Silicon Nanowires Used to Turn Heat into Electricity 3
An anonymous reader alerts us to a report that scientists have developed silicon nanowires which convert heat into electricity at a rate 100 times greater than that of typical silicon. The developers are hopeful that this technology will allow the harvesting of waste heat as a power source, improving the efficiency of various computer chips and appliances. Quoting IEEE Spectrum:
"Research teams found that they could decrease silicon's thermal conductivity--and therefore increase the conversion efficiency--by fashioning the material into nanowires with diameters of 10 to 100 nanometers and introducing defects in the silicon that slowed the flow of phonons--the acoustic vibrations in the crystal lattice of a material that carry heat. 'Defects are important here,' says Peidong Yang, a materials scientist at Berkeley. 'They can block the phonon transport from one end to the other end, so the thermal conductivity can be drastically reduced.'"
dupe? (Score:1)
I get the feeling that... (Score:1, Interesting)