From the University of Minnesota via Eurkealert today, this looks interesting:
University of Minnesota engineering researchers discover source for generating ‘green’ electricity
University of Minnesota engineering researchers in the College of Science and Engineering have recently discovered a new alloy material that converts heat directly into electricity. This revolutionary energy conversion method is in the early stages of development, but it could have wide-sweeping impact on creating environmentally friendly electricity from waste heat sources.
Researchers say the material could potentially be used to capture waste heat from a car’s exhaust that would heat the material and produce electricity for charging the battery in a hybrid car. Other possible future uses include capturing rejected heat from industrial and power plants or temperature differences in the ocean to create electricity. The research team is looking into possible commercialization of the technology.
“This research is very promising because it presents an entirely new method for energy conversion that’s never been done before,” said University of Minnesota aerospace engineering and mechanics professor Richard James, who led the research team.”It’s also the ultimate ‘green’ way to create electricity because it uses waste heat to create electricity with no carbon dioxide.”
To create the material, the research team combined elements at the atomic level to create a new multiferroic alloy, Ni45Co5Mn40Sn10. Multiferroic materials combine unusual elastic, magnetic and electric properties. The alloy Ni45Co5Mn40Sn10 achieves multiferroism by undergoing a highly reversible phase transformation where one solid turns into another solid. During this phase transformation the alloy undergoes changes in its magnetic properties that are exploited in the energy conversion device.
During a small-scale demonstration in a University of Minnesota lab, the new material created by the researchers begins as a non-magnetic material, then suddenly becomes strongly magnetic when the temperature is raised a small amount. When this happens, the material absorbs heat and spontaneously produces electricity in a surrounding coil. Some of this heat energy is lost in a process called hysteresis. A critical discovery of the team is a systematic way to minimize hysteresis in phase transformations. The team’s research was recently published in the first issue of the new scientific journal Advanced Energy Materials.
Watch a short research video of the new material suddenly become magnetic when heated: http://z.umn.edu/conversionvideo
In addition to Professor James, other members of the research team include University of Minnesota aerospace engineering and mechanics post-doctoral researchers Vijay Srivastava and Kanwal Bhatti, and Ph.D. student Yintao Song. The team is also working with University of Minnesota chemical engineering and materials science professor Christopher Leighton to create a thin film of the material that could be used, for example, to convert some of the waste heat from computers into electricity.
“This research crosses all boundaries of science and engineering,” James said. “It includes engineering, physics, materials, chemistry, mathematics and more. It has required all of us within the university’s College of Science and Engineering to work together to think in new ways.”
Funding for early research on the alloy came from a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (involving other universities including the California Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, University of Washington and University of Maryland), and research grants from the U.S. Air Force and the National Science Foundation. The research is also tentatively funded by a small seed grant from the University of Minnesota’s Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment.
For more detail on the research, read the entire paper published in Advanced Energy Materials at http://z.umn.edu/energyalloy.
The Direct Conversion of Heat to Electricity Using Multiferroic Alloys
Vijay Srivastava1, Yintao Song1, Kanwal Bhatti1,2, R. D. James1,*
Abstract
We demonstrate a new method for the direct conversion of heat to electricity using the recently discovered multiferroic alloy, Ni45Co5Mn40Sn101. This alloy undergoes a low hysteresis, reversible martensitic phase transformation from a nonmagnetic martensite phase to a strongly ferromagnetic austenite phase upon heating. When biased by a suitably placed permanent magnet, heating through the phase transformation causes a sudden increase of the magnetic moment to a large value. As a consequence of Faraday’s law of induction, this drives a current in a surrounding circuit. Theory predicts that under optimal conditions the performance compares favorably with the best thermoelectrics. Because of the low hysteresis of the alloy, a promising area of application of this concept appears to be energy conversion at small ΔT, suggesting a possible route to the conversion of the vast amounts of energy stored on earth at small temperature difference. We postulate other new methods for the direct conversion of heat to electricity suggested by the underlying theory.
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Nice sales pitch.
Maybe the agw crowd will buy it…….as a way to remove heat from the atmosphere.
Fire no longer evil….move on to next crisis….
It might be useful in space, the rotisserie or barbecue mode used to keep spacecraft cool could be used to make juice.
@richard courtney
“The novel material we really need is a room-temperature superconductor. That would change the world.”
Not unless it’s also cheap, ductile, and doesn’t lose superconductivity in magnetic fields. Good luck with that.
One material I’d like to see with world changing potential is carbon nano-tube cable or ribbon with enough strength to make a space elevator possible. It’s tantalizingly close now with incremental improvements rolling out like clockwork. That makes the cost of boosting mass to orbit trivial and when you can do that it makes solar thermoelectric power generation viable. Imagine solar concentrators that don’t have to deal with weather. You can use the thinnest of foils and they hold their shape perfectly and don’t get dirty and don’t have to deal with cloudy days. What’s more you can send the energy 24/7 to pretty much any place on the globe through focused microwave transmission to inexpensive small footprint rectenna installations. That solves many if not most of the most vexing problems in shifting from hydrocarbon fuels to electricity.
