Silver Antimony Telluride
- February 22, 2021
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Silver Antimony Telluride
Subject: Science and Technology
Context: Bengaluru-based scientists have developed a new material that can help in tapping waste heat produced by all kinds of domestic and industrial appliances, and use it to accomplish other useful work.
Concept:
- Industrial processes and power plants produce ample amount of waste heat that can be utilised to do significant amounts of work through energy conversion.
- Bengaluru-based Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research says that Antimony Telluride, that can facilitate this energy conversion.
- Energy conversion, in general, is not a very efficient process. Only a small fraction of energy that is used is actually productive. The rest of it becomes waste, often getting released as heat
- The problem in facilitating transfer of energy, however, is the fact that most materials that conduct electricity, also happen to be good conductors of heat leading to wastage of energy.
- Traditionally, thermo-electric effect (If two ends of an electrically-conducting material, like a metal, are maintained at different temperatures, current flows from the hot end towards the cold one) has been demonstrated — and utilised — by using two different metals joined together, and by mechanically maintaining two different temperatures at the ends
- But this has not been an efficient or economical solution.
- Silver Copper Telluride, according to the study overcomes this challenges as it is a good conductor of electricity but a bad conductor of heat. It is because it is a crystalline solid, it had free electrons that helped in conduction of electricity but its lattices were rather inflexible, and vibrated quite slowly thereby inhibiting the propagation of heat.
- Lead Telluride is also said to have this property and the Silver Copper Telluride offered lesser efficiency than Lead Telluride in the conversion of heat into electrical energy, but it was considered an important breakthrough because it was environmentally benign
- The material has been found to have an efficiency of 14 per cent, though a prototype device has so far been able to achieve 10 per cent efficiency
- Potential: The heat from the laptop, for example, can be used to charge a mobile phone. Or, that from the phone can be used to charge a small watch.