Reduce, reuse, rethink. Waste heat and you.

The last few times I had a drink with my architect friend El Ensalada, we talked about using the heat from microprocessors to power some electrical drip charging function to extend battery life in laptops or reduce power draw on stationary equipment.  It started as simple idea for a single device, but as I stewed on it, I realized the problem was ubiquitous.

The fundamental issue is this:  A great deal of powered machines generate heat, electronic devices and otherwise.  Heat is energy of course, but rather than harnessing that energy, we employ even more energy to disperse that heat away from the source.  Basic thesis then, why not employ that heat energy and do something useful with it.  Here are a few examples from my mind grapes:

Internal combustion engine.

The heat generated by an engine is pretty great, but with a simple water pump and radiator, we divert that heat away (to the air) letting the engine operate at appropriate temperatures.  We created a system specifically to remove energy from the greater system.  How is it powered?  With the engine of course, which is designed for the exact opposite function, to create energy.  Why?  Well, because it's pretty simple, very reliable, and the water pump attached to the crankshaft probably doesn't create a massive amount of power loss.  But it seems to me even a small increase in motor efficiency can create a huge savings when multiplied against the sheer number of vehicles in use every day.  So, here is the question; how can we harness that heat and turn it into useful energy?  Here's an option, although it has probably a million more parts that I would want in a machine that people expect to work perfectly every day with little or no maintenance.  What about the existing cooling system?  Water produces great pressure with heat, it seems some sort of enclosed steam cycle could power itself off an internal combustion engine.  Does that exist?  I need a research assistant.

The desktop microprocessor.

This was my original thought line.  There's basically a hot-plate inside every desktop in the nation, and each one of them is kept cool by spending energy to dissipate energy.  Why not use it for something?  Like I said, my original idea was to turn heat into electricity.  Some guys at MIT are working on that, and it doesn't seem all that simple.  My mind floated to other useful forms of energy, and that's when it hit me.  Turn heat into motion rather than electricity.  With a simpler concept, I turned to research and found a few options for heat engines.  The one I liked the most was called the Stirling Engine because it did not use intake or exhaust in it's cycle.  Armed with some newly discovered words, "Stirling Engine" and more importantly "waste-heat engine", combined with "processor cooling", and I stumbled upon the solution I was aiming for.

Using heat to power a fan, to reduce the heat.  My father-in-law, upon hearing my idea mentioned 'perpetual motion'.  At first blush, it does sound pretty ridiculous, perhaps something akin to "The Most Useless Machine Ever"

It's true in a sense.  If I created a device that plugged into the wall, that powered a hotplate, which powered a fan to cool the hotplate, it would truly be akin to the above video.  But the reality is we are using that computer.  The computer is producing heat already, that's our power source, so this machine is certainly well within all the laws of thermodynamics.  The fact that it's cooling itself doesn't mean it won't work either, it means it will reach an equilibrium, and as I see it the challenge is making sure the equilibrium reached will always be within operating temperatures.

So someone beat me to it by a few years, but, like flywheel energy storage, at least I know my brain is working well enough for my hidden ideas to have been powerful enough to invest in.  In the end, I don't think they brought this to market.  Perhaps, like the "cyclone", is may have too many parts for reliability, so maybe I can come up with something else.

The real winner will be from MIT though, or at least, their direction.  Turning heat directly into electricity dramatically reduces the complexity of turning the heat energy into useful motion, in fact, it seems to me, it could simply power the existing cooling systems on whatever we've already designed.

I bet in say, 20 years, all engines will have passive cooling systems with a net zero draw, and hopefully, even more power can be harnessed from waste heat to extend hybrid vehicle battery life.

Wait a second... don't batteries have over heating problems too?

GeorgeP