Will Your Emissions Power Your Car?

Thermo-eletric generators (TEGs) are turning heat back into energy, a very important skill when most machines lose significant amounts of the energy they use to waste heat.

The car is one of the more inefficient examples, wasting almost seventy percent of the energy it takes to run as unused heat. That means that if you are paying $4.00/gallon for gas, almost three dollars of that gas is wasted and the remaining amount actually powers your car. Kinda sucks, eh? Not for long, if German researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques are successful. There could be many uses for TEGs, one of which is fitting your exhaust system with a TEG, so the heat that your car emits as exhaust (which can reaches temperatures of 700 degrees or more) can be turned back into power for your car. The main idea is to eliminate the alternator, which now provides power to start the engine.

In test models, engineers have been successful in using this energy to power the car’s electrical system, resulting in fuel demand reduced by 5% or more. That’s a nice cycle.According to researchers, if all German cars are fitted with TEGs, it could result in a recovery of ten terawatts per year. That’s a lot! (One terrawatt = one million megawatts.) 

More at ENN.