New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
51–60 of 163 posts
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#52Would this be efficient in a mobile phone?
This will be slowly but surely be used everywhere. Reducing heat output while providing electricity is almost always a win-win situation.
This adds weight and volume that are bad for a mobile phone. Also, the size must be enough to process all the heat from the phone. In systems with a big heatsink you will need a bigger device between the heat source and the heatsink. This will not be a problem for phones, but it may be a problem for notebooks.
Also, with a difference of 30C (60F) they increased the maximum efficiency from 1% to 4%, but that temperature difference is probably too hot for a phone in your pocket.
It's probably better to have a smaller phone, or to use the additional space/weight in a bigger battery.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#53does this imply an overall entropy reduction for a whole system comprising a device and support apparatus for reusing its heat as energy source supply?
No you can't make a perpetual motion machine with it ;)
i am aware of it. i was not pretending we could reach zero entropy but nevertheless it manifests entropy reduction compared to an energetic non-optimal raw material doesn't it? meaning if we need less energy for the same amount of work we do it more efficiently and therefore require less (but not null!) entropic output
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#54Every time some phenomenon arises from a recipe of fairly typical materials I wonder what other surprises nature has in store for us. The idea that the crystalline structure plays a large role in the bulk thermal conductivity of the material is kind of mind-blowing at first and then retrospectively obvious.
I am twenty years removed from it, but I used to be well-informed on this kind of thing; I have a PhD in mineral physics. Let's see how well I can explain this (haven't read the article, yet, sorry! Waiting for a plane...) So you're no doubt familiar with the physics of a vibrating string; it resonates at wavelengths (length of string, 2 * length of string, 3 * length of string... n as n->inf). So you can express any…
> A reasonable approximation for a crystalline structure is balls – point masses – connected by springs, where the springs are covalent bonds, plus electrostatic effects between point charges.
Thanks! This is a great analogy.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#55Sadly 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.
Lots of hand tools like hex-head wrenches also use it. Typically they get stamped with "CR-V" for chromium-vanadium. It's basically all you need to know when buying standard quality hand tools.
In addition to being affordable the material is available in bulk and there exists an industry which knows how to work with it. Same with all the materials mentioned.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#56Every time some phenomenon arises from a recipe of fairly typical materials I wonder what other surprises nature has in store for us. The idea that the crystalline structure plays a large role in the bulk thermal conductivity of the material is kind of mind-blowing at first and then retrospectively obvious.
> a recipe of fairly typical materials
We don’t have good theory for materials science. Our understanding is closer to a list of observations (“effects”) than anything unifying. That almost ensures there will be surprises in the gaps.
At the same time, popular disillusionment with repeated claims of wonder materials has led to—in my opinion—underinvestment in basic research.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#57What 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 predominant use cases for this will be powering ultra-low power sensors. The higher power could enable better (longer range, higher bandwidth) radios in the sensors.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#58Every time some phenomenon arises from a recipe of fairly typical materials I wonder what other surprises nature has in store for us. The idea that the crystalline structure plays a large role in the bulk thermal conductivity of the material is kind of mind-blowing at first and then retrospectively obvious.
I am twenty years removed from it, but I used to be well-informed on this kind of thing; I have a PhD in mineral physics. Let's see how well I can explain this (haven't read the article, yet, sorry! Waiting for a plane...) So you're no doubt familiar with the physics of a vibrating string; it resonates at wavelengths (length of string, 2 * length of string, 3 * length of string... n as n->inf). So you can express any…
Well written I must say. Makes me very curious about crystals and material physics (especially since I got interested in low level electronics and semi conductors).
Any suggestion to read ?
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
We were talking just the other day about back-side power distribution in ICs. Basically you bury the power rails really deep, lap the chip down to half a micrometer, and add through vias to ge to the rails. So now you’ve got a very thin chip and all the power comes in on the side with pretty much nothing else on it. I wonder if you mount the chip backside up, put these little peltier devices on the hot spots, if you…
The thing is, a chip generally cools just fine with heat pipes and fins up to 200 or more watts. And the built-in heat spreader gets rid of hot spots very effectively. At that power level a peltier tends to be worse than useless, even if you're putting enormous amounts of power through it. Even if you double the efficiency it's still a bad option.
Overclocked threadrippers can hit 500W[1]. I can see peltiers and 'vapochill' style phase-change cooling making a comeback...
1. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13124/the-amd-threadripper-29...
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#60Every time some phenomenon arises from a recipe of fairly typical materials I wonder what other surprises nature has in store for us. The idea that the crystalline structure plays a large role in the bulk thermal conductivity of the material is kind of mind-blowing at first and then retrospectively obvious.
I am twenty years removed from it, but I used to be well-informed on this kind of thing; I have a PhD in mineral physics. Let's see how well I can explain this (haven't read the article, yet, sorry! Waiting for a plane...) So you're no doubt familiar with the physics of a vibrating string; it resonates at wavelengths (length of string, 2 * length of string, 3 * length of string... n as n->inf). So you can express any…
I think you meant to say length of string, length of string / 2, length of string / 3, ...