Creating power out of thin air. Article on zdnet

Can't remember Seebeck effect - I know the name from way back.

Peltier effect heat pumps have been used for years, typically for cooling semiconductors & sub-assemblies, and are readily available.

See, for example, RS238-2988

... Just looked at the article. Sounds like the usual bulls**t. Run these things backwards, and you get electrical power out - BUT you need the temperature differential (& heat flow) for it to work. The energy's got to come from somewhere.

How about jumping up & down on a Piezo crystal? You'd get lots of volts, which in theory you could convert to lower voltage/more current and use to charge batteries, heat your house etc. etc. But how long could you keep jumping up & down?

I think you miss a slightly small but important point.

They are talking about temperature differential and on car surfaces you would have that especially when you drive around. Find an exposed bit of the steel body inside your car and when you go along at 70 miles per hour it is deffinitely cold and remains so. That energy would be lost anyway so it could be reused which is not the same as for nothing but still converting waste.

Jumping up and down on a piezo crystal is not a good idea, you get a heart attack and the heat you generate is much higher than the voltage ever will be anyway

"They are talking about temperature differential " - you need a heat source the other side of the cold bit. If you're using the waste heat from the engine, then maybe this is a possible way of scraping back a bit of the lost stuff.

I'm all in favour of making ICE cars more efficient (we're stuck with petrol engines & similar for a while), but I don't think this is the holy grail of free energy that the article seems to be hinting at. Certainly needs a lot of cost/benefit work + study of practical application.

Maybe I'm just an old cynic...

They are talking about temperature differential ...

The article says: "Conceivably, one could take that material and fashion it into a passive fuel cell that can create power by just sitting in an ordinary room heated to about 72 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to self-charging electronic devices." That seems to specifically say they are not talking about differentials.

They go on to say: "Although the fuel cells would ultimately produce electricity by just sitting around, producing the materials for the fuel cells takes a lot of power. "Manufacturing is energy-intensive," Surany said.

The whole article strikes me as utter BS. It seems they are deliberately confusing things, by suggesting that since peltier junctions work (on temperature differentials), that their scheme will work without temperature differential.

Instead of being in a "normal" energy state at room temperature, the altered material is in a normal energy state at, hypothetically, minus 40 degrees Celsius or colder. Thus, when this material is put into a room-temperature environment, it's excited.

As far as I can tell this is gibberish. I am unaware of any "normal" energy state for a material. Any material at a temperature above absolute zero is "excited".

Perhaps it's just a poorly-written article, but is sounds like fraud to me.

The article on Zdnet (and other news sites, although there only appears to be 2 or 3 versions of the story which have been copied by every man and his dog) looks really dodgy, and the reference to Enocean doesn't make sense as they only use solar cells and piezo actions to operate remote self-contained devices. Other references to piezo generator development also don't make sense as it is not comparing apples with apples.

The part regarding nuclear fusion seems very wrong. Syrdec doesn't seem to have a presence on the web (they are apparently in Princeton, N.J).

.....and it gets worse, this was found........

Theoretically, one could heat the material, too, to get better results. If you heated one square meter of the material to 100 degrees Celsius, or the boiling point of water, the material could absorb 1.2 kilojoules of heat energy. Converting 5 percent of that heat to electricity would give you enough energy to power a car, Surany asserted.

Something smells here .

I haven't read the link yet (I will later) but let me explain what the Seebeck and Peltier Effects are.

The Seebeck effect is the phenomenon that makes thermocouples work. These devices produce an electrical DC voltage when subjected to a temperature differential. The voltage increases as the temperature differential increases. Note that the voltage produced is very small (in millivolts).

These are mainly used for measuring temperatures. If you want to use them as a power source, say to produce even just 12 volts, you'll need about a couple hundred of these things. You'll need less if the temperature differential is higher. Not practical, in my opinion.

The Peltier effect is the phenomenon that makes Peltier devices work. You inject a DC voltage one way and it gets cold. Reverse the polarity and it gets hot. They are commercially available and in use in a lot of stuff. Yes, in laboratory equipment also.

In computers, they can be used to cool the microprocessor chip. They are usually not included in commercial computers though. You buy and install them separately. I think you also need a separate power supply for them.

Remember small is beautiful by schumacher? he created a thermopile of these devices, used a candle as the heat source and used them to power radio receivers in India.

Hello Vulcan

Peltier devices are interesting , can i get links on web , any way i too will search but i expect better links from you , thank you

What links? I didn't provide any links. What are you talking about? Do you mean that you want me to provide links?

