What does the level of performance indicated here likely mean in terms of the efficiency of, say, a thermal energy plant of some description? How far is the needle shifted for an end user?
New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
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Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#12Sadly the key here is lab scale and vanadium. Costs won’t make it worthwhile.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#13Sadly the key here is lab scale and vanadium. Costs won’t make it worthwhile.
Easy, just build a fusion reactor capable of eventually producing vanadium from hydrogen, and you got yourself a stew going!
Edit : Method of producing said reactor left as an exercise for the reader.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#14What does the level of performance indicated here likely mean in terms of the efficiency of, say, a thermal energy plant of some description? How far is the needle shifted for an end user?
The Peltier and Seebeck effects are so grossly inefficient that even an order of magnitude increase in efficiency doesn’t bring it into reason for basically any purpose. I’m not actually aware of any device ever made that uses the seebeck effect in any substantial way other than the little heat powered fans people put on wood stoves.
The peltier effect is just down right awesome, you put power in and now it’s cold!? Reality steps in at some point when you need to drive down the efficiency even further to get large differentials and ugh. They’re insane to deal with, any amount of thermal load worth speaking of means you have to use a phase change system.
It is very handy for camera sensors though and other scientific gear. There’s a world world of CCD sensors that act in a vacuum with peltier devices driving them below -30c to reduce the noise produced by the sensor.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#15What does the level of performance indicated here likely mean in terms of the efficiency of, say, a thermal energy plant of some description? How far is the needle shifted for an end user?
it works similar to a thermocouple. A normal thermocouple needs a voltage bridge to increase the voltage with a millions to get anything that can be read by a digital 5v meter. These materials don’t need that. And a couple of degrees could produce a workable voltage. But the title Of the article states that the material is meta stable, unsure if that means it will work for a couple of seconds then die. Also, vanadium is used which makes it quite costly.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#16Sadly the key here is lab scale and vanadium. Costs won’t make it worthwhile.
I don't think the research is intended for large scale electricity production. It's for small sensors and processors and that won't cost much.
This opens up a quiet a few possibilities like buy a temperature sensor place it somewhere and it starts feeding data into your home WiFi. No wires, no batteries.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#17Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#18Sadly the key here is lab scale and vanadium. Costs won’t make it worthwhile.
Commercial vanadium metal, of about 95% purity, costs about $20/lb. This is a tiny layer, so even at the 99.9% purity level cost of $100/oz, materials cost is not likely be a critical factor. The main constraint is that it's not making much power -- at this level it's really for very low power applications, especially things like sensors and comms.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#19Sadly the key here is lab scale and vanadium. Costs won’t make it worthwhile.
Vanadium is only $6 per pound. About as expensive as street price of ice cream. It's not a rare earth element or anything like that.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#20What does the level of performance indicated here likely mean in terms of the efficiency of, say, a thermal energy plant of some description? How far is the needle shifted for an end user?
From mucking about with the device efficiency formula from wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_materials#Therm...), and a change of zT from 2.5 to 5, we see a maximal possible efficiency increase of 38% (when T_c == T_h).
Wiki also tells me that the best TEG modules currently lock in around 8%, so we're looking at like 10-11% at best with the new material.
So from a bulk scale electricity standpoint... the needle probably hasn't shifted at all. From a small scale? In the IoT like applications (as mentioned in the press release), that extra 30-40% is nothing to sneeze at.