Get the latest tech news

Getting a charge out of wasted automobile heat (2012)

Only about 25 percent of the energy in every gallon of gasoline you buy actually helps your vehicle to run. The rest is converted to heat, which is radiated uselessly off of your engine or blown out of your exhaust pipe. What if you could recover some of that wasted energy? JPL and automakers are developing technology to do just that.

Two major brands so far have struck deals with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to help them develop devices that will turn some of that waste heat into electricity. NASA has been using heat-to-electricity technology for decades to power spacecraft touring the outer planets, where the distance from the sun makes solar panels inadequate. Such devices have logged millions of hours of operation in space without a single thermoelectric-related failure, according to Thierry Caillat, a principal staff member of the JPL Thermal Energy Conversion Technologies group.

Get the Android app