If you're looking for links, this site has a list of various sites. Okay, it's a link to more links but you get a lot of choices depending on what you want to learn. Happy hunting!

ohh , thank you , i was just looking for some source and supplyers so i could get some for my experiments on heat conservation , waste heat manegement and cooling for small devices where fan cooling was inefficient ..,,thank you once again

Don't forget the thermocouples used to turn off the gas flow to water heaters etc. when the pilot light goes out. Its a single junction, so very low voltage, but enough current to operate an electromagnet that holds the valve open as long as the temperature differential is there.

Yep, the Peltier effect. I've used Peltier devices in several novel applications. The problem is that they are very inefficient for cooling and you have to dump the heat somewhere close to the cool side, so you have to have some air or fluid cooling system for the hot side.

The typical use for Peltier devices is for chips, CCD devices in telescope cameras and the "Icy Esky" type of cooler. But you really have to have power to spare to make this workable.

As far as use for generating power I can see that it would be easy to get some high temperatures on one side of the device, but how are you going to get and keep) the cold side cool? The temperature differential has to be significant (like, freezing on one side and boiling on the other) to get a lousy 12vDC out at 8 - 10A. So call it 100w out of a 1600mm2 area with the cold side at 0C.

It's not at all straightforward to get the cold side cold in a car application. Without active cooling of the cold side you might get enough power to play the radio. By the time you power a cooling device you've used more power than you've gained.

This is why Peltier devices are really used only in a few niche areas. They just aren't that efficient and usually require a lot of peripheral hardware to deal with cooling.

http://cr4.globalspec.com/comment/131653

As a development of the technology, this seems more serious:

http://nextreme.com/

It is so small that it can be integrated to generate usable power, w/o nuclear fusion tough.

Using conductors with dissimilar materials that have their conduction band electrons in shells further apart would certainly help increase the efficiency of a peltier device, but radically change the cost advantage in a direction one would not want to go.

I think most of the limitations of a peltier device have already been listed above, so I won't go into those, but my challenge in trying to use them in the past was getting a device with a large enough active area to really be useful with the temperature gradiant that I had to work with (which for me was less than 50'C).

I think the current state of Peltier-seebeck devices is still very nascent and there is a lot more which can be done. Perhaps a hybridized approach of more exotic materials actually optimized for reverse peltier operation and capitalizing more on thermionic emissions would be workable in the not so distant future

In the words of Orville Wright, "If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance"

This reminds me of a Chinese researcher named Dr. Fu who claims to have converted ambient thermal energy into measurable electrical current -- without using a temperature gradient. In other words, rectification of thermal electrons/Johnson noise. Yes, a violation of the second law of thermodynamics! (here we go again). Now I think it's far more likely that he is mistaken. But if so, the mistake is very subtle and difficult to point out (the skeptics on the Yahoo Free_Energy group offered some critiques, but nothing that definitely nailed down the error). Anyway, I offer these links for your bemusement:

Realization of Maxwell's Hypothesis: an Experiment against the Second Law of Thermodynamics
X. Y. Fu and D. T. Fu, Shanghai, China, November 2003
arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0311/0311104.pdf

Another Way to Realize Maxwell's Demon
X. Y. Fu and D. T. Fu, Shanghai, China, September 2005
arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0509/0509111.pdf

This is the best use for peltier coolers :)

http://www.grynx.com/projects/peltier-beer-cooler/

Peltier effect heating and cooling "car fridges" are on sale in Australia and they work quite well.

Have not used one for heating but excellent for cooling.

The Peltier effect is used quite a bit in some industrial purposes.

I used to be involved in the TEC (Thermo-Electric Cooling) community at one time while an employer was developing a TEC industrial cabinet air conditioner. Even 10 years ago, people were discussing the Seebeck effect as it applies to Peltier devices. The main thrust of the discussion was in how, if cheaply mass produced, they could be used in places where heating was necessary for something else, but was essentially being wasted afterwards. An example would be hot flue gasses from a furnace or boiler.

Here is a wealth of links and information for those who are interested.

http://www.zts.com/

I have seen pictures of a themopile in a kerosene lamp chimney which, "for free", allegedly provided enough electricity to power a tube-type radio during WW-2.

Neglecting capital costs, it was free - to the extent that the lamp was otherwise only used for illumination; the thermopile didn't degrade the light output or cause the lamp to use more fuel - it just used some of the waste heat.

Just been looking around and found this:

Identified as a Russian device from the '50s, which was used for powering radios.