As I see it, this is good for low power iOT devices that are installed in remote / hard to reach areas (say underground etc. ..). A small temperature difference could produce power enough to run the device without any battery.

Heart Pacemaker require around 10uWatt and this new power source seems to provide 12uWatt for 1 cm2. If temperature difference could be maintained, then could provide a low weight, low power source that do not require changing battery.

Is there a 5C difference anywhere in the body? Skin temperature to blood temperature, maybe?

That's what I was thinking. 37°C inside vs. up to 32°C (90°F) outside and you still have enough temp gradient to produce the power. All you need to do is install this heatsink on your chest :)

And to satisfy precedent, pipe any leftover power after running the pacemaker to a ring of white LEDs.

Testicles versus main body is the classical example. Sperm production and conservation just works better around 32°C.

On a more practical note, I wonder how feasible a thermoelectric powered earpiece would be...

How does that works? For a period of time before you try to get someone pregnant you should try to keep your testicles at that temperature to get the best quality possible?

Yes. Boxers. Loose pants. No hot baths or saunas. Good luck!

There are likely papers on the exact effect over to be found on google scholar.

Thanks. If that energy is stored in a battery or capacitor, how could it bleed off any excess charge (in your example 10 v 12uW). Is this a thing that’s is problem anywhere?

Getting rid of a few microwatts is never a problem. If these things behave like Peltier elements, they'll simply float their voltage up to a design maximum then stop extracting energy as the electric field balances the energy of the electrons they're trying to extract from.

Heat engines generate work (power) through the movement of heat from hot to cold. Conventional systems (steam turbines, Stirling engines, regular thermoelectric generators) require a temperature difference of much higher than 5C between hot and cold, which limits the situations they can be used in. This apparently can work at much lower temperature differences than other systems while generating 'useful' amount of work.

I wonder if this could be used to power an electric recovery generator in a Internal Combustion Engine in hybrid applications. If my back of the envelope calculations are correct a typical 2 litre engine exhausts over 1000 litres of exhaust gasses at ~300c per minute. A fair amount of energy is lost to the atmosphere this way.

In combined cycle power plants they use the exhaust gasses of a turbine engine to power a secondary steam power plant. This obviously would work in a car if it weren't for the huge complexity and cost.

Sure,but you are judt bolting one heat engine to another (the motor). I'm assuming the efficiency of the motor is better than the TEG (generally the case), so why not just draw power from the motor instead?

This technology is probably more applicable to situations where you have a source of low quality heat and you want to extract a tiny bit of power.

An internal combustion engine relies more on the heat from the chemical reaction than the heat of the engine block. And the hot gasses are just blown out the exhaust pipe. It isn't a closed cycle.

Bolting a heat engine to the internal combustion means that the excess heat from the engine block and the exhaust gases can do some work before convecting, diffusing, or radiating away. The usual problem is not the additional weight of the heat engine part, but the enormous radiator you would need to maintain a proper cold well. This would likely be a ribbed (finned) aluminum plate covering the entire underside of the car, with scoops and fans to ensure sufficient airflow across it.

The combustion engine part could then be redesigned to produce higher temperatures, as the heat engine portion can be actively driven if necessary to cool the engine block--or to warm it, as might be needed for diesel startup.

The typical way to extract power from exhaust gas heat is to add a turbo.

And in Formula 1 now this is done "completely" with the waste heat recovery units. Basically, a normal turbo frequently generates more boost pressure than the engine can use, so the recovered power is just wasted again through a wastegate. But in F1, they've managed to build very long turbo shafts, so they can be coupled to an electric motor, and thus remove excess boost by generating electricity.

Combustion engines don't rely on heat so much as pressure (can be viewed as the same thing in some models).

There's no need to have "excess" heat in an engine.

PV = nRT

In a fixed volume (the cylinder, on the time-scale of ignition), pressure is proportional to temperature.

Higher temperature in the cylinder bleeds more heat into the engine block, but also produces more force on the pistons.

Nitrous oxide systems do this, at risk of overheating the engine. If you were to actively drive a Stirling integrated into that engine, it would actively cool the engine, forcing its heat into the cold well. You would overheat your oversized radiator, instead of your engine.

Yeah, checking wikipedia the efficiency of TEGs are ~5-8% so I guess that is why this idea isn't used. It would be hard to justify the cost / weight at that limit.

There's got to be more to it than that. I would suspect that energy recovered over the service life isn't enough to more than break even.

If up front cost and/or weight/packaging were the issue you'd see them employed at least occasionally in marine/rail/off highway/stationary industrial applications where physical trade-offs aren't as big of an issue and the up front cost is can be more easily amortized over the long service life of the equipment it's tacked on to.

Many applications don’t have a weight limit, things like generators powering remote living locations.

Formula 1 cars use a much simpler method to recover energy from exhaust gases - a generator attached to the turbocharger.

Aircraft engines had an "simpler solution" to this problem, they geared the output of the turbo charger down to the crankshaft speed and directly recovered the power into mechanical energy.

This was known as a turbo compound engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo-compound_engine

These improved fuel efficiency by 15-35%. It's actually the reason my mind jumped to recovering energy from exhaust gasses. Doing this directly from heat would be elegant if it could ever be made cost effective.

Well as you know current power generator technology for the most part uses a heat source (burning coal, nuclear reactor, etc.) to produce steam from water, this pressure difference is used to drive a generator which turns the rotational energy of the turbine into electrical energy. Thermo-electric devices like thermocouples and thermopiles convert heat energy directly into electrical energy.