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Comment by Iv | Hacker News Reader

That... is the great breakthrough that many people were waiting for in thermoelectric generation.

Tell me it can be easily manufactured and we have a winner. This has the potential of making solid state thermal plants, where no moving parts would be required to transform heat into electricity.

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Even if it's not particularly easy to manufacture it would still be massively beneficial to a lot of generator designs. We already do some crazy stuff to make single metallic crystal turbine fins for jets, I could see something similarly exotic in manufacturing being useful for power plants even if it costs 10x-50x more than the traditional parts given what this material can enable.

Would it be possible to use such a thermo-electric generator as a heat sink for a chip?

No, as you need to be removing heat from the hot side anyway.

Depends what you mean. If you want to use it for power generation then you can but it is probably a bad idea: it gives resistance to the heat flow.

However, the thermoelectric effect is used by overclockers but on reverse : they consume energy to move heat from the CPU to a radiator. It is called a Peltier cell.

How about its use in computer chips? Maybe all those fans and heat sinks won't be needed.

I think it's the other way around: the chips are producing heat constantly and you want that heat to dissipate as quickly as possible, so it's not the right place to put a thermal insulator.

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