They kept referring to IoT uses in the article. It got me wondering if the best usage of this would be to be embedded in a jacket’s outer shell. You get the surface area but not a lot of wattage of heat, I guess. But it sounds like it makes a pretty good insulator. I could certainly imagine sensors running off that kind of power.
New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
61–70 of 163 posts
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#62Every 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…
This reminds me of this Sixty Symbols video which explains why light is slower in media such as glass than in a vacuum:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiHN0ZWE5bk
The incoming light wave causes an avalanche of secondary waves through electromagnetically perturbing the individual atoms, and the superposition of all these results in a wave that seems to travel slower than the speed of light.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!?…
> 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. It's used to power space probes that can't use solar panels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
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Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#64I've always wanted to build a little hobby project where I put TECs on top of my wood stove and have a radiator outside with coolant to get a nice big heat difference (maybe 100C to 200C) across them and make power in winter when solar isn't so great in the Yukon.
I know it won't be a massive amount of power, but given it will be 24/7 for about 6 months of winter when the wood stove runs, I think it will be a useful amount.
Does anyone know where I can buy TECs that will handle extremely high temperatures like this?
All the ones I see say they're rated at about a max temp delta of ~67C-72C
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#65I've always wanted to build a little hobby project where I put TECs on top of my wood stove and have a radiator outside with coolant to get a nice big heat difference (maybe 100C to 200C) across them and make power in winter when solar isn't so great in the Yukon. I know it won't be a massive amount of power, but given it will be 24/7 for about 6 months of winter when the wood stove runs, I think it will be a useful…
How much power are you trying to make? You can already buy "off the shelf" USB power supplies for camp fires
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#66I've always wanted to build a little hobby project where I put TECs on top of my wood stove and have a radiator outside with coolant to get a nice big heat difference (maybe 100C to 200C) across them and make power in winter when solar isn't so great in the Yukon. I know it won't be a massive amount of power, but given it will be 24/7 for about 6 months of winter when the wood stove runs, I think it will be a useful…
That's a cool idea.
I came across this link because I want to build cheap small sensor stations using LoRa to transmit data (gps location?, temp, humidity, air quality) to a central server.
Solar is not really an option because it needs to be cleaned once in a while.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
The space of "fairly typical materials" is very wide because there are lots of elements and their combinations blow up very fast. Secondly, materials are often very sensitive to small physical or chemical changes, resulting in wildly differing properties. To you the simpleness of the final result is surprising, but that simple result was discovered after a long and exhaustive search. A search into a wide and shallow…
I think OP was just expressing delight and wonder at our surprising and elegant universe rather than making light of the findings.
Actually looking into independent power sources for small IoT sensor stations for a hobby project. I think to understand climate change better, we need more data.
Engineer here btw.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#68I've always wanted to build a little hobby project where I put TECs on top of my wood stove and have a radiator outside with coolant to get a nice big heat difference (maybe 100C to 200C) across them and make power in winter when solar isn't so great in the Yukon. I know it won't be a massive amount of power, but given it will be 24/7 for about 6 months of winter when the wood stove runs, I think it will be a useful…
Could you chain 3 of them using a tank of coolant at room temp as the between value. Or make it water and put the TEC on the cold side of the tank
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#69I've always wanted to build a little hobby project where I put TECs on top of my wood stove and have a radiator outside with coolant to get a nice big heat difference (maybe 100C to 200C) across them and make power in winter when solar isn't so great in the Yukon. I know it won't be a massive amount of power, but given it will be 24/7 for about 6 months of winter when the wood stove runs, I think it will be a useful…
How much power are you trying to make? You can already buy "off the shelf" USB power supplies for camp fires
As much as possible. I would probably cover the entire top of the stove in TECs (so maybe something like 0.5m^2). If I wanted to I could play with adding some to the sides, onto the chimney, etc.
Essentially, it's just to supplement the solar which as I said isn't so crash hot in the Yukon in winter. It's a hobby, and I'd like to see what I can get out of it.
Again, because it's 24x7 for ~6 months I think it might be a fun side project to play with and watch what I can get out of it.
Re: New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some space craft have actually had full reactors on them believe it or not.
There were indeed real nuclear reactors with thermoelectrics being launched in the cold war. However, thermoelectrics have an efficiency well below 10% (maybe a bit better with this improvement but not much). For that reason, future reactors in space will likely use Stirling engines instead.
Correct. Space stirling designs* (and tested engines) have been much more performant than the RTG designs
*I spent part of my career working on these devices and saw many of them running in labs