Popular Mechanics sheds light on an inventor’s all-new approach to getting power from the sun:
The Atlanta-based independent inventor of the Super Soaker squirt gun (a true technological milestone) says he can achieve a conversion efficiency rate that tops 60 percent with a new solid-state heat engine. It represents a breakthrough new way to turn heat into power.
Johnson, a nuclear engineer who holds more than 100 patents, calls his invention the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion System, or JTEC for short.
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“It’s like a conventional heat engine,” explains Paul Werbos, program director at the National Science Foundation, which has provided funding for JTEC. “It still uses temperature differences to create pressure gradients. Only instead of using those pressure gradients to move an axle or wheel, he’s using them to force ions through a membrane. It’s a totally new way of generating electricity from heat.”
They say it doubles the efficiency of normal photo-voltaic (PV) systems, which turn light into electricity. This thing just moves hydrogen around by heating it up in the sun. Lonnie Johnson was a NASA engineer when he invented his squirt gun – which was a spin-off from his work creating heat pumps to begin with.