[Stoves] thermoelectric cooking pot now available

[ajheggie at gmail.com]

On Tuesday 27 December 2011 22:57:59 Charlie Sellers wrote:

> when they demonstrate an increase in power when additional (cold) water
> is added to the pot during "cooking", since that results in a greater
> temperature differential across the TEG.

It doesn't seem sensible to have the cold sink for the TEG to be the very 
thing one is trying to heat. From memory these Bismuth teluride?? based 
TEGs have an upper temperature limit of 400 so the delta T isn't great.

As all the conduction through the TEG passes into the pot and the power 
output is 2W then how much of the 2kW or so passes through the TEG? 
Either way the loss to the pot is only the 2W.

I still quite like the idea of a metal-metal TEG, even though it requires 
a vast number of junctions. The reason being a very high delta T becomes 
possible, say around 700C and there is no worse loss to the pot than the 
electrical power compared with other tincanium stoves and it should be 
robust. Steve Taylor recently showed me a link to a copper-copper oxide 
junction that produced much higher voltages but as it was a point contact 
the current would be low and I suspect the junction open to degradation.

AJH