14 DAY TRIAL // With more and more cars crowding the streets and exhaust gases being released into the atmosphere, it was time for a brilliant idea on what to do with waste heat, so an international collaboration between scientists at government and university laboratories, came up with a new way of generating electricity from exhaust gas.
The team included scientists from the federal Brookhaven, Argonne, Los Alamos national laboratories, Columbia University, Northwestern University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
The phenomenon is called the thermoelectric effect and it applies to car exhaust, factory emissions and other domains in which the large amount of human-manufactured energy currently being lost to the atmosphere, can be captured.
Thanks to new models and experimental techniques, the researchers managed to observe and confirm a random “flipping” behavior, meaning that in certain materials, their atomic structure rearranged to block the transfer of heat.
This phenomenon is actually the key to thermoelectric efficiency, and it will allow researchers to identify new, low cost materials to do the job, CleanTechnica reports.
When certain materials of different temperatures are contiguous to each other, a thermoelectric charge occurs between them.
Theoretically, it sounds quite simple but in order to obtain maximum efficiency, the scientists have to identify the most suited materials, and keep the difference in temperatures within an efficient range.
So far, scientists used conventional techniques and studied the materials according to their average atomic structure, but now, thanks to new nano-scale methods, they can focus on structural changes among individual atoms as materials heat and cool.
Actually, GM is working on new thermoelectric generators to capture waste heat from car exhaust, and Virginia Tech researchers are creating new low-cost thermoelectric materials.
Recycling waste heat could be a part of our daily life, and this is rather a good thing because, besides cleaning up the air, it could also prove to be a valuable energy source, and limit the use of fossil fuels.
For those who like nice cars, here is an after-Xmas present:
