I would just like to confirm if it is possible to convert waste heat energy to electricity... if possible, how?
plis, i rily nid help...
2007-09-05 01:52:47 · 3 answers · asked by blakken101 2 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Physics
There's a bit of a semantic quandary here. Heat is turned into electricity in a power plant. It releases "waste" heat because the conversion process is not 100% efficient. They just decide at some point that it would be too expensive to extract any more energy from it and discharge the heat into the environment (a river, say). If they went to the expense of extracting more heat with, say, a low termperature coolant cycle, then it would no longer be classified as "waste". One could argue, then, that you can't convert waste heat to electricity *by definition*. It would be like asking if one can survive a fatal car crash.
2007-09-05 02:58:57 · answer #1 · answered by Dr. R 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Sure, it's done all the time in things like "combined-cycle" power plants, where electricity is generated by a gas turbine (the gas cycle) and the exhaust is then run through a heat recovery steam generator (HRSG, aka "waste heat boiler"), for the steam cycle.
2007-09-05 09:05:08 · answer #2 · answered by donxfive 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
no
2007-09-05 09:00:59 · answer #3 · answered by ivory 2004 3 · 0⤊ 2⤋