Asphalt Heat Harvesting

Description

Asphalt has enormous amounts of unused heat that is waiting to be tapped. I have seen a few different method's for heating water but I would like to make a system that goes straight to electricity. There is the hot asphalt on top and cold soil underneath and i believe by placing a grid of two dissimilar metals in the asphalt we can create a Seebeck effect and harvest the heat. As of right now this is only a idea and will require some experimentation to see how to produce a cheap way to implement this design.

Components

1 × thin copper wire

1 × thin aluminum or steel wire

1 × A driveway and a battery to store the electricity

Project Logs

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Proof of Concept
Jesse Ransom • 07/21/2015 at 15:43 • 0 comments

so I did some work on it the past few days and have a proof of concept. this is the cheapest option and its a very small amount of electricity but when its scaled up with constant heat from ashphalt or painted concrete this could be a game changer.

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Discussions

FuVinatro wrote 07/23/2015 at 18:32

I'd much rather have this than "solar freaking roadways" .

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hickss wrote 04/01/2015 at 10:07

you could try a "geothermal" approach.. underlay tubing through which you pump water.

Similar approach to geothermal pool-heaters.

You would only be able to harvest a modest temperature differential as compared to atmospheric temp (maybe 50C).

That said, you could operate a stirling engine (better efficiency), peltier (worse efficiency), use for domestic heating or something funky (think "refrigerator that runs off of a cycling heat source" http://apptechdesign.org/technologies/solar-refrigeration/ )

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Jesse Ransom wrote 04/05/2015 at 20:28

many people are playing with a geothermic design and to lay that much tubing is expensive. I want to make something that's cheap and easy.

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rexofrome wrote 03/31/2015 at 15:51

To use the Seebeck effect you need hot and cold. The colder the better (more power). I see the heat but I don't see anywhere for the heat to go.

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Jesse Ransom wrote 04/05/2015 at 20:26

so if you think about it you have the heat in the asphalt and the cold of the ground underneath. Im hoping that will be enough to produce a good amount of electricity. I will do some experiments next weekend.

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Paul Kocyla wrote 03/25/2015 at 21:10

Some protection will be needed in case of street damages, so the remaining grid won´t be shorted.

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Jesse Ransom wrote 03/25/2015 at 21:17

If this works this will be the last thing we have to worry about I think. Making it cheap will be the hard part

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Paul Kocyla wrote 03/25/2015 at 21:37

Yes. A peltier solution would be surely too expensive. But a two-metal grid doesn´t cost that much. An asphalting machine could be modified to inlay metal stripes. Perhaps :-D I hope so!

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Jesse Ransom wrote 03/26/2015 at 03:06

yeah so we were talking about even a conductive paint that you could paint on old parking lots when they need to be resurfaced maybe applied with a robot so it makes the connections between the two kinds of paint? sooo many possibilities and things to try and develop.

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Jesse Ransom wrote 03/25/2015 at 21:07

yeah so that would be the experimentation to see what can be produced with different methods of doing this. and yeah that I was going to do is make a bunch of squares of asphalt.

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Paul Kocyla wrote 03/25/2015 at 21:03

I really like the idea. It would be awsome if you would build something like a square-foot of a street-like structure including the grid to estimate the power capability.

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GaryBusey005 wrote 03/25/2015 at 20:02

What are you best case expectations for W/m^3??

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Asphalt Heat Harvesting

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Proof of Concept

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Asphalt Heat Harvesting

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