Help me by answering my question.

for my senior project I developed a system that would light indicators on a wireless display...

All it was for was to see if the buildings laundrette was in use.

That's a big convenience in communal living... not very exciting, but awesomely practical..

heat is a radiation, and wave of sorts, i have no clue how it could be transferred into electricity using sound. I know the old school way of using steam from heat to give you the power you desire. steam or heat in a metal tube creating pressure/ vibration could possibly be harnessed. good luck.

Why not apply the Peltier effect to convert the heat energy into electricity directly instead?

See "Laminar Flow" and "Thermoacoustic Engine" in a google search.

I have seen Thermocouples operating moving coil analogue meters in some German Machines. Efficiency will be extremely poor. Try cascading many thermo couples in series. It will be OK for some experimental project; practically I think it is not a good idea.

Hi Subramanyan,

Thermocouples does not convert heat energy to sound energy. It converts heat energy to electrical energy. "Seebeck effect " When two dissimilar metals( Ni Cr.& Ni , Pt & Pt Rh ) are joined and if the joint is heated it generates electrical energy. This generated emf is used to operate a millivolt meter to measure the temperature by calibrating as degree centigrade.

Dear Mr.Abraham,

Yes. I never said sound. TC convert electrical only. I have working experience over 30 years with Thermocouples.

I'd hate to see anyone going into this at all. There just is no substance. The key is "sound ray". Maybe someone else can pick up on that one.

I assume by sound ray, you mean sound wave, or perhaps focused sound waves. In any case, how do you propose to convert the heat into sound, and then how do you propose to convert the sound into electricity? As indicated by others, I see two very low efficiency conversions. Very low multiplied by very low equals extremely low efficiency!

Unless you have something radically new in both of those conversions, I suggest you pick a (different) topic where you have at least a glimmer of hope in succeeding!

Here's how...

You take the heat you have, convert it into electricity, (Simple) with this you power a hi power audio amplifier to produce a "Sound Ray" (same procedure as "Death-Ray"), with your death-ray, sorry, sound ray, and based on our poster engineering skills, you convert it to electricity and vualla... you did it.!

Piece of cake...

Pd: If our poster doesn't know the difference between "Sound-Ray" (what to hell is this?)and "Sound wave," After 2 or more years of engineering, I suggest we close that school.

Wangito.

C'mon Wangito - you know about second languages! Be kind... If the OP's first language is English, then you are right, but I presume it is not.

I had not heard of the 'Thermoacoustic Prime Mover' referred to in posts 15 and 16, so it may well be that the project fits my 'Unless...' category.

I suspect that many of us were led off in the wrong direction by the poor English and lack of detail in the original post. At this point, it sounds significantly better than most of the HHO proposals we've seen recently.

You can check the end results of hundreds of years of testing in Hansard, and probably the Congressional Record. Politicians make noise, result lot of hot air. Nobody has come up with a way of harnessing the hot air yet.

Simon

It is always good to think differently and find new area of invention. In this particular case ( You may feel that I am rude) the fact is ,it is a bad idea for a BE project as it does not serve any useful purpose and is impracticable and inefficient. Conversion of energy results in losses and then why double conversion when you can directly convert heat and light of sun to electricity with available technology. The present day problem is this conversion is costly and storing is another problem. Try to invent cheap material which can be used for generating cheap solar cells and a combination of lenses and mirrors to concentrate solar energy to limited location instead of having large area for the installation. Invention of large capacity miniature battery if possible can serve a lot of energy storing problems.

Best of luck . Think and find great ideas.

Say What?

Heat into a sound beam?

I can see the other way around as you can heat things up with sound as is the case with ultrasonic welding of plastic parts.

Some things just don't work in reverse too well...

Travis

I brought your idea to the small group of the engineering students.

Most of them repeated the same negative opinions you might read above.

