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Your CPU could soon be a source of regenerative energy
Heat has been an ongoing engineering dilemma of energy efficiency. Most of the electricity used to power a light bulb is lost to heat energy – only about 10 percent of the light produced is in the visible spectrum.
Such inefficiency is also seen in computer chips. CPU makers Intel and AMD recently made considerable progress in that area, but controlling heat continues to be a challenge. It’s no brilliant idea to try to convert that heat energy back into a better usable form in electricity, but achieving that feat with any level of efficiency is something that’s still out of reach.
Startup company Eneco last week presented to investors its supposedly revolutionary power chip that will convert heat directly into electricity, or conversely will cool to -200 degrees Celsius when a current is applied (like a Peltier cooler).
"This chip compares with the invention of the transistor, or the TV, or the first aircraft," said Dr. Lew Brown, president and CEO of Eneco. "It is a genuinely disruptive technology."
The chip works on the basis of thermionic emissions, which is caused by thermal vibration energy overcoming the electrostatic forces holding electrons to the surface. The free electrons then pass through a vacuum to a cold metal surface, which creates an electrical charge that can then be reused. As the temperature rises, this effect increases dramatically.
According to Green Business News, the chip can operate at temperatures of up to 600 degrees Celsius and deliver heat energy converted to electricity of between 20 and 30 percent efficiency. Eneco plans to first target its technology towards pipeline monitoring stations and spacecraft, but is already in talks with Apple and Dell to explore the applications of this chip into computing devices.
Following Eneco’s spotlight in the news, another startup company named Power Chips says it is developing a similar technology with even better results than its peer. Using the same principals of thermionic energy, Power Chips claims that it is able to achieve a practical conversion efficiency of around 40 to 50 percent.
The difference between to two approaches is that Power Chips plans to engineer a vacuum gap between the two metals, while Eneco places a transistor in that space instead. Chris Bourne of Power Chips says that it is because of this difference in design that accounts for the differences in output. "Without the gap the heat can flow back so you get less efficiency," he claimed to Green Business News.
In practice, creating a vacuum into a gap less than 10 microns wide is quite a difficult feat with our current manufacturing technology. "One of our engineers described it as being like flying a jet all the way across the US keeping it exactly 10 feet from the ground the whole way," said Bourne. Because of this, Power Chips’ design is still largely theoretical.
Still, Power Chips remains confident in its design. "I'll be disappointed if when we get something working it is delivering efficiencies of less than 50 percent," said Bourne.
Both Eneco and Power Chips are both currently rounding up investors to help fund the next stages of development. Eneco believes that it will have products launched by this time next year or early 2008 and Power Chips has yet to commit to a date estimate.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5057
Heat has been an ongoing engineering dilemma of energy efficiency. Most of the electricity used to power a light bulb is lost to heat energy – only about 10 percent of the light produced is in the visible spectrum.
Such inefficiency is also seen in computer chips. CPU makers Intel and AMD recently made considerable progress in that area, but controlling heat continues to be a challenge. It’s no brilliant idea to try to convert that heat energy back into a better usable form in electricity, but achieving that feat with any level of efficiency is something that’s still out of reach.
Startup company Eneco last week presented to investors its supposedly revolutionary power chip that will convert heat directly into electricity, or conversely will cool to -200 degrees Celsius when a current is applied (like a Peltier cooler).
"This chip compares with the invention of the transistor, or the TV, or the first aircraft," said Dr. Lew Brown, president and CEO of Eneco. "It is a genuinely disruptive technology."
The chip works on the basis of thermionic emissions, which is caused by thermal vibration energy overcoming the electrostatic forces holding electrons to the surface. The free electrons then pass through a vacuum to a cold metal surface, which creates an electrical charge that can then be reused. As the temperature rises, this effect increases dramatically.
According to Green Business News, the chip can operate at temperatures of up to 600 degrees Celsius and deliver heat energy converted to electricity of between 20 and 30 percent efficiency. Eneco plans to first target its technology towards pipeline monitoring stations and spacecraft, but is already in talks with Apple and Dell to explore the applications of this chip into computing devices.
Following Eneco’s spotlight in the news, another startup company named Power Chips says it is developing a similar technology with even better results than its peer. Using the same principals of thermionic energy, Power Chips claims that it is able to achieve a practical conversion efficiency of around 40 to 50 percent.
The difference between to two approaches is that Power Chips plans to engineer a vacuum gap between the two metals, while Eneco places a transistor in that space instead. Chris Bourne of Power Chips says that it is because of this difference in design that accounts for the differences in output. "Without the gap the heat can flow back so you get less efficiency," he claimed to Green Business News.
In practice, creating a vacuum into a gap less than 10 microns wide is quite a difficult feat with our current manufacturing technology. "One of our engineers described it as being like flying a jet all the way across the US keeping it exactly 10 feet from the ground the whole way," said Bourne. Because of this, Power Chips’ design is still largely theoretical.
Still, Power Chips remains confident in its design. "I'll be disappointed if when we get something working it is delivering efficiencies of less than 50 percent," said Bourne.
Both Eneco and Power Chips are both currently rounding up investors to help fund the next stages of development. Eneco believes that it will have products launched by this time next year or early 2008 and Power Chips has yet to commit to a date estimate.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5057
