According to a recent report by the American Physicist Organization Network, American scientists have used thermoelectric effects to develop an energy capture device. This “energy catcher†can turn waste heat generated in industrial processes into electricity, saving tens of industrial production annually. One hundred million U.S. dollars.
About 50% of the energy produced in the United States each year is wasted as waste heat. Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, under the US Department of Energy, developed this waste heat converter under the leadership of Scott Hunter, and can efficiently generate electricity and save energy while efficiently cooling equipment such as electronic equipment, photovoltaic cells, and computers. The potential is huge.
The Hunter team's latest technology uses a cantilever structure about 1 square millimeter in size. The device is built on an energy capture system. The energy capture system is a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) thermoelectric capacitor structure. When it is heated and cooled, it will cause currents to flow alternately in both directions, so it can generate electricity. In the device, the cantilever is attached to an anchor that is attached to a base that generates waste heat. When the base heats up, the cantilever will also heat up and bend because of its bimaterial effect.
Hunter explained that when the tip of the hot cantilever comes into contact with a cold surface, the heat on the cantilever will be emitted, and the rapid heat dissipation causes the cantilever to bounce back and come into contact with the hot surface again. The cantilever cools again and then rebounds again. As long as there is a temperature difference between the hot and cold surfaces, the cantilever will continue to dissipate heat and generate electricity. Using this cantilevered "energy catcher" array characterized by fast response and periodic cycling, thermoelectric conversion efficiency of thermoelectric materials can be increased to 10% to 30%. For decades, the conversion efficiency of thermoelectric materials has been hovering between 1% and 5%, and related research has stagnated.
Thermal devices (computer chips, integrated photovoltaic cells, etc.) with a surface area of ​​1 square foot can hold 1,000 such "energy catchers." Although the power generated by each device is only 1 milliwatt to 10 milliwatts, the power generated by many of these devices' aggregated arrays is significant enough to power remote sensing systems or to cool these heat generation systems. provide help.
Hunter believes that this technology can be used first to cool down high-performance computer chips, help solve the problem of petaflop-class supercomputers that need a lot of heat during operation, and at the same time turn most of the heat into electricity.
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