http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/20057/
Turning Waste Heat into Power
Research shows that silicon is as efficient as pricier materials.
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Silicon, in the form of photovoltaic cells, is good at generating electricity from sunlight. New research shows that it could also make a good thermoelectric: a material that converts heat into electricity and vice versa. Since silicon is more abundant than the leading thermoelectric materials and has a vast manufacturing infrastructure behind it, it could eventually yield cheap devices for generating power from engines' waste heat or from solar heat.
In this week's Nature, University of California, Berkeley, chemistry professor Peidong Yang and his colleagues report having fabricated silicon nanowires that generate electricity when a temperature differential is applied across them. Until now, silicon has been considered a bad thermoelectric material. But according to Yang, "the performance of the nanowires is already comparable to the best existing thermoelectric material."
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Cool customer: This image, produced by a scanning electron microscope, shows a rough silicon nanowire bridging two heating pads--one serving as a heat source and the other as a sensor. Researchers have found that 50-nanometer-wide silicon nanowires have drastically lower heat conductivity than bulk silicon but retain their electrical conductivity. Thus the nanowires show potential as thermoelectric materials--ones that convert heat into electricity and vice versa.
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I love it when you see technological breakthroughs start seeing applications so quickly.
The use of thermoelectric materials could revolutionize transportation. Heat is generated in the engine, the tires, our breath....