your electronic goods using heat from food or other electronics, that would otherwise get radiated out and go to a waste. But companies like Alphabet Energy are working on with thermoelectric technology to make this a reality.
Design students at Copenhagen’s Institute of Interaction, Sergey Komardenkov and Vihanga Gore, recently proposed the idea of embedding this technology in furniture to Ikea; a dinner table or a desk could absorb heat from a plate of food or a laptop and turn it back into electricity.
Calling it the Heat Harvest, this idea was developed at an Ikea-run research lab opened this fall in Copenhagen called Space10. Right from their project description, while a normal laptop will consume about 40 watts of electricity and will emit the same amount of heat during operation, a Heat Harvest desk would use an embedded pad to absorb that latent heat and run it through a small thermoelectric generator. The resulting electricity would then be pushed back to the surface of the table through a wireless charging dock.
Ikea started selling kits to convert its furniture into wireless charging stations last year, but involving thermodynamics would be much, much more complicated. A material was required for this technology that was a great conductor of electricity, while simultaneously being a very bad conductor of heat. In other words, it should have the ability to absorb all the heat and give out all the electricity. That’s because the conversion process takes advantage of heat differences in a given conductor to generate voltage. Such materials are rare to come by, and extremely expensive to manufacture. But start-up energy companies like Alphabet Energy orTellurex are developing low-cost versions that use nanotechnology to make any old semiconductor worse at conducting heat–making it possible to use them as thermoelectric generators.
Here’s to your dream of letting your coffee do the work and charge your phone while you kicked back and relaxed.
Source: www. Technolgyvista. In
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