A crash course in changing the world.
During my blogging here on Evoke, I have been focusing mainly on one key issue, the use of thermoelectric
technology to assist in increasing in the energy efficiency of modern
western living. I have been focusing mainly on one particular
technology as I feel that it can be implemented into modern life
without a great loss of comfort and style of life for western man as
well as providing high quality long term benefits in the form of
energy savings.
The Peltier and Seeback effects have been known since the 19th century. Up to today, the
emphasis has been mainly on the use of this technology to provide
cooling for components. This is in part due to the urgency of the
expansion of the telecommunications industry and therefore the need
for cooling has been emphasised more then the need to turn heat into
electricity. There appears to be a lot of information out there about
Peltier cooling for Personal Computers, which again seems to be as a
result of the needs of the IT industry, but now with global warming
being a proven reality and the public needing a visible manifestation
of Governmental effort to reduce the impact of peak oil, its time to
use this technology in a publically and politically visible manner to assist in emmission reduction.
Some members of the IT community might object to the use of the Seeback effect (generating electricity) as
opposed to the Peltier effect (cooling powered by electricity) in,
for instance, IT applications, but if the heat that comes out of a
computer could be harnessed and be made to do work, then there will
still be a cooling effect in the computer, game server, web server, telecommunications laser
etc., and as an apparent by-product of that, electricity (the
recycled energy) could be ploughed back into the system to do work.
It appears that there are numerous different types of Peltier devices that could be used for the
generation of electricity, possibly more than 850, and they can be
configured in a wide variety of different ways to give maximum power
and heat tolerance or sensitivity.
There are two different types of technology that can be used, solid state (semiconductor) which can
operate up to temperatures of 150 degrees Celsius and thermocouple
based systems (dissimilar metals in certain configurations) that can
take up to 225 degrees Celsius.
Tools exist to measure the efficiency of a Peltier device, and they are already used for cooling in
Personal Computers, but now its time to use them for
electricity generation, the recycling of the energy that is given off
by modern living.
See here for images of a Russian liquid fuel lamp that uses the thermoelectric effect to power a built in radio.
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