Electrical Energy from Hot Water?

Peltier effect thermoelectric electric cells can be run in reverse where if you had a hot side and a cold side they would produce electricity. Extremely inefficient, but if you were smelting metals in a cold environment you may be able to recover some energy that way. If you have to run a fan or refrigerant compressor however to attain a cold side, you would consume more energy than you could make.

Drive a 100 watt chevy alternator with a small steam turbine.

What about using natural convection? Let the hot section flow to the cold section through a pipe and install a generator (impeller with a dynamo) inside the pipe.

You could hook up a tread mill to a generator. Place ten engineers on the tread mill. And spray them with the hot water everytime they slowed down.

Connect a Stirling-cycle heat engine to an electric generator and let thermodynamics do the rest?

How about if you put your cauldron of water underneath a large turbine shroud, and allowed the rising heat to turn the turbine? Chris

The efficency of any heat engine is dependent on the difference in temperature between the hot source and the cold on an absolute scale.

With the hot source at say 370°K and the cold source at say 300°K only a low efficiency can be expected the working fluid of the heat engine will have to boil and produce an useful pressure at 370°K and condense at 300°K.

Israel has built power stations where the hot side was heated by salt water skimmed from Sun heated pools with the cold side normal cooling towers, I think a thermal efficiency of about 10% was achieved.

Do you have any documentation or references we could look at?

Steve: now,I tell you that there is something in the world not acceptable by me if we consider that mankind get photos of Mars,...I think heat expeled by cars using fans and radiator globally is a bad thing-imagine many millions of cars elliminating the most of fuel energy as heat:not good for environment ,and bad eficciency ,can no one think of transforming this heat,at the moment that fan would be turned un ,in a switch that would get thermal energy of hot water to obtain a voltage source from thermocouples or thermoplates ,probably with very many of them to give a minimal voltage level and perhaps a dedicated i.c to operate similarly to charge-pump regulators,and to store a good percentage of this energy?

Waste heat generated by inefficient heat engines is indeed a bad thing. However, I think the best solution is to find higher efficiency alternatives to the heat engines, rather than trying to recover the heat after it has been generated. Even the best thermocouples and peltier-effect devices have very poor efficiency (e.g., < 10%).

This is a good place to start looking also look to 'Organic Rakine Cycle'

http://www.solarpond.utep.edu/

Good for you guys!!

I like there are people that look for alternative power surce solution.

Some of this ideas look craizy for now but I am sure soon will came the necesity of this energy.

I have done an experiment with some wires from different materials like thermocouples. I put together some home made thermocouples up to reach 0.5VDC just with the stove flame temperature at home and the air temperature (that time was something like 40 to 45 degress celcius).

So now come to my mind that if we introduce something like this into the earth (some thermocouple together), one side facing the magma (some 1000 C) and one side facing wather (100) there will be a big themperature difference. So at the end we can get the evaporated water for the turbine and some VDC from the Themochouplers arrays.

If somebody can deveope this for me please let me know the result.

I have not the money and time to develope and implement this into a big power system.

I hope soon I can develope my small prototype :). I hope before God call me to haven :)!!

Saludos!

Delmar

PD: between the the surface facing the water at 100C and the evaporated wather there should be some 0C to 4C. This difference can be used also :).

As a child my grandpa showed me a device that I remember being like a porcupine. It consisted of a lot of wires going from the center of a chimney on an oil lamp that were welded together to form a star with two leads coming out and running the radio that he had on the table. I think the wires were copper and steel or nickle. the power produced was very low but it was enough to make the radio play. Possibly you can use this process with the hot water heating one end of the wire bundle and the other end being cooled by ambient air temp.

Thermocouple and peltier effect generators have been in use for a long time but are a very expencive and inefficiennt form of generator, the the main use is in space vehicles where radio isotopes can be used as a source of heat although their use worries enviromentalists in case a crash on launch occurs.

Units have been built giving about 150 watts and are still able to produce 75 after 30 years.

They are of course very costly to produce but for deep space vehicles they are they best power source

Are you able of studying such metals?How would the costs decrease if this were produced in very,very ,large scale?Would you like to have my e-mail?I am an Electrical Engineer taht use thermocouples for the only purpose of measuring.I say that considerably best efficient thermnocouples were not profoundly researched because this principle is obviosly not good for heat generation in order to them transform it directly to electrical energy ,but if world have too much hot water at almost 100°C to be chilled by radiator and powerful fans,and considering that this is not negligible for our planet to warm-up ,then this would permit sutdies.Besides,much of heat would not be eliminated to ambient ,but partially recovered to machine as by a battery ,so that efficiency of machine ,in the situation that I not yet feel good to expose to you, would perhaps have a factor of 100%!I think world asks us some new challenges,but I recognize that at a glance it will seem utopic!