I still think biofuel from genetically engineered micro-organisms will win the day long before anything else comes close. It almost seems like a slam dunk in the next 20 years. Pilot plants are being built as we speak able to compete with $30/bbl oil. It almost seems to me like $100+ barrels of oil are a dying industry’s final act in milking all the money out of it they can before they are driven back down to $15/bbl to remain competitive with the new renewable source.
Richard wrote:
“There is a problem with gaining research funds for novel materials: i.e. potential funders ask “What use is it?” and they expect an answer. So, researchers need to give an answer because no real use will ever be found if the research is not conducted.”
This was the modern age bummer that set such a divide betwen the old and new school that helped turn me away from academia, way back in the late ’90s.
Re Crosspatch
Where it’s plugged into AC/DC transformers in the customer kit where there are more conversion losses and waste heat. Datacentres could be more efficient if more customer kit were DC fed, but typically vendors charge a premium for that. Next step would be to make domestic wiring and equipment DC powered and do away with billions of transformers.
As for solar panels, some places have done this but it’s the usual problem of cost. Whether this material would be useful in a datacentre would I guess depend on cost and power output. If it needs temperature changes to make power, strapping it across chilled water/air and return. That might be expensive.
I think Richard S. Courtney may be right and this material ends up more useful for it’s magnetic properties.
Ric Werme says:
June 22, 2011 at 2:37 pm
“One example is the charging system. The electricity to keep your car’s battery charged is generated by the alternator, a mechanical device driven by a rubber belt powered by the crankshaft. You’ve got friction, slippage, strain, internal resistance, wear and tear, and weight, in addition to the mechanical energy extracted to make the electricity. Just replacing that one subsystem with a thermoelectric solution could instantly improve a car’s fuel efficiency by 10 percent.”
10% horsepower draw from an alternator? Maybe in a Honda Civic with headlights on, electric cooling fan spinning, air conditioning blower motor running at full speed, and a 200 pound megawoofer in the trunk blasting music out at a volume annoying to entire neighborhoods at once. Alternator horsepower draw is pretty dependent on the load and percentage horsepower is pretty dependent on how much total horsepower is available. Automotive electrical requirements generally rise much slower than engine power. The alternator draw on an 18-wheeler for instance is trivial compared to total power from the engine. And remember those alternators use el cheapo self-exciting electromagnets instead of that expensive chunk of niobium in the gadget under discussion to say nothing of the cost of producing the multiferrous alloy.
A thermocouple generates steady d-c current when heated. If I understand this widget correctly, it generates a magnetic field when heated and that field collapses when the widget is cooled. Alternating current is induced in a surrounding coil when the expanding and collapsing field passes through the windings of that coil. Can anyone explain to me any practical means of heating and cooling the widget 60 times per second? I fail to see any practical power generating potential for this scientific curiosity. What have I missed here?
Think of a pair of them using a shared conical diaphragm, like a loudspeaker cone, use a pair of reed valves to direct liquid/air flow; a sort of Sterling cycle. Moving fluid over a circuit board for free can’t be bad.
Help me out here…does the heat dissipate in the process or is it conserved?
I weakness for atrocious puns. Now Jack Green and Bart have provided the opening that I need. The devil made me do it.
•Have you heard about the new high-tech embalming fluid?
•It’s called Perpetual Lotion. 🙂
“To create the material, the research team combined elements at the atomic level to create a new multiferroic alloy, Ni45Co5Mn40Sn10.”
Not to nitpick but I believe the ” -ferroic” part implies the presence of iron. Where is the iron in the alloy?
@NikFromNYC
Drat! I was going to mention Tesla’s pyromagnetic generator and see you have already done so! Yes, Tesla’s version cycles a ferromagnetic material’s temperature back and forth around it’s Curie temperature to modulate a magnetic field and create an induced current. The thing that I find interesting about the current development is that these scientists have apparently created a material with a sort of inverted Curie temperature function. Heat it up, it is ferromagnetic, cool it down and it is not ferromagnetic. Very neat trick!
From a practical point though, I do not see it as being a particularly efficient way to change low quality heat to electricity. There may be better ways to harvest waste heat.
http://www.prismnet.com/~frg/tar.htm
Hook those babies up to active volcanoes!!!!
A few years ago, a business contact of mine tried to get me to back him in a scheme to scavenge waste heat from car exhaust thermoelectrically. I asked him for a comparative analysis of his technology versus a turbocharger with regard to cost, efficiency, etc. I never heard from him again.
I have my doubts that even significantly improved thermoelectric generation in cars would be better than the present alternator generation.
There is a fair amount of hot air in the comments today, all received in good spirit, but let’s be a little more realistic. This effect is new, it is very significant and not to be sneezed at.
