hjl4

Is it possible to make your own thermocouples?(store bought are just to expensive) especially, when you need thousands.
If so , thousands could be joined together like a tree, and voila, free energy.
As long as there is heat(direct sunlight), you have power, right?
Thermocouples would be black to collect as much energy?

Just a thought.

akg

theoreticaly it is correct , but how about the practical limits and economy. that's why it is still to appear commercialy.

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Nigel Goodwin

Try doing the sums - they don't produce much energy, so it's impractical.

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dknguyen

It takes more energy to make them than they produce. Solar panels work better.

hjl4

Just so you know, it takes more energy to extract oil from the oil sands or oil wells, then the final product (gasoline or whatever), gives off. That goes for almost all modern refineries around the world also. Check it out and you'll be surprised. By the time they explore, bring in the equipment, drill the well, cap it, pump it, then send it down a pipeline, or truck it, build a refinery, then build ships, and then the infrastucture to distribute it, and so on.....
So lets eliminate that one.
I guess i will see what they're made of and then deduct it from there.
Thanxs anyways.

dknguyen

Gasoline giving off less energy than the energy needed to refine it is not quite the same thing because you are not using gasoline energy to refine gasoline. It's comiing from somewhere else like directly from crude oil. (If you only used gasoline to make gasoline then that's a diffent story. It's kind of like if you used thermocouples to power everything, you would need to use that energy to make more thermocouples.) If you were going to use fossil fuels to make thermocouples (and it takes more energy to make them than they produce) then you might as well just use the fuels.

Anyways, it's plainly obvious that what you are saying is not accurate (not yet anyways). You say that it takes more energy to find and make the wells than the energy the wells provide BUT JUST LOOK AROUND YOU! We've been using fossile fuels to find and dig more wells for a while now. If what you said was true, then they would have run out of oil as soon as they started using fossil fuel machinery to find and dig wells. It would be impossible to dig a well with fueled machinery. For every well you find and dig, you would use up more than one well in the process. THat would put a stop to it pretty quickly (also remember that the energy cost for an infrastructure gets spread across the multiple wells that it supports. You can't double count the energy costs of pre-existing infrastructure by including them as energy costs during the development of new wells.

hjl4

Hmmm, looking at it that way, yes, it makes sense.
But last night I looked at how and what makes a thermocouple work, and yes you would have problems with galvanic corrosion, and in the end no power from them.
I guess I have to keep looking.

BTW, I'm heading for rich Alberta this fall to work for the oilfeilds, as work has dried up here.

Thanks for making sense of it all.

Sig239

I know this thread is a bit old, but consider also that we get wayyyyy more than just gasoline out of crude oil! How many petroleum distillates can you think of?

Oznog

Actually, Seebeck (thermocouple) Effect power generation is not totally impractical. In idealized contexts its output can be similar to solar cells.

Efficiency is low and for a substantial output for the device's size a solar concentrator would be necessary to raise the hot side temp. It is of course necessary to keep the cold side as cool as possible.

In a crude attempt, you might have a black side in the sun get to 150F or whatever. Hard to say because you have to understand the device is conducting heat from the hot to the cold side, cooling it. Might only get to 120F. Assuming this is a summer day, the cold side might be 90F. Output of a Seebeck device is proportional to the temp differential and this is pretty small. 50F is pretty negligible, 30F is pathetic.

Hi-Z had some modules which could make a few watts, maybe 10 watts or so, I don't remember, look them up. However, that's with like 300F+ on the hot side and the cold side kept pretty cool, like 70F.

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tytower

The petrol coys must be making a loss then? I think we better not eliminate that one
Your comment does not make rational sense

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Sceadwian

Googling a little I see that they actually used thermocouple generators back in the 1900's to charge small batteries. I'm sure it would be a practical power solution if you had a reliable source of ambient heat. Such as nearer the earths core or in an active volanic reagion where you don't have to go too far down to get really hot. The only major attraction I can see to them is they're effectivly a solid state energy source. A long as the temperature differential can be maintained you get power. Hyper low maintance.

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