New material makes electricity from waste heat
Researchers at Northwestern University placed nanocrystals of rock salt into lead telluride to create a material that is expected to be able to convert 14 percent of heat waste to electricity, a university release said recently.
"It has been known for 100 years that semiconductors have this property that can harness electricity," chemistry Professor Mercouri Kanatzidis said. "To make this an efficient process, all you need is the right material, and we have found a recipe or system to make this material."
"We can put this material inside of an inexpensive device with a few electrical wires and attach it to something like a light bulb," said Vinayak Dravid, professor of materials science and engineering and co-author of the paper. "The device can make the light bulb more efficient by taking the heat it generates and converting part of the heat, 10 to 15 percent, into a more useful energy like electricity."
Automotive, chemical, brick, glass and other industries that use heat to make products could make their systems more efficient with the use of this scientific discovery, Kanatzidis said.
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TORONTO - The Canadian energy sector has been buying Internet-connected sensors for monitoring a range of activities in generating plants, distribution networks and home smart meters for several years. However, so far industrial IoT device makers have been creating their own security standards for devices, leaving energy producers and utilities at their mercy.
The industry hopes to change that by creating national cybersecurity standards for industrial IoT devices, with the goal of improving its ability to predict, prevent, respond to and recover from cyber threats.
To help, the federal government today announced an $818,000 grant support a CIO Strategy Council project oversee…
