TEC Peizoelectric Energy Generation

so I recently read an article about peizoelectric energy and one of the methods they use is heat differentiation between 2 materials to generate electricity. Although I watercool I immediately thought of you crazy TEC people!

I'm just jealous though.

I was wondering if it was possible, or rather how one could convert that radiant heat back into electricity? It must be possible and it seems like we could harness that to help, i dunno, light a light bulb or feed electricity back into the system to help offset electricity costs.

If there was a way to directly pull the energy out of that side and reuse it that would help the cooling as well. Can you kind of reverse a TEC? so one TEC is connected to the die generating heat and one is stacked on top of it collecting the heat and reconverting it? Obviously, I don't understand all the properties involved here but I thought I would bring it up for discussion as it has merit.

Yup, TECs generate power when heated.
The issue is that they generate very little power at low temps, and tend to melt before they start generating any useful amounts.

Thing to do is to get a tec and play with it, see what you can come up with.

Power generation is useful in some applications, however the power generated is on the order of 2-4%. This means that 100W of waste heat can be converted into 2-4W of power for an optimized system. That is barely enough to power a fan.

This kind of power generation is being used only at very special circumstances since the power generated is pretty low. Mostly are used in a special ultra low power gadget like for example standalone self powered remote sensor circuit that is getting it's power from this kind of sources like this TEG (thermo electric generator) or thermopiles and most popular are solar cells. The hardest part is managing the energy harvesting and storing them efficiently, for example at remote sensor, that stored energy will be used to transmit the captured information at a very short burst periodically.

This kind of technology aided by recent advancement in material technology is getting better now days, but currently its no where near practical use for us.

For powering high wattage equipment like light bulb or others, don't believe it is feasible right now.

well poop.

i like the idea of efficiency so i hate to see energy wasted. I guess I will use it for what I currently use it for. heating the office in winter