March/April 2007
Friends of Berkeley Engineering,
In a study published last month in Science Express, mechanical engineering professor Arun Majumdar and colleagues report that they successfully generated electricity directly from heat using organic thermoelectric materials. Although thermoelectric conversion has been studied for about 50 years, researchers have focused on expensive inorganic alloys. Organic-based thermoelectric converters bring the exciting promise of much cheaper ways to capture waste heat from power generation and other activities.
Wouldn’t it be nice, for example, if we could cool our computer processors with thermoelectric refrigerators and make them compute faster? In fact, microelectronic companies such as Intel are exploring thermoelectric refrigeration for spot cooling of hot spots on their chips.
Computing is just one possible application. An estimated 90 percent of the world’s electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels in an indirect method that wastes huge amounts of heat and fuel. Saving even a fraction of that lost heat could amount to an enormous savings of fuel and reduced carbon dioxide emissions into our atmosphere.
Throughout the College, engineers like Majumdar are thinking in novel ways about our energy problem, a problem so massive that we must approach it as broadly and as globally as possible. Berkeley’s new Energy Biosciences Institute, announced last month, truly puts Berkeley on the world map of energy research. But it also attests to the work in transformative technologies that has been going on for quite some time, research in areas such as biofuels; nuclear power and nuclear waste storage; renewable power sources like hydro, thermal, solar and wind; smart buildings; optimal combustion methods; light-emitting diodes and other novel modes of lighting; energy storage and battery disposal solutions.
In these and other areas we have yet to imagine, engineering will have a major role in setting us on a new course of clean, renewable and sustainable energy self-sufficiency. It is indeed an exciting time to be an engineer!
Fiona Doyle
Acting Dean, College of Engineering
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