[E&E seminars] Tomorrow: Joseph Heremans on Thermoelectric Energy Conversion

[Jameson Twomey]

Thermoelectric Energy Conversion: Recent Progress and Applications

Joseph P. Heremans

Tuesday, November 3rd

4:15 PM
Refreshments to follow

Room 66-110
25 Ames Street
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract

The most obvious way to address the pending energy crisis is to  
conserve energy. The sum of hydroelectric, biomass, geothermal, wind  
and solar energy generated today in the US amounts to about 11% of  
what we waste, mostly as heat. Overall, the efficiency of the  
production and distribution of static electrical power is much higher  
than that of transportation devices. Consequently, it is in automotive  
applications that the best short-term opportunities exist to recover a  
fraction of that waste heat through thermodynamic "bottoming cycles",  
i.e. technologies that use convert the heat lost by the engine in its  
exhaust to useful work. If we could recover 10% of the heat lost in  
transportation devices, we would save as much energy as the  
hydroelectric or biomass industries produce.
Thermoelectric (TE) energy converters are all-solid-state heat engines  
that convert heat into electrical power. They can be inverted and used  
as heat pumps (Peltier coolers). Their inherent advantages are their  
extreme reliability and power density, related to the absence moving  
parts. While in the long run TE converters could become to  
conventional heat engines what the transistor is to the vacuum tube,  
in reality the efficiency of existing TE materials has remained low,  
limiting their use to niche applications. Research during this last  
decade has resulted in a doubling of the efficiency of TE materials,  
through the use of nanostructuring and of a band structure engineering  
technique whereby we distort the electronic density of states. This  
talk will give an overview of the new TE materials and of the new  
classes of applications they open.

About the Speaker

Joseph P. Heremans is an Ohio Eminent Scholar and professor of  
Mechanical Engineering and Physics at the Ohio State University. He  
holds a Ph. D. in Applied Physics from the Catholic University of  
Louvain (1978); after appointments as a visiting scientist (MIT, U.  
Tokyo), he joined the research staff at the General Motors Research  
Laboratories, where he became the leader of the Electro-optical  
Physics group and later the manager of the Semiconductor Physics  
section. He joined the Delphi Research Laboratories as a fellow in  
1999, and the Ohio State University in 2005. In 2006, he was elected  
chair of the Forum for Industrial and Applied Physics, the largest  
unit of the American Physical Society. His research is focused on the  
electrical and thermal transport properties of narrow-gap  
semiconductors (PbTe, InSb) and semimetals (bismuth, graphites). While  
most of his work is published, including in the journal Science, three  
groups of his 37 issued US patents have resulted in commercial  
products. His latest field of interest is in the development of high-  
efficiency thermoelectric materials.

The MIT Energy Initiative thanks CERA for its generous support of the  
2009-2010 Seminar Series.


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