Future of Engineering

Engineers and scientists in Massachusetts have managed to greatly boost the efficiency of a common material used for thermoelectric cooling that has not been improved upon in 50 years. The researchers at Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who reformulated the material—bismuth antimony telluride, or BiSbTe—say that not only will the change boost the efficiency of current uses but it will also open the way to operating automobile systems on waste heat from the engine and possibly provide an alternative to solar cells for converting the sun's energy to electricity.

The team, Zhifeng Ren and Gang Chen, reported on their work in today's Science Express. They say that by breaking the bulk material into tiny chunks—from 5 to 50 nanometers across—they've increased a key measure of thermoelectric conversion, called the ZT of the alloy, from 1 to 1.4.

The relationship between the ZT of a material and the conversion efficiency of a device based on it is not linear, so that translates into an improvement in thermoelectric conversion efficiency of between 15 percent and 30 percent...

Full report here

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Labels: Energy-Environment-Engineering, Material-Sciences