Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Despite its low efficiency, burning liquid fuel to generate mechanical and electrical power is the simplest and commonly used energy conversion method. In general, burning is an uncontrolled phenomenon where one can have either burning or no burning resulting in large percentage of wasted energy. Creating localized heating at micro and nanoscale is a formidable challenge. There is no nanoscale or even microscale flame. Our earlier research has shown that nanoparticles of platinum catalytically convert methanol into very localized heat with individual particles turning red hot as observed by infrared thermometry. Even though the temperature around the nanoparticle can be hundreds of degrees centigrade, the entire device can remain at room temperature. This observation of nanocatalytic process can be used to generate sustainable thermal gradient on suspended microfabricated thermoelectric structures for direct conversion of liquid fuel, such as methanol, into electricity. We theorize that nanocatalytic heating zone supported on a micro-machined structure can create a micro-scale ultra-high thermal gradient that is two to three orders of magnitude greater than what can be achieved in macroscale. Maintaining such a high thermal gradient enables high-efficiency direct conversion of nanoburning heat into electricity through a nanostructured thermoelectric energy conversion system without any moving parts. The fuel's chemical energy spontaneously releases to thermal energy at predefined localized nanocatalytic heating zones without conventional ignition or high temperature gas-phase burning/combustions while bulk temperature of the entire device remains at ambient. This concept has the potential for developing a miniature energy converter the size of a battery that uses methanol as fuel, which can be recharged as needed. However, before such a goal can be achieved, many practical aspects need to be optimized. There is no apparent theoretical obstacle to making nanoburning a fully scalable distributed power system that could have specific power and energy 10-100 times better than existing batteries. The first goal of this proposal is to fabricate and demonstrate miniature DC power generator with output power of 1 W and long operational life (1000) hours.