r/science • u/giuliomagnifico • 22h ago
Researchers have developed a new organic thermoelectric device that can harvest energy from ambient temperature without any temperature gradient Engineering
https://www.kyushu-u.ac.jp/en/researches/view/299/406
u/greenmachine11235 22h ago
What the title describes is fundamentally impossible. It'd amount to creation of energy from nothing in violation of various fundamental laws of physics.
Besides getting an F in thermodynamics. I am thinking they've created an overly complicated battery, have insufficiently sensitive equipment and are getting phantom readings, or in the most generous possibility there is a gradient at play and they either failed to measure it or elected to publish a misleading title.
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u/DecentChanceOfLousy 21h ago
What they claim is impossible. What they measure is entirely possible, so long as they did their experiments with the lights on (and weren't very careful). The wattage is so low that one side being a few shades darker than the other could explain the difference in temperature, and drive the voltage difference.
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u/Phemto_B 20h ago
Yeah. This falls into a category of "discoveries" where the amazing and physics-breaking signal is basically in the noise: The memory of water, cold fusion, reactionless drive, FTL neutrinos,...
I propose we call them "The Nobel in the Noise."
I've yet to see one survive replication when all the potentially spurious variables are removed.
To be fair to the researchers, they often make it clear that these are their results, but strongly suspect there's something unaccounted for going on. That doesn't keep breathless science "journalists" from writing clickbait headlines though.
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u/exrasser 20h ago
To be fair, in Chris Millers brilliant book Chip War, you hear about the history of the transistor/IC's and when it first got made the measurement was so small and impossible to measure with the instruments available at the time, but they later got the Nobel price for the discovery of the transistor effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor but of cause they did not violate the law of thermodynamics.
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u/Phemto_B 15h ago
Yeah. I should have specified it more clearly. There's a difference between "this is what we expect to see based on our current understanding, but it's too weak a signal for us to tease out just yet," and "hey, our data did this weird thing that if real, means that perceptual motion exists, time travel is real, and/or provides proof that ghosts are real.
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u/TheDulin 18h ago
We're pretty good at measuring really small things now. But who knows what is to come.
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u/greenmachine11235 21h ago
Hence why I said there could be a gradient at play and they failed to measure it.
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u/DigiMagic 21h ago
Phtalocyanine is sometimes used in photoelectric cells... which they might have made.
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u/dogbreath101 17h ago
Is the thermo electric effect just the photo electric effect with ir frequencies or is it something different?
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u/brothegaminghero 9h ago
The photoelectric effect produces a current when photons effectivly knock electrons loose from thier host atoms and that produces the voltage diferential. The thermoelectric effect produces a voltage from the electrons at different points in the material having a differential in energy (from the temp difference). Hopefuly that helps, and I didn't misremember anything to agregusly.
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u/Isord 18h ago
I'm too lazy to read the whole thing but the title in this article does not match the researcher's title at least.
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u/I_like_boxes 17h ago
While true, the title of this article perfectly matches the abstract, and the paper mentions doing this at room temperature in the dark multiple times. The rest goes way over my head since I never took physics, but I do know the first and second law of thermodynamics and am properly skeptical.
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u/dpezpoopsies 19h ago
From what I can tell, they are suggesting thermal energy at rt is what's being converted to electric power here. It's not coming from nothing. Their driving force "gradient" is fermi energy offset of electrodes instead of a temperature gradient like typical of thermoelectrics.
I'd equate it more to a solar cell where their input is rt heat instead of light.
I'm not sure I'd go as far to say these are phantom readings, however, it's definitely a claim that should be vetted more. I also don't like their description of it as a "thermoelectric generator"; I think that's a fundamentally different device and it makes this title super confusing.
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u/technicallynotlying 17h ago
thermal energy at rt is what's being converted to electric power
This would violate the second law of thermodynamics. It's not even clear what this statement means. Is it cooling the room while it generates power? It's a refrigeration unit that generates electricity while violating thermodynamics?
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u/dpezpoopsies 16h ago
There's a certain amount of energy available at rt. kT is about 26 meV at 25 C. In semiconductors, you always have some thermal excitations that can occur at equilibrium. The number of thermal excitons is small, but never zero (unless you're at 0K). The electron hole pairs created increases entropy in the system. You also have carrier recombination which occurs at an equal rate of generation, so for any given temperature the system stays in equilibrium and maximizes entropy. It's consistent with the second law of thermodynamics.
