Company Claims New Chip Converts Heat To Electricity 346
Dster76 writes to tell us that the startup, Eneco, has invented a solid state energy conversion chip which they claim will be able to convert heat directly into electricity or reach temperatures of -200 C when given an electrical current. While such a device could revolutionize many aspects of computing I'll keep my skeptic hat on for the time being.
Thermocouple (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocouple [wikipedia.org]
Invented 1821 - Prior art?
gus
P.S. Yes, I know that TC's rely on a temperature differential, not just a temperature...
This is new? (Score:1, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier_effect [wikipedia.org]
Re:Peltier? (Score:2, Informative)
What?! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Energy conversion devices (Score:5, Informative)
Dupe (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Energy conversion devices (Score:5, Informative)
Similar work been done before (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Energy conversion devices (Score:3, Informative)
Peltier-Seebeck (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where is the energy going? (Score:5, Informative)
1) Extract heat and use heat differential to generate electricity.
2) Use electricity supply to cool down to -200.
Either one or the other, but not both at the same time.
The summary is bogus (Score:4, Informative)
Very silly idea (Score:5, Informative)
There are thermionic devices already around, you're probably looking at one. Vacuum tubes and CRT's are thermionic devices. Not very powerful ones--a typical tube only boils off microamps of current at under a volt, while requiring several watts of electrical power to heat the emitter. Not very impressive.
Thermocouple (Score:3, Informative)
I read part of TFA but it just sounds like a better thermocouple.
Show me a production, working product. Otherwise, I'll wait for someone to come up with a way to 'catch' entropy.
Re:-200C ? (Score:5, Informative)
Peltier (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier-Seebeck_effe
thermodynamics (Score:5, Informative)
Second Law of Thermodynamics (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Similar work been done before (Score:2, Informative)
Their parent company http://borealis.com/ [borealis.com] has lots of technologies that are equally world-changing, and almost equally vaporous.
Re:Energy conversion devices (Score:4, Informative)
No, you can't run your car that way, but you can use the exhaust to turn a fan to turn a compressor to force induction to increase power.
Well call this a "turbocharger."
KFG
Re:Energy conversion devices (Score:5, Informative)
The Earth receives high energy, low entropy photons from the sun. It reradiates low energy, high entropy photons back into space. These reradiated photons are not very useful in a 300 K environment, which is in thermodynamic equilibrium with them. This is similar to how you'd find it much harder to extract work from sunlight if you were on the surface of the sun, an environment in thermodynamic equilibrium with that light. (Yes I know everything would melt you nitpickers but the point remains.)
The reason those calculators work is because they are exchanging energy with the sun's surface and they are not in thermodynamic equilibrium with it. On the earth's surface, if you try to make a solar cell to catch low infrared from objects on our own planet, you'll find that your cell radiates away the photons you are trying to capture, just by being at room temperature.
Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics (Score:5, Informative)
I read the link. It looks like an improved thermocouple. It uses a heat-sink and a heat source just like an RTG.
As one person said to discredit the story "it is like powering your car with it's exhaust". A gas turbine engine does exactly that.
This wouldn't be a perpetual motion machine since it would still require a power source. What this device does is simply recovers some of the wasted energy from the hot chip and feed it back into the battery.
The only "questionable" part is this mystery semiconductor that conducts electrons a lot better than it conducts heat.
Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics (Score:5, Informative)
Heat is the energy contained in random motion of particles. The key here is *random". If you extract energy from pure heat that's just sitting somewhere, you're reducing the entropy of the hot thing, practically by definition. In order for this to not be a violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics, you would have to create even more entropy somewhere else. The easiest way to do this would be to generate more heat than you removed, but then you're up against conservation of energy. There are other ways to create entropy, though, so it's not technically impossible.
The reason you can grab energy out of heat moving from a hot location to a cooler location is that that net motion is not random, so you can increase the entropy of the system by randomizing the non-random element.
Note: yes, all the above is a dramatic over-simplification.
Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics (Score:5, Informative)
Their patent on the solid state energy converter [patentstorm.us] mentions that they have been experimenting with indium antimonide (InSb).
They also hold a patent for a way to make N-type semiconducting diamond [patentstorm.us], which may hint to where they're heading with this (or not.)
Re:Energy conversion devices (Score:3, Informative)
That sounds like they're trying to build a semiconductor equivalent of the true-vacuum device I described above. Perhaps something like a field-effect transistor using bulk, undoped, semiconductor material for the "vacuum" and perhaps a schottky barrier junction (or a doped region) for the "thermionic emission cathode". A "P-I-P" diode perhaps, with the thermal agitation lifting the electrons from the potential well to launch them into the undoped region?
(I should stop guessing and look up their patents.)
Much of the heat conduction in solids is done by electron motion rather than mechanical vibration transfer. So a bar of undoped semiconductor should be a better insulator than the heavily-doped P and N type silicon that makes up the structure of a peltier cell, leading to higher efficiency in a "semconductor thermionic" device.
Darn. I thought these guys were working on true cold-cathode vacuum tubes at integrated circuit scales, and had solved the three big problems blocking them (cathode construction, ion erosion, and maintaining a clean vacuum).
Vacuum tubes and their close relatives, gas-discharge (plasma) tubes, have great properties (like radiation and EMP resistance) and can do a lot of amazing stuff - some of which semiconductors still can't do, or do well. It was mainly the need to heat the cathode that let semiconductors displace them - and the strucutral shrinkage and continued breakthroughs that let them hold their lead. While the size of the electron wave function means nano-scale vacuum ICs will probably hit a density wall at a slightly larger feature size than semiconductors, vacuum ICs still have a lot of potential. If somebody had solved those three problems I mentioned I can imagine a partial revival, with vacuum ICs leveraging the semiconductor manufacturing processes and displacing semiconductors in at least some applications where their properties give significant advantages.
HERE's the real story: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Second Law of Thermodynamics (Score:5, Informative)
In everyday language, sure. But not in scientific language.
From the wiki article [wikipedia.org]: "In physics, heat, symbolized by Q, is defined as energy in transit."
Heat is the amount of thermal energy that is flowing between two bodies at different temperatures. The "thermal energy content" (roughly) is temperature itself. GP was quite correct.