I was in a hardware store recently and noticed this curious thing there.
This is a fan you can place on top of a wood-burning stove. If you are unfamiliar with them, this type of stove is essentially a metal can in which you can burn wood to warm a (typically remote and unpowered) cabin. Their thermal mass is very low, which in practice means that while fire burns they give out a lot of heat at one point, and after fire has died the heat stops very shortly too.
Enter this thing.
This is essentially nothing but a heat sink with fan attached to it, so that when it sits on top a hot stove the heat rises up to radiating fins and fan then circulates warm air better in the surroundings. But wait, it gets better yet.
See that red arrow I drew there? There is a peltier element between top and bottom parts which generates the electricity needed to run the fan when this is hot. No external power needed.
I have no idea how efficient this is (i.e. how much and well this will warm the air and circulate it), but knowing typical peltier elements I suspect it'll need to get very, very hot (well actually, bottom part must get very very hot, and top part should stay relatively cool to allow heat transfer through peltier to generate electricity) and even then the air flow may not be very strong.
But still, when you are trying to warm your freezing cabin on evening before crawling to a sleeping bag, every bit of spread heat certainly helps.
Ei kommentteja:
Lähetä kommentti