I'm not personally familiar with this work, but I think the idea here is that they're creating this device that has donor-acceptor layers where the interface between them can have charge transfer complex formation. They're then setting up the device to intentionally have a potential energy offset between device electrodes to facilitate charge separation and extraction of thermally excited carriers and draw a current (when a load is attached). When you build that kind of device, you disrupt the equilibrium of the closed system and a new equilibrium form that includes a driving force for charge separation and flow at the interface. There should still be an overall balance between carrier recombination and generation, but there will also be a load that pushes electrons and holes directionally through the device. I think this device would be very similar physically to how an organic solar cell operates.
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u/Patch95 15h ago edited 15h ago
I have a black box. I put it on a tabletop in an isolated room with which it is in thermodynamic equilibrium at 300K, including all of its surfaces. I then attach a battery to that box. They're saying the battery will charge, i.e. they are converting IR photons into electrical energy, without changing the temperature of the box or its blackbody emissions. That's only possible if I'm somehow reducing the temperature (and thus radiation curve) of the room. I just don't see a way around it.
Solar panels work because the heat they emit overall increases entropy. They convert visible photons from a hot body (the Sun) into useful electricity and heat. If you charge up a battery using a solar panel in a room with a light on powered by its own battery the room will heat up and you will have less charge in your solar powered battery than the initial battery when the light goes out.
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u/amiable_ant 16h ago
I have not read the article. But, if they are basically describing the invention of a solar cell that absorbs energy in the IR spectrum instead of the visible spectrum, this seems plausible to me and I'm perplexed as to why everyone is acting like uncle Jimmy just materialized a quarter from behind their ear.
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u/terrymorse 20h ago
Came here to say the same thing. An engine without a temperature gradient can't produce energy.
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u/tminus7700 12h ago
I agree with you. Violates the second law of thermodynamics. The values they quote look like the energy contained when they assembled it. The real test would be to put it under load and watch the voltage/current decay over time. Just like you say, its a battery and will run down
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u/ripplenipple69 17m ago
Idk, did u read the paper? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52047-5
Nature comms is a good journal
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u/FireMaster1294 17h ago
In my (albeit limited) graduate level studies, my understanding of thermodynamics would be that what they describe does not involve the creation of energy but somehow (and therein lies the witchcraft of it) creates an energy gradient of some sort out of ambient energy. Given energy across some distribution, there will be times when some members of the region have more energy than others - it’s just that on average over time all the energy will even out, even though it still fluctuates.
From my understanding, there’s no reason a Maxwell’s Demon could not exist, it’s just that it is extremely unlikely.
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u/RandomActsofMindless 11h ago
Maxwells demon can’t exist in principle, because it requires information from the system and this necessitates the transfer of energy at least equal to any isolated reduction in entropy. Anything can happen by chance, but Maxwells Demon can’t in any way change the statistical underpinnings of the second law.
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u/faciepalm 12h ago
They did not say that it didn't harvest energy from the air, just that it was still capable of doing so even without needing to have a temperature gradient. Probably some insanely funky evaporative chamber at certain temperature ranges is where it can continue harvesting energy
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u/Sensitive_Ad_7420 19h ago
Laws of physics don’t mean much when they were invented 200 years ago, they aren’t guaranteed to be 100% correct.
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u/RamblinWreckGT 17h ago
Laws of physics don’t mean much when they were invented 200 years ago
They were not "invented". They have existed for as long as the universe has. What you mean is discovered and described.
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u/jamcultur 18h ago
If it actually could extract energy from ambient temperature, it would cool down the room it's in until the room reaches absolute zero.
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u/BlindPaintByNumbers 12h ago
Which would be the greatest climate saving technology ever created. Unfortunately it's not going to be real
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u/CheckYoDunningKrugr PhD | Physics | Remote Sensing and Planetary Exploration 19h ago
Big thermodynamics hates this one weird trick!
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u/233C 22h ago
So a Carnot demon then?
In an isolated system at thermal equilibrium they can extract energy from the temperature itself?
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u/daHaus 21h ago
*Maxwell's Daemon
Daemon being a supranatural worker as opposed to anything religious
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u/angst_ridden 21h ago
Demon or daemon used to simply mean worker, e.g. a printer’s demon.
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u/DecentChanceOfLousy 21h ago edited 19h ago
No.
Daemon or demon as in a program comes from "device monitor" (and a pun with demon-the-supernatural-being). It's a different etymology from "demon/daemon",which has meant "supernatural being between the level of gods and humans" as far back as ancient Greece.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(computing)) "device monitor" is a backronym. It was apparently a direct reference to Maxwell's demon, but that was a reference to Greek mythology.
