News Liquid-like solid could boost battery life

A selenium-copper compound which exhibits liquid-like properties could hold the key to boosted batte

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/03/27/liquid-solid-could-boost-battery/1

 

"Electrons in the hot end diffuse to the cold end, producing a small but useful electric current."
"allowing electrons to flow easily while inhibiting..."

You mean the copper atoms are diffusing. Electrons don't defuse according to temperature, they "defuse" according to electric potential.

 

What, custard?

 

Too much custard makes me sluggish and slow to respond; hopefully the same won't be true if they apply this tech to processors.

 

No such thing as too much custard... IMHO

But I would avoid OD-ing on selenium myself...

dunx

 

I believe if I have understood this correctly the electrons are diffusing or moving from the hot to cold end and this creates an electric potential hence how it generates electricity.

I doubt the 'liquid' copper atoms actually move very much. I believe what they are refering to is that they are not rigid which reduces the amount of energy lost to vibrations normallytravelling through a solid which.

I am sure the answer is in there somewhere. At the end of the day I am a chemist, hunt down a physicist for a long and complicated answer

 

@Fused
"I believe if I have understood this correctly the electrons are diffusing or moving from the hot to cold end and this creates an electric potential hence how it generates electricity."

Electrons don't diffuse according to temperature. Heat one side of a wire up and see if the electrons move to one end (spoiler: they don't).
One of the researchers explicitly said "...the copper atoms are diffusing..."

When one side of this material is heated the copper atoms (at least some of which will be charged) are free to diffuse to the cold end of the material. The electrons (presumably any free electrons) themselves don't care about the temperature.

Copper atoms diffuse through the material because they are getting knocked around more at one and than the other (thermal diffusion). Electrons don't knock each other around and therefore cannot diffuse (in a thermal manner that is, they will diffuse by repelling each other according to the electrical potential of whatever material they are in).

The movement of these charged copper atoms from one end to the other creates the overall charge.

 

to elaborate further:

the charged copper ions move within the selenium crystal lattice (so it is theorized) which creates a voltage difference, i.e. not an even distribution of charged particles (copper ions in this case).

The trick to Thermoelectric materials is that they conduct electricity, don't conduct heat well, and have some ability to get charged particles to move around within them.

When you apply a current to a thermoelectric material the charged particles within the material feel the force of the magnetic field (created by the current going through the material) and are pushed along the field lines (until they hit the edge of the material). Since these charge carriers (the copper ions) now find themselves crowded in one end of the material they end up bouncing around off each other more and more (this is heat).

When you remove the current the magnetic field dissipates and the charge carriers (copper ions) bounce off of each other into less populated regions of the material until they are (mostly) evenly spread out (the material comes to a stable temperature - aka diffusion).

If, for whatever reason this material became warmer on one side that another the copper ions in the warm side will start colliding with other copper ions harder than the copper at the cold end of the material (they are warmer and have more energy). This results in a general crowding of copper ions at the cold end of the material, at least until all of the ions reach the same temperature, at which time they will spread out to an even distribution again. The act of these charge particles moving to and crowding one end of the material creates a voltage difference for the overall material (which can be exploited and used to power things).

Since they only will crowd together in the cold end of the material you will only get power out of the device when one end is hotter than the other, so when you slap it on your laptop it will only produce energy while it heats up, when its hot it will stop producing energy.

So by these actions the material is able to produce a temperature gradient when current is applied and conversely is able to produce current when a temperature gradient exists.

This tech is nothing new, its just that the material this article is talking about has a very good ability to allow charge carriers to travel within it, while inhibiting thermal conductivity (because the longer the temperature gradient lasts the longer the material will produce a voltage difference).

I guess this post is just to clarify that electrons are not involved in any direct way here, as suggested above.

 

Personally I find this type of technology fascinating
The potential for ever lasting energy from one initial source is getting ever closer
Converting and harnessing and then reusing the types of energy given off as a waste product off one source to fuel another. Sublime

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy0UBpagsu8&t=0m16s

 

@ Omnituens

ha

 

Or conversely to the copper ions migrating it could be that at the hot end more electrons become "free" from the copper atoms due the the heat energy, the mutual repulsion between the electrons causes them to migrate toward the colder end and so set up an electo potential between the hot and cold ends, the cold end becoming negative, the copper ions remain fixed in place in the selenium lattice.

 

AMD should name their next chip "Custard" ...