The only one (in Instrumentation major) stated that this kind of multi-stage energy conversion could be seen in specific monitoring processes. His idea (by the way was not approved by the rest of the group) was to:

a. create a vibrator which output = the sound wave amplitude would be a (maybe linear?) function of the heat or temperature in the chamber. The output signal should have a triggering point.

b. Acoustic signal would indicate alert - to - alarm level around the monitored object (its heat/temperature level).

c. in the some permanent/constant distance of the sound source would be installed a microphone. Its electrical signal could be transmitted via wires to the remote Control Room to the attenuator/meter. Because of very hard to calibrate this "installation + devices" system, it could be used only just to alert - alarm monitoring.

The positive here is doubled alert/alarm: locally and remotely using two type of phenomena: sound and vision. A good redundancy

Some students suggested putting this idea to Psychology or Political Science -101 courses.

P.S. Our question: How many year of study is required in your School/University for Bachelor degree? Your project is in .... year of the study? Thanks in advance for your answers.

GA for you! I probably completely misconstrued the intention of the original poster. Thanks for taking the time for giving the idea some serious thought.

This is a good idea to pursue if you can convince the "old school" guys you are not crazy.

You don't have to convince us of anything...we merely gave an opinion as asked, we don't actually mind if someone ignores our advice, we are however, unkilely to be able to offer constructive suggestions.

Blink has already posted a lucid reply.

You seem to think that magic words like resonance and Peizo Crystal can generate power from thin air, or efficiently from heat. Many of us are familiar with travelling wave tubes, lasers, magnetrons and such.

The original question is to get electricty from heat. It then adds the intermediate stage of a sound ray. It is this intermediate stage which we are querying.

A sound ray will have great difficulty transmitting useable power for many reasons which are well known.
E.G If you consider a laser beam as a similar way of transmitting power you will know that a laser isn't very efficient and there are problems transmitting the power through the atmosphere due to localised heating and other effects. Sound would be harder to direct and focus than a laser.

We are not giving anyone a 'bad time' we are giving them sound advice (ho ho) in an attempt to stop them wasing their time on a fool's quest.

When you next want to go upstairs, maybe if you do it via the window and climbing the drain pipe, you will realise the inefficiencies we are trying to avoid.

Del

Just given 14 and 15 a GA which sounds weird, but I agree with Ken on the issue of where is the enthusiasm. And I am about to start a seriously contentious post on this topic, but Accudave has a valid point, "hey guys it might work" and that surely is what engineering is about. So having given a GA to two contadictory posts, I thought I ought to explain.

Simon

Guys, I've got no (plausible) idea about the initial conversion "heat to sound", but at the other end, "sound to electricity" please read on.

If the sound receiver was a movable VERY strong magnetic wafer contained within an appropriate coil. The the movement (of the magnet) caused by the sound would cause a moving magnetic flux inside a fixed coil.

There is a basic principal of physics, relative movement of conductor and magnetic flux gives voltage. (Effectively this could be regarded as the secondary side of a transformer that would produce ac signal at the sound frequency used.)

The mechanical guys can buy into it from here, but if the frequency were relatively stable, the wafer could be mounted such that it matched harmonic responce to the sound. It becomes a single frequency microphone.

I hope the originator enjoys the challenge. If this project is truly their "passion" then there will be challenges to overcome, scheptics to tolerate and burdens to bear. If from this they learn good analytic skills, good experimental skills and good recording and presentation skills, then they will make a good Engineer.

Crikey, if every task we attempted was a success, then we'd never know that those HHO devices are such bunkum.

A member of this family is called microphone.

Tbh, as stated above your idea is a bit bad and in my opinion too narrow for a final year BE project. Maybe you should study energy conversion as a whole and add that heat conversion to sound wave to it.

In most cases even in BE projects the idea isn't that you get nobel prize from it but to give student some insight how these kinds of studies are made and how they should be scheduled. Also you should maximise the benefits of this study by asking if you could do it for some company/corporation. If not, then pick atleast a subject that interest you most.