The Focus Fusion Society › Forums › Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Experiment (LPPX) › Net Energy and Waste Heat Recovery › Reply To: Mind, Spirit, Science connection?
Here’s a new development in the Heat Recovery area:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/new-nanomaterials-unlock-new-electronic-and-energy-technologies
The scientists invented a versatile method for creating these atom thin nanosheets from a range of materials using common solvents and ultrasound, utilizing devices similar to those used to clean jewelery. The new method is simple, fast, and inexpensive, and could be scaled up to work on an industrial scale.
“Of the many possible applications of these new nanosheets, perhaps the most important are as thermoelectric materials. These materials, when fabricated into devices, can generate electricity from waste heat. For example, in gas-fired power plants approximately 50% of energy produced is lost as waste heat while for coal and oil plants the figure is up to 70%.
However, the development of efficient thermoelectric devices would allow some of this waste heat to be recycled cheaply and easily, something that has been beyond us, up until now,” explained Professor Jonathan Coleman, Principal Investigator at CRANN and the School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin who led the research along with Dr Valeria Nicolosi in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford.
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“Our new method offers low-costs, a very high yield and a very large throughput: within a couple of hours, and with just 1 mg of material, billions and billions of one-atom-thick nanosheets can be made at the same time from a wide variety of exotic layered materials,” explained Dr Nicolosi, from the University of Oxford.
It all comes down to costs, of course. If it can drop below “replacement” cost of simply using another FoFu, it might have some application in heat-recovered power generation.