Scientists from the US have derived a metric to analyse the cost of power generation using thermoelectric technology. The metric shows that thermoelectric devices have greater potential in large-scale power generation than previously thought.
Thermoelectric generators convert heat into electricity by a physical phenomenon called the Seebeck effect. They are compact, robust, and have no moving parts. This means they are useful for low-maintenance applications, such as in spacecrafts. However, their device efficiencies – the power produced for a certain heat flow – are low, so they are not used for large-scale power generation.
Thermoelectric research has typically focussed on the dimensionless figure-of-merit ZT, a metric that relates directly to device efficiency. Shannon Yee from the University of California Berkeley, part of the team that performed the analysis, explains that for power generation to be commercially viable, what really matters is a technology’s capital cost per watt and not just its device efficiency: ‘we found that the design that minimises a system’s cost per watt value is generally very different to the design that maximises efficiency.’
Interested to know more? Read the full news article in Chemistry World here…
Read the article by Yee, Dames et al. in EES:
$/W Metrics for Thermoelectric Power Generation: Beyond ZT
Shannon K Yee, Saniya LeBlanc, Ken Goodson and Chris Dames
DOI: 10.1039/C3EE41504J
