Ulysess, the NASA/ESA mission to study the sun will end on or about July 1, 2008.  The spacecraft has exceeded the design lifetime by nearly four times.  The first mission to study the sun from above and below the solar poles, Ulysess utilized a gravitational 'slingshot' around Jupiter to get out of the solar system's ecliptic plane and eventually enter a solar orbit past the north and south solar poles.

A recent blog piece indicates worldwide production of tellurium amounts to about 135 metric tons and that this entire amount would be required to produce a single GW of electricity using current CdTe photovoltaic cells.  They indicate the three main uses for tellurium today are hardening steel, thermoelectric coolers and now CdTe solar cells.  Their point is, of course, is there may not be enough tellurium to do everything we want to do with it.

A report about BMW R&D on the Motor Authority website attributes a "real world" gain of 5% in fuel economy to use of a thermoelectric generator to produce electricity from exhaust heat.  As much as 1 kW of electricity could be produced this way.  The US DoE FreedomCar program goal is 10% fuel savings.

As early as 1978 Bhandari and Rowe [Bhandari, 1978] suggested improving thermoelectrics by reducing the grain size.  Back then 'fine grain' meant maybe micron sized or slightly smaller.  But today people are learning to make nano-scale grain structures. 

Google is an amazing resource.  But if you simply type "thermoelectric" into a Google search you'll find more pages related to power plants (i.e. generating electricity from heat by burning coal, natural gas, etc.) than related to the solid-state energy conversion technology.  Sorting out one meaning from the other is called "disambiguation" on Wikipedia.com.

We've tried to create a Google News search which returns pages:

• related to thermoelectric energy conversion
• appeared (or update) recently on the web

Here is a link to our customized Google-assisted TE News search:

http://www.zts.com/googlefeed

Bookmark that page and you'll always be up to date.

"MSU is at the cutting edge of the potential of thermoelectricity" says US Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan while visiting the  MSU Energy and Automotive Research Laboratories in East Lansing, Michigan USA. The State News story on Levin's visit to MSU includes an aerogel demonstation by Jeff Sakamoto.  The full quote from Levin:

Recent Google searches on thermoelectrics turned up (in no particular order):

The Voyager 2 spacecraft passed through the heliosheath boundary, also called the solar wind termination shock, on August 30, 2007.  A classic example of overdesign, the Plasma Science instrument, radio and power supply (a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator using silicon-germanium thermocouples) are among the systems on Voyager 2 still working 30 years after lauch.

This week in Google

Google.com is amazing.  I have a "Google Alert" set to email me when new webpages come appear which mention thermoelectrics.  Many of these hits concern "thermoelectric power plants", which includes anything that produces electricity by burning something (as opposed to hydroelectric, solar or nuclear, for example).

But here are some recent hits related to thermoelectric energy conversion: