> Why would you do it that way?

However you do it, it's hard to beat the 5-10%.
The point is that efficiency does matter.



On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Bastiaan Bergman <bastiaan.berg...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> A car running on 10kW electric from a cold fusion device connected to
>> a 5% efficient heat to electric converter (steam or bismut or
>> whatever) would spit out 200kW of waste heat . . .
>
> That would be a Rube Goldberg machine! Why would you do it that way? Put the
> cold fusion reactor in the car and use a heat engine to convert the heat
> directly to mechanical force.
> When the technology is first introduced it might be cheaper to make the car
> a hybrid like a Prius, where the mechanical force is sometimes converted to
> electric power and stored.
> Also, even small steam turbines are better than 5% efficient.
> Thermoelectric devices will not come into widespread use for cold fusion
> until efficiency is more like 20% I suppose. Present day ones are ~10%
> efficient at 500°C. See:
> http://www.electrochem.org/dl/interface/fal/fal08/fal08_p54-56.pdf
> In the 1960s and 70s, thermoelectric devices were used with plutonium in
> pacemakers, so they can be scaled down. In a pacemaker, wristwatch battery
> or earphone battery you need only a tiny trickle of electric power so
> efficiency does not matter.
> - Jed
>

Reply via email to