Last week there was an interesting debate about raising the altitude of a satellite by using magnertic fields.
Carrying on the wacky ideas theme, I've been looking at producing power by using thermocouples and not solar cells.
Question: Does anyone know the 'current' or the impedance of the voltage source represented by a thermocouple?
A thermocouple generates an emf (voltage) proportional to the difference in temperature between its two junctions.
Given that we know a white object in space gets very cold, while Aluminium gets very hot it's interesting looking at the possibility of thermocouple power....Even if it's just to understand its limitations
A thermocouple can be made very small so it should be possible to manufacture an array of them in a reasonable space.
Example: A junction of two wires, one made from constantan and one from Chromel will generate a voltage of 58 microvolts for every degree difference between the junctions.
That means for a 100 degree C difference you generate 5.8mV. For 350 junctions in a chain you generate 2.03 V and for 6 chains (if you wanted to risk all those junctions in series) you could have 12.18V
But.........how much power can you draw from it ??
73
David