Improving energy production from dissipated heat. Free Technical Library News

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Improved power generation from dissipated heat

01.06.2021

A team of scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder has developed a new cell to generate power from dissipated heat that would simply escape into space. The new development turned out to be 100 times better than previous similar devices, but for commercial purposes, the efficiency of the element needs to be increased by another 100 or 1000 times.

So-called rectifying antennas or rectifying antennas can generate electricity from an external electromagnetic field (radio frequency radiation). Scientists have created a rectenna to generate electricity from heat. The operation of the element is based on the tunnel effect. The problem was set in such a way that to collect energy from heat, an element as small as possible was required, but it was necessary to solve the problem of resistance growth as the elements were reduced.

The tunnel effect that scientists have achieved on the element actually means zero resistance to electron transition and a sharp increase in the level of production. The researchers were able to obtain such an effect after creating a gap between two dielectric layers between the junction contacts - the so-called quantum well. The selection of the gap and the thickness of the dielectrics was such that the electron tunneled from one contact to another, as if passing through a wall.

The scientists tested an array of more than 250 butterfly-shaped rectennas made from nickel, nickel oxide, alumina, chromium and gold, each about 000 nm long and 11 nm wide. The array was found to exhibit 6-100 times greater conversion efficiency than previous optical rectennas.

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