by Brianna Crandall — April 18, 2016 — Public-private research has revealed one method to capture waste heat, with great potential for reducing energy usage and costs. According to researchers at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a finely tuned carbon nanotube thin film has the potential to act as a thermoelectric power generator that captures and uses waste heat.
The research could help guide the manufacture of thermoelectric devices based on either single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) films or composites containing these nanotubes. Because more than half of the energy consumed worldwide is rejected primarily as waste heat, the idea of thermoelectric power generation is emerging as an important part of renewable energy and energy efficiency portfolios, notes NREL.
The research, “Tailored Semiconducting Carbon Nanotube Networks with Enhanced Thermoelectric Properties,” appears in the journal Nature Energy, and is a collaboration between NREL, Professor Yong-Hyun Kim’s group at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Professor Barry Zink’s group at the University of Denver. Andrew Ferguson, a research scientist in NREL’s Chemical and Materials Science Center, is co-lead author of the paper with Jeffrey Blackburn. The other authors from NREL are Azure Avery (now an assistant professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver), Ben Zhou, Elisa Miller, Rachelle Ihly, Kevin Mistry, and Sarah Guillot.
