EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Researchers at Michigan StateUniversity are working on a
new low-cost approach to recapturing theheat energy that is lost in car exhaust
and many other industrialprocesses, in search of a way to improve efficiency and
decrease waste.Theteam is using a material based on very common naturally
occurringminerals called tetrahedrites to make thermoelectric materials that
havethe ability to convert heat into electricity.The project’sleader is Don
Morelli, a professor of chemical engineering and materialsscience who heads
Michigan State’s Center for Revolutionary Materialsfor Solid State Energy
Conversion."What we’ve managed to do issynthesize some compounds that have
the same composition as naturalminerals," said Morelli. "The mineral
family that they mimic is one ofthe most abundant minerals of this type on Earth
— tetrahedrites. Bymodifying its composition in a very small way, we produced
highlyefficient thermoelectric materials."The U.S. Department of Energyis
financing the research, which involves a partnership with Oak RidgeNational
Laboratory; the University of Michigan; the University ofCalifornia, Los
Angeles; and Northwestern, Ohio State, and Wayne Stateuniversities.The challenge
in developing new thermoelectricmaterials, according to Morelli, is that many
are derived from rare ortoxic materials or are hard and costly to
produce."Typicallyyou’d mine minerals, purify them into individual
elements, and thenrecombine those elements into new compounds that you
anticipate willhave good thermoelectric properties," he said. "But
that process costs alot of money and takes a lot of time. Our method bypasses
much ofthat."Possible applications include waste energy recovery
fromindustrial power plants, converting vehicle exhaust heat intoelectricity and
generating power from home furnaces, Michigan Statesaid.___Online:Research
details: http://bit.ly/UjakPeCenter
for Revolutionary Materials for Solid State Energy Conversion: http://www.egr.msu.edu/efrcCopyright
2012 The Associated Press.