Extracting Electricity from Waste Heat

It's a PDF (ancient web technology), so you'll have wait a bit for it to load, but the potential for this tech truly does seem disruptive, as flyer suggests. As we know, power generation is never perfectly efficient. Some energy is always lost, usually converted to heat. And then it's truly lost -- entropy in action. But just about any reaction can run both ways. So take heat and convert it to electricity, and if it's the waste heat, you've just improved the overall efficiency of your original energy conversion. Materials that convert heat to electricity (or pressure, or whatever) have been known for decades, if not centuries. But Kevin Malloy from University of New Mexico and Richard Epstein, from Los Alamos National Lab, figured out how to make a thin film of three layers. One side is a thermal (heat) switch. The middle layer is "electrocaloric" -- electricity to heat or vice versa-- and the third layer is another thermal switch.

So you can cool or harvest power, as the flyer says. You can produce it in continuous manufacturing process from relatively simple or at least familiar materials. The list of markets the scientists and their colleagues at the tech transfer and venture arms of the university and lab have come up with include: blankets and clothing, automotive energy generation and air conditioning (lots of waste heat in cars and trucks!), home or building AC, even industrial scale power-plant cogeneration. I'm sure you'll think of others. Check it out!