Harnessing waste heat to produce electricity

That heat emanating from your computer as you sit reading this article amounts to nothing more than wasted energy. And your computer is not alone. More than half of the energy consumed worldwide is wasted, most of it in the form of excess heat. But new research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) indicates it might be possible to harvest much of the wasted heat produced by everything from computer processors to car engines and electric powerplants, and convert it into usable electricity. This kind of waste-energy harvesting might lead to mobile phones with double the talk time, laptop computers that can operate twice as long before needing to be plugged in to mains power, or energy plants that produce more electricity for a given amount of fuel.

Theory says that conversion of heat into electricity can never exceed a specific value called the Carnot Limit, based on a 19th Century formula for determining the maximum efficiency that any device can achieve in converting heat into work (energy). But current commercial thermoelectric devices only achieve about one-tenth of that limit. However, in experiments involving a new technology, thermal diodes, an MIT research team has been able to demonstrate efficiency as high as 40 percent of the Carnot Limit, with calculations showing that this new system could ultimately reach as much as 90 percent of that ceiling.

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Tags: harnessing waste heat, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, thermoelectric devices, waste energy

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 6:14 pm and is filed under Cutting-edge Research, Innovation, Project Energy, gizmag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.