There are Peltier devices that are designed to work at surprisingly low Delta T’s – check Micropelt in Germany. They work in a comparable environment (low DT) but are not as efficient as the common types so this is big news.
A key word for application in the descriuption is ‘thin’. Materials that have a high Ni content are usually extremely resistant to mechanical stress (changing size/crystal structure). When this material is made a few nanometres thick and cycled at perhaps 0.1 or 1 kHz, there may be all sorts of strange and interesting devices made.
One of the current new applications of small amounts of electric power is the operation of small fans on domestic stoves. See the bioenergylists.org, for example. The average ‘fan stove’ has a 90% reduction in PM emissions, and that is before much serious work has been done researching them.
The fragility of the current crop of Peltier devices is a big hindrance to bringing cell phone charging and LED lighting to very poor and remote populations – the two critical most needs.
I look forward to seeing a practical device in perhaps 10 years, and that is without significant additional discoveries which are undoubtedly in store. The low mass per watt will be a very important characteristic.
The power generation only takes place during the phase change, so you have to repeatedly cycle the material from hot to cold. This is going to require some interesting mechanisms and fairly large parasitic loads. The only thing in its favor is that it is not subject to Carnot Efficiency limits.
Don’t hold your breath folks. This is going to just be another of those interesting phenomena without significant real world application.
brings to mind the old stirling cycle mechanical engines that use external heat to operate again the big difficulty with them is purging the heat from the cylinder at each stroke of the cylinder.
During an electronics course I did years ago, much time was spent studying the ins and outs of heat sinks, an essential component in any circuitry delivering power to a load. It struck me then that there had to be a better way than wasting so much energy. Now, it seems, there is.
Exploiting waste heat? What is wrong with a Stirling Engine? You could use the waste heat from your car engine to charge your battery and run your air conditioner? What about a number of them in the cooling towers of a power station?
First catch your
rabbitheat as Mrs. Beaton might have said.U of M? I have a suspicion, that while coded carefully in their PR, what they really mean is that they’ve found a way to turn waste heat from cooking corn mash to produce ethanol into electricity. . . .
Sounds like a Thermocouple to me. We have known about them for over 100 years and using them for a similar period.
The efficiency is given in the paper. They tested a delta-T=10°, T_Max=300°K setup and got 0.004% efficiency (Yes, thats not a typo). It’s mainly limited by Carnot’s law, which it cannot evade since it requires to operate with a very small delta-T.
Any one seen this one? Just asking.
http://www.freeecopower.com/c2s/?hopc2s=isyot
It’s an ad. of course, but on face value seems genuine. Can we trust anyone that this is an alternative to home electrics? Just asking!
Here is an extract…Free Eco Power generators were designed so that anyone can easily build and implement one. Our Free Eco Power guide will take you every step of the way from start to finish and leave you with a magnetic generator that is capable of powering your entire home month after month. So, not only will your Free Eco Power generator save you money, it will put money back in your pocket over time.
How can this be possible? Is this a hoax? Check out the following video of a man who has built just such a device and see for yourself.
Just asking!!!
higley7 says: “In thermodynamics, the waste heat is called low quality energy. It cannot be converted into high quality energy.”
Jack Green says: “Sorry. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says this won’t work.”
…and like comments
Without passing judgment on whether this device and phenomenon is any use or not (it’s too early to say), I really must take issue with some of these comments on thermodynamics. Have these and other commenters making similar remarks ever studied thermodynamics at degree level physics ? If so, they will know that such comments are false. I don’t think I’ve known a physical principle to be so widely misunderstood as the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
One man’s waste heat is another man’s useful heat. It is only considered ‘waste’ heat in a heat engine where it is at the same temperature as the heat sink. Design a second heat engine that operates between the ‘waste heat’ temperature as a heat source and a lower temperature heat sink and you can extract more energy, and in as ‘high quality’ form as you like. The ‘waste heat’ is only ‘low quality’ with respect to the ORIGINAL heat engine because it can’t do any more useful work in THAT heat engine. But it is fallacious to say that waste heat from one heat engine can’t produce ‘high quality energy’ in a second heat engine designed to use (as its heat source) the ‘waste’ energy dumped into the heat sink of the first engine . Whenever heat flows from a hotter body to a colder body it is possible to extract useful (‘high quality’) energy. Make the hotter body the exhaust of some combustion heat engine, and the colder body the atmosphere, for instance, and you will definitely be able to extract ‘high quality’ energy, though only a proportion of the total heat flow, the maximum proportion and optimal efficiency being limited by the Second Law.
According to some of the comments above, one would never be able, for example, to produce ‘high quality’ electrical energy from the ‘low quality’ heat energy in the ground, but there are plenty of installations working very well thank you doing just that. There are also hundreds of thousands of domestic boilers in the UK producing electricity from the ‘low quality’ exhaust heat of gas-fired heaters.