New Thermoelectric Cooling Breakthrough Nearly Doubles Efficiency
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Thermoelectric CoolingEnergy EfficiencySustainable Technology
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Thermoelectric Cooling
Energy Efficiency
Sustainable Technology
A new thermoelectric cooling breakthrough has been announced, nearly doubling efficiency, but commenters are divided on its practical applications and potential impact.
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Thermoelectric cooling is notable for not having any moving parts and ability to scale down to small sizes, so it might end up having many specialized applications, but for A/C heat pumps are already very effective.
In practice I strongly suspect most peltier based systems are built very cheaply... because their inefficiency means the majority of the market is bordering on a scam. Sophisticated consumers aren't going to be buying very many fridges built with them (of course you might have a niche use case where they actually make sense and you're willing to pay for a quality product, but do most purchasers?).
There's engineering challenges here, but I believe the science is pretty clear that in principle these beat gas phase change systems.
Do you know by how much?
Edit: And just for reference peltier devices are usually 10-15% efficiency on this scale. So I suppose this new one is somewhere in the 20-30% range.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfmrvxB154w
"better" "cheaper" "cleaner" is buried by political spite agendas
Thermoelectric cooling is extremely inefficient, to the point that we have very little practical use for it right now. Heat pumps a hundred times more effective predominate.
Aren't there theoretical limits to this sort of cooling too?
But, if this innovation causes Technology Connections to make yet another heat pumps video, I'm all for it.
Solar panels used to be horrible at efficiency. Now they’re pretty amazing and extremely competitive in the power generation market. It, similarly, took a few decades of these kinds of efficiency improvements to get there.
To be fair, in my understanding economies of scale kicked in _hard_ for solar, making it much cheaper to produce single panels, moreso than making each individual panel more efficient.
I do astrophotography as a hobby (taking pictures of galaxies/nebulae/etc). This involves doing long, multi-minute, exposures repeatedly all night long. The heat generated from such long exposures produces what are called "hot pixels" - noise generated by heat disrupting the electronics.
To combat this, dedicated deep sky imaging cameras run a thermoelectric cooler to bring the sensor to sub-zero temperatures. These sensors tend to be about 23.5×15.7mm in size.
Niche, sure. But I saw an opportunity to bring up an aspect of my own life where I sincerely do not think even the smallest compressors would be practical. Plus, the lack of moving parts in thermoelectric is very attractive.
But before that I figure it's worth it to check the comments already to see what people are thinking. And of course, your comment is at the top of the list.
Someone should code an "HN TC poster-bot" that scans headlines for topic matches and just immediately posts the relevant TC video. All of which to say, TC is awesome and everyone should check it out.
They're good for active cooling phone holders, maybe a chilling cupholder or stuff like that. Novelty items where you have USB power and want to cool something maybe 10-20 degrees below ambient and can have a heatsink/fan on the hot side. You can stack them for a bigger delta T, but the efficiency drops even more, and you end up needing to use increasingly smaller modules on the cold side, so only good if you need to get something small and well-insulted down to very cold temps, not active cooling.
Things I'd never think would exist much less that I would think of actual occasion for utility: my phone was in the sun (windshield), charging and performing wayfinding, resulting in "phone too hot" errors.
On the whole however, can someone explain how efficiency can be over 100%, if 100% represents conversion of inputs into all work and no entropy?
The same is said of those scam "personal" AC devices that blow air over ice. They too are "more than 100% efficient".
That is a little unfair: this is the language of economics rather than physics, so if you are paying for 100w and getting 300w, that is indeed over 100% efficient. SCOP is a more "correct" term but is less clear when communicating with the public and (IMO) is mostly for professionals or people with a technical understanding of heat pumps. Nobody thinks they defy the laws of physics though.
I do some work using TECs for cooling optical sensors. Most of the industry has settled on a very small range of materials, such as BiTe, meaning that we're probably at a plateau until a more efficient material comes along. Some of my applications are battery powered, and cooling consumes a fair portion of the total power budget, so a more efficient cooler would be welcome.
Also, TECs are mechanically delicate. There's a laundry list of needs such as being able to form the material into the desired shapes, and make a good mechanical and electrical connection to it, which is usually done with some kind of low melting solder.
better opex but may not overcome the capex cost.
Since these devices can also produce power given a heat differential, they are used in spaces where you need just a little power and heat is readily available.
It also depends if you just need "as cold as possible" or if you need to know the temperature and can calibrate out fluctuation, or if you genuinely need stability.
https://bluefors.com/stories/differences-between-pulse-tube-...
Highspeed needing it is a head scratcher though. Best I can come up with is the sensor needs relatively low temperatures, that or as the frame gets smaller on the sensor to up the framerate the power density goes nuts.
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/cryocooler/
https://www.jhuapl.edu/about/people/rama-venkatasubramanian
This is the same sort of person that MAGA and tech workers want to discourage coming to the United States.
Tangential, but let's not forget that there are also Indian MAGAs like the current FBI director.
There are also influential and wealthy Indians who are more than willing to partner with MAGA to pay whatever tribute is necessary to curry favor, and throw working Indian immigrants under the bus to line their own pockets and accomplish their own personal and political objectives.
In the end, it has little to do with being Indian and more to do with scapegoating and dividing tech workers among themselves, to distract them from the squeeze that big corporations are putting on them.
I can't help but be reminded of Steve Bannon's comments about their being too many Indian tech CEOs.
> Abstract: Refrigeration needs are increasing worldwide with a demand for alternates to bulky poorly scalable vapor compression systems. Here, we demonstrate the first proof of practical solid-state refrigeration, using nano-engineered controlled hierarchically engineered superlattice thin-film thermoelectric materials. [...] The improved efficiency and ultra-low thermoelectric materials usage herald a new beginning in solid-state refrigeration.