Purdue University assistant professor of chemical engineering Yue Wu leads a team developing a technique that uses nanotechnology to harvest energy from hot pipes or engine components.  The team has coated glass fibers with a new thermoelectric material they developed.

When thermoelectric materials are heated on one side electrons flow to the cooler side, generating an electrical current.  The new Purdue material also could be used to create a solid-state cooling technology that does not require compressors and chemical refrigerants. The fibers might be woven into a fabric to make cooling garments.

Thermoelectric Coated Glass Fibers. Click image for more info.

Yue said, “The ugly truth is that 58 percent of the energy generated in the United States is wasted as heat.  If we could get just 10 percent back that would allow us to reduce energy consumption and power plant emissions considerably.”  That might be a generous number to start with.

The team uses glass fibers that are dipped in a solution containing nanocrystals of lead telluride and then exposed to heat in a process called annealing to fuse the crystals together.  Then the fibers could be wrapped around industrial pipes in factories and power plants, as well as on car engines and automotive exhaust systems, to recapture much of the wasted energy. The “energy harvesting” technology might dramatically reduce how much heat is lost, Wu said.

That would be a much more practical than today’s high-performance thermoelectric materials that are brittle and formed into large discs or blocks.  “This sort of manufacturing method requires using a lot of material,” Wu said.

The new flexible devices would conform to the irregular shapes of engines and exhaust pipes while using a small fraction of the material required for conventional thermoelectric devices.  Wu said, “This approach yields the same level of performance as conventional thermoelectric materials but it requires the use of much less material, which leads to lower cost and is practical for mass production.”

The coated fiber concept promises a method that can be scaled up to industrial processes, making mass production feasible.


Scott Finefrock starts the description; “We’ve demonstrated a material composed mostly of glass with only a 300-nanometer-thick coating of lead telluride. So while today’s thermoelectric devices require large amounts of the expensive element tellurium, our material contains only 5 percent tellurium. We envision mass production manufacturing for coating the fibers quickly in a reel-to-reel process.”

Plus, the fiber material also can be operated in a reverse manner: Applying an electrical current causes it to absorb heat, offering a possible solid-state air-conditioning method. Such fibers might one day be woven into cooling garments or used in other cooling technologies.

The team is showing the material has a promising thermoelectric efficiency, which is gauged using a formula to determine a measurement unit called ZT. One part of the formula is the “Seebeck coefficient,” named for 19th century German physicist Thomas Seebeck, who discovered the thermoelectric effect.  The others parts are having a low thermal and electrical conductivity results.  Having a low thermal conductivity, a high Seebeck coefficient and electrical conductivity results in a high ZT number.

Wu said, “It’s hard to optimize all of these three parameters simultaneously because if you increase electrical conductivity, and thermal conductivity goes up, the Seebeck coefficient drops.”

The Purdue researchers have used the ZT number to calculate the maximum efficiency that is theoretically possible with a material. “We analyze the material abundance, the cost, toxicity and performance, and we established a single parameter called the efficiency ratio,” Wu said.

Wu explains, “Today’s higher performance ones have a complicated composition, making them expensive and hard to manufacture. Also, they contain toxic materials, like antimony, which restricts thermoelectric research.”

Purdue’s nanocrystal lead telluride material is a critical ingredient, in part because the interfaces between the tiny crystals serve to suppress the vibration of the crystal lattice structure, reducing thermal conductivity. The materials could be exhibiting “quantum confinement,” in which the structures are so tiny they behave nearly like individual atoms.

“This means that, as electrons carry heat through the structures, the average voltage of those heat-carrying electrons is higher than it would be in larger structures,” Finefrock said. “Since you have higher-voltage electrons, you can generate more power.”

The Purdue team is also exploring other materials instead of lead and tellurium, which are toxic, and preliminary findings suggest other new materials are capable of a high ZT values, too.



Wu adds, “Of course, the fact that our process uses such a small quantity of material – a layer only 300 nanometers thick, it minimizes the toxicity issue.  However, we also are concentrating on materials that are non-toxic and abundant.”

This work may finally get thermoelectric materials into practical use.  While lead and telluride are not inviting, the Purdue team has both the alternative material route and a coating method to solve the toxicity issue.

It looks like mass thermoelectric could get underway soon to capture a massive resource already at hand.


1 Comment so far

  1. VAN DEN BOGAERT JOANNES on April 21, 2012 8:51 AM

    Ideal material for converting directly the heat produced by “cold fusion” (E-Cat device) into electricity. Congratulations of
    inventor of Belgian patent BE1002780 published in English on e-Cat Site and in “Cold fusion times” in article: Belgian LENR/LANR Patents.

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