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Old 08-23-2020, 04:31 AM
 
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I work in a hospital boiler room with natural gas fired steam boilers and other heat generating equipment. Has the technology for thermoelectric improved enough to be viable for generating electricity from our heat generating equipment? We have steam water heaters, natural gas boilers for generating hot water used to heat the air in the building, and other equipment that constantly generate heat.
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Old 08-23-2020, 04:46 AM
 
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Quote:
Has the technology for thermoelectric improved enough to be viable for generating electricity from our heat generating equipment?
Not really.
It's still too inefficient for large scale power production.
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Old 08-24-2020, 10:55 AM
 
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No. The Peltier effect is still useful for places where you need a small amount of refrigerating or heating capacity but you also only have a small amount of electric power available, or a limited space.


Think about it.


If you need to make steam the highest efficency conversion of electric power to heat is resistive heating - 100% efficiency. Can't do better than that. And yet steam plants almost universally use gas or oil or coal - something you can set on fire.
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Old 08-24-2020, 10:34 PM
 
Location: King County, WA
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At some point heat generation will presumably be taken over by IR LEDs.
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Old 08-25-2020, 08:30 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rjshae View Post
At some point heat generation will presumably be taken over by IR LEDs.
No it won't.


Read the above. Conversion of electrical energy to heat by resistive heating is 100% efficient.


You can't get better than 100% efficiency.
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Old 08-25-2020, 06:21 PM
 
Location: Fortaleza, Northeast of Brazil
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It's still too expensive using Seeback effect or Peltier effect.

If it was cheaper, it would be very interesting to harvest all the "waste heat" and turn it into electricity.
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Old 08-25-2020, 06:29 PM
 
Location: Fortaleza, Northeast of Brazil
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An idea that I had once, but I'm not sure about the viability of it, is to use SAND to harvest waste heat, in some way that sand could be heated to high temperatures (500 Celsius or above). Maybe using thermal insulation? I don't know... Super hot sand could then be used to boil the water for a while, instead of the gas.
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Old 08-25-2020, 07:59 PM
 
Location: Fortaleza, Northeast of Brazil
3,900 posts, read 6,697,167 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MalaMan View Post
It's still too expensive using Seeback effect or Peltier effect.

If it was cheaper, it would be very interesting to harvest all the "waste heat" and turn it into electricity.

To give an idea of the costs, this thermoelectric module for sale on e-Bay costs 36 US dollars and can generate only 24 watts:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/TGM-287-1-4...-/254360922552

That's 1.50 dollar per watt, you would spend 1500 dollars in modules like that to generate 1000 watts.
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Old 08-26-2020, 06:29 AM
 
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I don’t think I asked the question well. I was asking about devices that uses heat to generate electricity. I was wondering if such devices have improved in electricity generation and lower cost so as to be worth the price to add to our heat generating equipment to augment our utilities.
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Old 08-26-2020, 08:47 AM
 
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The answer is still no.


Still the most efficient way to generate electricity is with giant generating installations. If we leave out hydro and geothermal which are (sort of) getting input power for free, you need to set something on fire or have a nuclear reaction.


Other methods including solar are best for situations where the grid isn't, or where you need mobile power generation, or other special circumstances.
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