Date: 1st July 2011
Thermoelectric tubes generate 1.3 W of
electricity by using hot water of 90 °C
Panasonic has developed thermoelectric tubes suitable
for fluid heat sources such as hot water and steam, for
capturing unused or wasted heat from hot springs and factory.
The tubular shape enables direct and efficient heat transfer
without additional heat exchangers, yielding high density
of generated power.
Thermoelectric technology is the direct energy conversion
from heat into electricity and has attracted much attention
as a renewable energy solution. Since conventional thermoelectric
generators are complicated in structure and restricted in
planar shape, they are difficult to scale-up and implement.
Panasonic's thermoelectric tubes solve these problems by
using unconventional phenomena called transverse thermoelectric
effect, which takes place in tilted multilayer made of thermally
resistive thermoelectric materials and thermally conductive
metals. This effect makes it possible to control heat flow
and electric current independently in materials, and realizes
quite simple structure without complicated electric junctions
and planar substrates.
According to Panasonic the performance of power generation
is dependent on many parameters such as size of the tube
and amount of heat source. The thermoelectric tube is constructed
by stacking conical rings of bismuth telluride as thermoelectric
material and nickel as metal. Panasonic has developed processing
technologies in fabricating conical rings of brittle thermoelectric
materials and bonding rings with minimum parasitic electric
and thermal losses.
The 10 cm-long fabricated thermoelectric tube using technologies
introduced above can generate 1.3 W of electricity by running
hot water of 90 °C inside, and cold water of 10 °C
outside the tube. The power density corresponds to as high
as 10 kW with only 1 m3 of volume as per Panasonic.
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