Quote:

Your car's engine loses 70 percent of its energy as waste heat - but Australian and Oregon scientists may have figured out an efficient way not only to recover that lost energy, but to at long last capture the power-producing potential of geothermal heat. The trick is to convert it to electricity - and a promising way to accomplish this, the researchers have discovered, involves using extremely thin nanowires to potentially more than double the efficiency of thermoelectric materials.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/energy-tech-05zh.html

 

I'm surprised that this post hasn't generated more interest.

I definitely see a lot of potential here. Your car engine gives off a lot of heat so it makes sense to recapture that as electricity. If you could recapture 50% of the heat given off that's still very good. Maybe encase the cylinders in the material and hook it up to the hybrid battery?

I suppose then you could have a bigger battery and a more powerful electric motor.

 

Wow. That's pretty interesting; I've been wondering how long it would be before any type of breakthrough came out in this area.

The applications are pretty widespread, depending on a lot of factors. Imagine a solar, heat, and wind powered nation. No coal, no nuclear power, nothing like that.

And for cars, another source for recharging the batteries. A near constant charge for expressway driving to make hybrids even more fuel efficient.

Oh sure, it'll take a decade or three before they can be even feasably effective, but still, that's pretty cool. (A bad pun, I know. )

 

This would allow the gas engine to be smaller, the electric motor to be larger, maybe even allow the gas engine to be air-cooled instead of water-cooled!

 

I think we're rapidly accelerating to the technological point at which every possible joule of energy will be used and recaptured and used again from each drop of gasoline. I wonder what people will say ten years from now when they look back at the first generations of hybrid cars. Ridiculously wasteful?

 

I think this whole generation of people will be looked back upon as extremely wasteful, we've got a long ways to go, but at least we're thinking about it.

Recovering waste heat energy is nothing new, and we've got conventional technology that could, in theory recover a lot of the energy wasted by the ICE. Remember the Stirling Engine? They even use these in solar setups that focus energy on an engine and generate more power than solar cells, and are also nearly maintenance free.

I don't think we're lacking the technology to recover wasted energy, rather it's the lack of "corporate will" to implement these technologies into consumer products. As long as gasoline is a cheap, plentiful source of energy people don't see the value in conserving it, but hopefully as the price of fuel rises up to reflect the real costs then people will really start to demand more efficient vehicles, and we are slowly seeing corporations responding to these demands.

 

good to see support for using waste heat to power the new hybrid/plug-in platforms that are changing the vehicular industry. Hopefully this may scale up to the power industry that wastes a lot of energy on BIGGER scale!!! maybe some american jobs can be created to put us back on AAA rating! seedybear