81–90 of 163 posts
Does anyone know if this discovery can be used to boost the efficiency of solar panels? Don't solar panels get incredibly hot?
It needs a nearby source of cool to work, and when a solar panel is hot, oftentimes everything surrounding it is hot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'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…
You'd be actively cooling your wood stove by much more than the power you'd extract, and you won't get more than enough to charge a phone or laptop. TECs are just terrible. You'd get much better result by making a small steam plant with the same setup: boil water on stove, drive plant (turbine or piston), condense outside, repeat. However, if you really want to do this with TECs, stack them to lower the per-unit temp…
Earlier 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.
I'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…
Won't this reduce the thermal output of your stove quite significantly? I suppose that might not be a problem in practice (most wood stoves I've used end up overheating the room if you're not careful), but it's not like it's free energy :P
Yes. You want to have the "cold" side indoors where the heat is going anyway. You might think it's all going outside in the end, but we dont want to create a new path for it to get there.
BTW a sterling engine running a generator seems like a good idea in this case.
Every 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.
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…
Every 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
You have some kind of error here: with T_c = T_h, not only does Wikipedia’s formula give 0% efficiency, but it must : any power at all generated with no temperature difference would make a perpetual motion machine.
Would also point out that for the IoT like applications, the assumption of T_c ~= T_h isn't so bad. For example, if you wanted something powered off residual body heat, you're looking at something like 293/310 = 0.945. For
Does anyone know if this discovery can be used to boost the efficiency of solar panels? Don't solar panels get incredibly hot?
The title is misleading, the technology (thermoelectric cooler) does not turn heat into electricity, but temperature gradients. It needs a nearby source of cool to work, and when a solar panel is hot, oftentimes everything surrounding it is hot.
I have no real data...
I'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…