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Don Morelli: Transferring waste heat into electricity
- Don Morelli talks with Kirk Heinze on WJR
Whether energy is converted from wind, solar energy, or coal, energy is lost in the form of heat and Michigan State University’s Don Morelli is looking at ways to make use of that wasted heat.
“If you look at how energy is transferred through our economy from source to its use, say from the coal mine to the light bulb, or from the well head to the automobile, a large portion of the energy we use is lost, something like two-thirds of it in the form of waste heat,” Morelli says.
Morelli is a professor of chemical engineering and material science at MSU and is part of a leading research team that aims to take wasted heat energy and turn it into thermal electricity.
As a former GM worker, Morelli understands how thermal electricity can help auto efficiency.
“When we burn gasoline in an engine, something like 50 kilowatts of the 75 kilowatts of energy that is produced is lost either in the radiator or the exhaust as waste heat. If one can convert a portion of that thermal energy—that lost heat—to electricity, one has a means of increasing the fuel economy or the fuel efficiency of the vehicle,” he says.
While Morelli believes the United States should continue to look at wind and solar energy, in the mean time, he says, we should be using wasted heat more efficiently.
“I like to sort of think of this waste heat as our best new energy source because it is energy that is available to us right now, we just have to figure out how to use it.” Morelli says, “When we convert energy from various sources to usable power, of course we inevitably lose part of that energy, it’s not necessarily that we are being sloppy, but we have to play by the rules—the rules and the laws of thermal dynamics which govern how efficient energetic processes are. But if we can recapture some of the lost heat, and turn it into usable energy, this is something that can impact our energy usage today.”
Click on the arrow above to hear Morelli’s May 28 Greening of the Great Lakes conversation with Kirk Heinze. Greening of the Great Lakes airs Fridays at 7 p.m. on News/Talk 760 WJR.
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