How so? TEGs are only 5% efficient and consume a lot of energy for that measly efficiency rating. They also have a low thermal differential which means you cannot cool more than a few degrees below ambient temperature. TEGs are far from a new thing and they have not found many practical uses because of their terrible efficiency and cost. Small desktop drink coolers are the most common use of these devices and those things suck a t cooling your drinks. Why pump 100 Watts of energy into a TEG to get only around 5 Watts of cooling energy when a standard compressor-based refrigeration system can get better than 50% efficiency and actually cool the air at a higher capacity?
OPs a fucking retard.
He's not tarded he's special
ONE OF US! ONE OF US!
The first part of the wiki is about turning waste heat from your car into eletricity. Not using electricty for cooling.
Maybe im wrong but I thought thats what OP ment.
Doesn't matter. TEGs operate at very low efficiency in either application. There are slightly better devices than these Peltier Effect (electric to thermal) devices that use the Seabeck Effect (thermal to electric), but they are only a few percent better at efficiency. Neither device is being used to harvest waste energy because they are just not efficient enough to be practical. If they were, don't you think they would already be widely used?
These devices have been around a long, long time and yet they are niche application use only because they are just not good at doing things at scale. Even solar photovoltaic cells (photoelectric effect, light to electricity) are just barely efficient enough to work at scale for their cost, size/weight and lifetime. You're still better off using chemical batteries to power things because they have much greater efficiency than all of these technologies. Physics doesn't give you anything for free and we have to accept that fact.
Don't forget the weight which would reduce your MPG.
At 5% efficiency and the need to have large heatsinks to make TEGs work, the weight difference is negligible compared to a standard refrigerant-based cooling system. A single TEG will do very little cooling so you will need many of them which will defeat the purpose further. We don't use TEGs for such purposes for very good reasons.
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