Quick-Cooking Nanomaterials in a $40 Microwave Oven To Make Tomorrow’s Solid-State Air Conditioners…

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2971

[font face=Times, Serif][font size=5]Nature Materials Study: Quick-Cooking Nanomaterials in a $40 Microwave Oven To Make Tomorrow’s Solid-State Air Conditioners and Refrigerators [/font]

[font size=4]Engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Develop New Method for Creating Better Thermoelectric Materials in Large Batches[/font]

[font size=3]Engineering researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new method for creating advanced nanomaterials that could lead to highly efficient refrigerators and cooling systems requiring no refrigerants and no moving parts. The key ingredients for this innovation are a dash of nanoscale sulfur and a normal, everyday microwave oven.

At the heart of these solid-state cooling systems are thermoelectric materials, which can convert electricity into a range of different temperatures—from hot to cold. Thermoelectric refrigerators employing these principles have been available for more than 20 years, but they are still small and highly inefficient. This is largely because the materials used in current thermoelectric cooling devices are expensive and difficult to make in large quantities, and do not have the necessary combination of thermal and electrical properties. A new study, published today in the journal Nature Materials, overcomes these challenges and opens the door to a new generation of high-performance, cost-effective solid state refrigeration and air conditioning.

…

See a video of Ramanath explaining the study at: http://www.youtube.com/user/rpirensselaer?feature=mhee#p/u/12/hgmBwg3FeS4

Driving this research breakthrough is the idea of intentionally contaminating, or doping, nanostructured thermoelectric materials with barely-there amounts of sulfur. The doped materials are obtained by cooking the material and the dopant together for few minutes in a store-bought $40 microwave oven. The resulting powder is formed into pea-sized pellets by applying heat and pressure in a way that preserves the properties endowed by the nanostructuring and the doping. These pellets exhibit properties better than the hard-to-make thermoelectric materials currently available in the marketplace. Additionally, this new method for creating the doped pellets is much faster, easier, and cheaper than conventional methods of making thermoelectric materials.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmat3213

[hunter]

1. Useful for heat pumps too, I imagine...

...and much less noisy than something with a compressor in it.

[AlecBGreen]

2. material science is so exciting

I love headlines like this: better, cheaper, simpler, more efficient. If we humans are to save our planet and civilization by technology, materials science is definitely the way to go.

[Yo_Mama]

3. Utterly fascinating

This may be one key toward smaller solar thermal projects.

Really exciting stuff.
http://www.electrochem.org/dl/interface/fal/fal08/fal08_p54-56.pdf