New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electricity

I&#x27;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&#x27;t so great in the Yukon.<p>I know it won&#x27;t be a massive amount of power, but given it will be 24&#x2F;7 for about 6 months of winter when the wood stove runs, I think it will be a useful amount.<p>Does anyone know where I can buy TECs that will handle extremely high temperatures like this?<p>All the ones I see say they&#x27;re rated at about a max temp delta of ~67C-72C

Every time some phenomenon arises from a recipe of fairly typical materials I wonder what other surprises nature has in store for us.<p>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.

Just to clarify why these aren&#x27;t used everywhere: heat-to-power devices act as insulation (compared to just letting the heat escape). If you have something that you&#x27;re trying to keep cool, like a CPU, a system that shunts heat straight to the surroundings will always give better cooling than a system that puts layers in between. Contrariwise, if you have a need for electricity, mechanical heat engines will almost always be more efficient. Solid-state heat-to-power only makes sense in a narrow set of cases which aren&#x27;t suitable for direct cooling or heat engines.

What 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?

paper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41586-019-1751-9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;s41586-019-1751-9</a>

This would be an even bigger deal for remote spacecraft that rely on the heat from on-board nuclear reactors.

Could this also be used to reverse electricity into cold-heat gradient with high efficiency?

If an advanced civilization continued to improve the efficiency of this effect would they eventually use it to capture the majority of the energy output of their local star? You could have a shell of high efficiency solar satellites surrounded by another shell of high efficiency Seebeck satellites. What would this look like from a distance? Would they be able to capture enough energy so their star would be indistinguishable from the ambient temperature of space?<p>Our galaxy and others appear to be missing most of the mass i.e. stars that they should have in order to rotate as fast as they do. We put the figure for missing mass at about 80 to 90 percent for our galaxy. What if our galaxy and others are already colonized by advanced civilizations that make maximal use of the power output of stars so it simply looks like we&#x27;re missing most of the matter that should exist. This could explain why there is a variation in the amount of missing mass between galaxies with some galaxies apparently containing 0% &#x27;dark matter&#x27;. No advanced civilization = no dark matter, different amounts = different stages in development of the galactic civilization.<p>Could this be a solution to the Fermi paradox?

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.

Something I was curious about, but not sure where to start - suppose you wanted to make something that at 400-500K, would emit radio waves from which the temperature could be derived. And as small, simple and durable as possible, so it didn&#x27;t break down.<p>I mean, there&#x27;s going to inherently be infrared, so how can you convert that to radio of roughly a desired frequency range without complex machinery?

Does anyone know if this discovery can be used to boost the efficiency of solar panels? Don&#x27;t solar panels get incredibly hot?

Sadly the key here is lab scale and vanadium. Costs won’t make it worthwhile.

does this imply an overall entropy reduction for a whole system comprising a device and support apparatus for reusing its heat as energy source supply?

Would this be efficient in a mobile phone?

&#x2F;&#x2F; Removed as I&#x27;m not a physicist and may be mistaken.