Bastiaan Bergman <[email protected]> wrote: A car running on 10kW electric from a cold fusion device connected to > a 5% efficient heat to electric converter (steam or bismut or > whatever) would spit out 200kW of waste heat . . .
That would be a Rube Goldberg machine! Why would you do it that way? Put the cold fusion reactor in the car and use a heat engine to convert the heat directly to mechanical force. When the technology is first introduced it might be cheaper to make the car a hybrid like a Prius, where the mechanical force is sometimes converted to electric power and stored. Also, even small steam turbines are better than 5% efficient. Thermoelectric devices will not come into widespread use for cold fusion until efficiency is more like 20% I suppose. Present day ones are ~10% efficient at 500°C. See: http://www.electrochem.org/dl/interface/fal/fal08/fal08_p54-56.pdf In the 1960s and 70s, thermoelectric devices were used with plutonium in pacemakers, so they can be scaled down. In a pacemaker, wristwatch battery or earphone battery you need only a tiny trickle of electric power so efficiency does not matter. - Jed
