Name: Solve for X - Lonnie Johnson - Heat Direct to Electric Energy
Uploaded: 2014-04-18T03:54:09.000Z
Duration: 10 min 20 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

LONNIE JOHNSON: I'm going to talk about something that

Adverbs of manner

has been touched on routinely throughout this conference--

the fact that we're in an unsustainable situation

And we have inefficient means for converting those images

sources to work or power, even for refrigeration.

Imagine what would happen if we had a universal engine that's

more efficient than any engine that's been built before

that it could be used for large-scale power plants

for converting heat to useful power, but yet small enough

that you could actually use it convert body heat

or even harvesting energy from ambient environment using

the temperature variations in our environment

Energy that could be used irreversibly for refrigeration

we could actually power and provide power and refrigeration

to remote, undeveloped areas of the world.

When you think about energy-- and the ideal sustainable

energy source is, of course, the sun-- there's

enough energy falling on a small area of desert, as shown here,

that could supply all of the needs of the world,

but yet we don't have the efficient conversion technology

So imagine if you could have an energy conversion system that

could convert this energy to useful power

talk about clean, natural gas, clean burning natural gas.

The fact is, natural gas is a hydrocarbon.

When you burn it, you get two reaction products.

The hydrogen reacts with oxygen to produce water, good.

The carbon reacts with oxygen to produce CO2, bad.

So we really do need a sustainable energy source

Aside from having an effective, clean way

of supplying and sustainable way of supplying energy,

allow us to use that energy more efficiently.

been talked about before here-- consume about 40%

of the energy that's produced in this country.

About 2/3 of that is used for heating, refrigeration,

we could actually cut that consumption in half.

I'm a proponent of electric transportation.

In fact, I'm developing battery technology

had a more efficient engine, what if we could cut

the amount of energy consumed for transportation in half,

That would have profound implications for us.

When we think about engines, we generally

You heat it up and expand it at high temperature.

That hot temperature expansion gives you a lot more

work out than it takes to compress it at low temperature.

They generally do it by turbines, pistons, and things

Even refrigeration systems operate in reverse.

to your ambient temperature, then you expand it.

When you expand it from that ambient temperature,

it cools, and that's how you get to refrigeration effects.

So it's all about compressing and expanding working fluids.

We're taught in thermodynamics that the Carnot cycle

is the ideal cycle for converting heat to work.

It's represented by a rectangle and if temperature entered

the space, you'd have a high temperature expansion

This is an ideal curve for a Carnot cycle.

What's significant about it is that if you look at it,

at temperatures that are way off the scales

here, up around 2000 degrees centigrade and higher.

from an internal combustion engine is only about 30%.

And you can get that with an ideal Carnot engine on a heat

So it's a lot of energy loss, the engines that we presently

We have a membrane electrode assembly stack,

not too different from what you would find in a fuel cell.

It's a proton-conducted membrane with a couple electrodes

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Solve for X - Lonnie Johnson - Heat Direct to Electric Energy

pressure

natural

energy

efficient