-world basis. Nevermind that gains in optimization must be offset by losses
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Peltier effect? (Score:2)
How different is this from existing Peltiers? Peltiers were all the rage back in the Celeron 300A days, but the amperage output is minimal at best.
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Peltiers manage around 5% conversion efficiency.
How About Home Use? (Score:2)
I just wish I could write a Grant for this. It sounds like a "cool" project.
coal? (Score:2)
* oceans
* buildings in sunny places like the parched SW US states
* my freakin' roof [and that is in upstate NY]
but first, please headline the INSTALLED $/Watt. we can take it from there...or not.
or did some coal company pay for this finding?
Will it work as a heat-sink? (Score:2)
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desktop cpu's typically dissipate ~50w at a moderate load (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation [wikipedia.org] for the maximum disapation of your favourite number cruncher)
the base of a heatsink is about 5cmx5cm (the actual die is quite a bit smaller than this), that's 50w/25cm2 or about 20 000w/m2. .5w/m2.
at a temperature difference of around 100c, this generates
Also, it's Seebeck coefficient of 1.5–2.2 mV K1 is 10x better than bismuth telluride (which has a Se of around 0.2 mV/K), (http:/
Throwing the NOT flag here.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Without going too deep into a lesson on thermodynamics, there is not going to be much chance that this works in a modern power station.
Let me put it this way. Current power stations are already engineered to be as efficient as possible. This generally means they are keeping the phase translations of the working liquid using the minimum temperature differentials possible to avoid entropy loss over the ideal Carnot cycle. Any thermally driven power producing device put in series with the heat exchangers is not likely to capture any more power than will be lost by the increased temperature differential required by the device. If this wasn't true, why don't we just attach a boat load of sterling heat engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine) to do the same thing? Reason: It wreaks the efficiency of the power plant by making the temperature differentials higher.. Chances are this new idea has the same problem.
Now, on your car, or other internal combustion engines, there *might* be some application, but I don't think there will be enough power output to make up for the weight increase. There is a HUGE amount of waste heat from your car engine but the question is how efficiently can we capture that and make useful energy out of it? Answer: Not very... Worth looking at because of the amount of heat being just dumped and the high differential temperatures but not likely to be much gain overall.
Mod parent up (Score:5, Informative)
Right. What we have here is another crap materials science article. Somebody did something vaguely interesting at lab scale, and then issued a bullshit press release.
Trying to get the last remnants of recoverable energy out of a heat engine is an old game, going back to the reciprocating engine era. Basic steam engines had one cylinder running off boiler pressure. Double-expansion steam engines had a second cylinder running off the output of the first. The second cylinder is bigger and runs at lower pressure. Triple expansion steam engines had a third, even bigger cylinder. Some quadruple expansion engines were built, but this is a diminishing-returns thing, and triple expansion is about as far as it's worth going economically. Marine engines were often triple-expansion.
Large steam turbines do the same thing, with a succession of rotors of increasing size. Three to twelve stages have been used. Again, this is a diminishing returns thing. At some point the steam condenses to water, which you don't want to happen inside the turbine. Existing turbines get close to that limit. Some turbine plants have a partial vacuum going into the condenser to keep the steam as a gas below 100C. 90C exit temperatures are not uncommon. Almost all of the usable energy has been extracted with an exit temperature like that.
If this new thermoelectric thing is a better way to convert heat to electricity than a steam turbine, it should replace steam turbines, not just be used on the cold end of the system. An efficient solid-state way of converting heat to electrical energy would be valuable. All the existing thermoelectric devices have low efficiency compared to heat engines. Back around 2011, there were several startups [bloomberg.com] getting Federal grants for R&D into "heat harvesting". Commercial products were supposed to appear in 2012. Didn't happen.
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From the article, "The device offers the possibility of a cheap and flexible design suitable for harvesting waste heat in the 100- to 200-degrees Celsius range.". Assume it really work all the way to 10C, that could theoretically be 190/283 ~ 67%. If their efficiency is
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It's always been possible (Score:3)
The abstract says they're getting power densities of 0.5 Watts/m^2 in an unoptimized device. That's pretty deep in "not worth it" territory. This device would have to have an area of 1,5000 square meters exposed to the car's exhaust gases just to generate 1 extra hp. I suspect the additional back-pressure alone from all that piping (never mind the weight) would cost the engine a lot more than 1 hp of generation capacity.
Produces 0.5 W/m^2 (Score:2)
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Tiny block of who knows (Score:2)
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engineering and manufacturing and marketing reality are very harsh to small experiments that can only work in a lab. Most ideas don't pan out, most start-ups fail.
This article's idea already has science and engineering going against it. we already have devices that convert differences in mass' temperature into electricity, and such things work best when the difference is great.
Civilization needs more energy, not ways to recover a couple percent more energy.
Limits aside from heat extraction... (Score:4, Informative)
Yet another 70s idea rehash (Score:2)
I remember a 70s (probably popular science) article about using low grade waste heat to increase efficiency. In principle it works. bit the efficiency (Carnot limit) is very low, and the power density is low. In most places where waste heat is usable it is already in use (large power plants for example). It is often better to just use the heat for non power-generation applications (like heating buildings).
In a sense the 1800s idea of the "triple expansion" steam engine was to use the waste heat from the fi
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i guess you hold a bunch of patents for this technology already?
welcome to hindsight
Hindsite?!?
Of course! Patent beans to energy after they've been used for food!
Re:Cost/Benefit Analysis? (Score:5, Informative)
Net energy loss is what you already have today.
Drive your car down the road, and your exhaust is always hotter than the ambient.
Run your exhaust thru this device, and you can recapture some of that existing loss to power your car's Air Conditioning.
This isn't the only research looking for such technology:
http://phys.org/news/2011-05-high-performance-bulk-thermoelectrics.html [phys.org]
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Usually cars are a bad example simply because they are mobile and adding weight and complexity usually negates most new devices from having value. Stationary engines are a better fit for such notions. So it will tend to boil down to the cost of installing and maintaining these thermopiles. I can imagine a turbine engine in which the hot side of the unit is internal near the combustion area and the cool side is in the air stream outside the engine casing. Or even water pumps and large air compressors
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When you put money above dumping waste heat to the atmosphere (and the problems that will eventually cause)
Again, the problem here is that using that waste heat may cost more in whatever you value, money, environmental dogoodness, or whatever, that it is not worth the effort. Waste heat is easy to dissipate. It is not so easy to use.
And it's a waste of your time to put a moral connotation on money. Money is just a unit of exchange for things we value. A process which loses money, means that someone loses some ability to trade for things they value. One doesn't have to be a "cheap greedy fuck" to be concerned
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On a point of pedantry, 1821 to now is just 1.9 centuries. Note the plural in the word "centuries".
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Ha ha, sore that we neckbeards once again proved your perpetual motion machine wouldn't work?