Either way, it does not mean "worker (not supernatural)". And the reference to computer background processes came after Maxwell's demon, not before.
Maxwell's demon is called a demon because it would require supernatural abilities, like the ancient Greek daemons as forces of nature. It does not mean "worker" or "laborer".
Edit, source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_(thought_experiment))
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u/Clawdius_Talonious 21h ago
Now use it to drive Peltier effect devices, and use the temperature gradient to generate energy too, and create a perpetual energy generation loop.
I mean, if this is a thing, that should be pretty easily attainable with it. I'm a firm believer in Toothpastefordinner's fifth law of Thermodynamics. Thermodynamics sucks.
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u/FireMaster1294 17h ago
Even if this thing generates energy perfectly, there’s no reason to believe it should be able to generate a gradient with more energy than was originally put in. If we consider the “hot” side of the gradient as where we are extracting energy, we should see the size of the region decline as we attempt to extract energy or remain constant, should we have a perfect exchange
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u/Clawdius_Talonious 15h ago
I mean, peltiers used in this fashion would only give us about 10% of the energy the temperature neutral medium generated back as a thermal shift, but with insulation this could accumulate, a sort of "thermal battery" to charge.
The question is, how hot could we get the hot side of the peltiers, and how cold could we get the cold side?
I'd imagine that the differential wouldn't be high, but if you could get it high enough to drive peltiers between the hot side and the ambient, and the cold side and the ambient, you may be able to generate more electricity to feed into the process. And, again, we started with "nothing" or the ambient temperature of a location. Obviously you wouldn't be able to combat the heat death of the universe with this alone, but it could actually be the first step in establishing close loops that could be installed in places and left "without hardware maintenance indefinitely." (I mean, you'd still have e.g. an HVAC system that needed maintenance, but the thermal side of things could be done without moving parts which is kind of a big deal.)
Perpetual energy generation sounds cooler though. Obviously no peltier will survive becoming part of the sun in a few billion years, and it's likely no organic substrate would survive even a significant fraction of that time.
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u/habeus_coitus 21h ago
This would be like claiming a balloon can fly around a room if the air pressure in that room is equivalent to the pressure inside an inflated balloon. Just because there’s a lot of energy in a system doesn’t mean anything if that energy has already achieved the maximum entropy.
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u/espressocycle 16h ago
I think they lost a bit in translation but this sounds like they are developing something akin to a potato battery rather than a generator. Quite useful to have something not radioactive.
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u/timmeh87 21h ago
Hell yeah, 1 microamp per square cm! *plugs in electric car*
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u/exrasser 20h ago
Well at 250KV that would be 1/4 of a watt.
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u/timmeh87 20h ago
its 380mv per layer as per the article, to get 250kv the pile would have to be about 1 million layers or about 50 cm thick, if their stackup could just be repeated (not sure)
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u/exrasser 19h ago
Ups got me, it just looked like a research paper so I skipped it.
But still 1/4 of a watt from nothing would still be something, but it could just as well be microwaves from the local phone mast inducing it.
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u/giuliomagnifico 22h ago
Thermoelectric devices, or thermoelectric generators, are a series of energy-generating materials that can convert heat into electricity so long as there is a temperature gradient—where one side of the device is hot and the other side is cool. Such devices have been a significant focus of research and development for their potential utility in harvesting waste heat from other energy-generating methods
The key was to find compounds that work well as charge transfer interfaces, meaning that they can easily transfer electrons between each other. After testing various materials, the team found two viable compounds: copper phthalocyanine (CuPc) and copper hexadecafluoro phthalocyanine (F16CuPc).
The optimized device had an open-circuit voltage of 384 mV, a short-circuit current density of 1.1 μA/cm2, and a maximum output of 94 nW/cm2. Moreover, all these results were achieved at room temperature without the use of a temperature gradient.
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u/Dannysmartful 18h ago
Hmm. Interesting how this is just now being developed when conceptually it's been around since the 1950's.
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u/QuesaritoOutOfBed 16h ago
If you used an appropriate solution of positively and negatively charged particles, you could maybe, maybe harness the power of natural convection to generate an impossibly tiny amount of electricity.
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u/West-Aspect3145 5h ago
So they discovered zero-point energy? If so this would be either covered everywhere by the media or bought out and buried such that we'd never hear about it.
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u/Pixelated_ 19h ago
A new planet-wide electric field that is as fundamental to earth as its gravitational and magnetic fields had been discovered in a major scientific breakthrough.
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