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SALT LAKE CITY — Have you ever been streaming a movie or downloading a large file, and suddenly the bottom of your laptop becomes exceptionally hot?
That’s because your laptop is consuming energy and, in the process, emitting heat. Machines that use energy — like laptops, cellphones, car engines and even refrigerators — become especially hot if they’re overused.
But what if you could take the heat your laptop generates and convert it into more energy for it to use?
That’s what Mathieu Francoeur, a mechanical engineering associate professor at the University of Utah, eventually hopes to accomplish.
All objects can only emit a certain amount of heat, called a “blackbody limit.” But back in the 1970s, researchers discovered that there is no limit to that amount when the gap between two objects is small enough — or nanoscopic.
About a decade ago, researchers brought that idea to life in a laboratory using a massively expensive piece of equipment. While the researchers’ experiment showed moving past that blackbody limit was physically possible, there was no way it could be practically applied in an everyday device.
That’s where Francoeur decided he could make some headway. So the U. professor and his team created a chip, or “device,” that situates two silicon surfaces next to each other with a tiny gap 100 nanometers thick — or a thousandth the thickness of a human hair — in between.
After placing the chip in a vacuum, the researchers heated one silicon surface and cooled the other, creating heat beyond the surface’s blackbody limit. And the closer the surfaces are, the more heat they will generate.
That heat can then be generated into electricity, though Francoeur said that’s the next challenge the team must hurdle. Once they accomplish that, then they’ll look at taking their device from the lab to actual application.
Francoeur believes the technology could be used to cool down devices like smartphones and laptops, then channel the extra heat into more battery life — even up to 50% more. The chip could even lengthen the life of a computer processor by keeping it cool and reducing the amount of work required by the fans.
The device may also improve the efficiency of solar panels, take the heat from a car engine and use it for the electrical systems, or fit into implantable medical devices like a pacemaker. In fact, Francoeur believes the chip could even improve the environment.
“You put the heat back into the system as electricity,” he said in an emailed statement. “Right now, we’re just dumping it into the atmosphere. It’s heating up your room, for example, and then you use your AC to cool your room, which wastes more energy.”
Francoeur says his team is probably about three years away from being able to convert that heat into electricity, but he believes actual application of the chip might be five to 10 years away — though, he admits he’s pessimistic.
“We have been able to design, manufacture and test that chip — but still in a laboratory environment. We still need to modify the chip so we can convert the heat into electrical power but also put it … into a natural system,” he told KSL.com.
Francoeur's team’s research was recently published in the newest issue of “Nature Nanotechnology.”
