Newbee question

[Physics_wiz]

I'm just a freshman in college (not an EE major) and I got a small question.

I read about peltiers and how they work, but I just wanted to ask if you think it's possible to buy a peltier, attach it to somewhere hot in my computer and light a 100 W light bulb from it. Do computers get hot enough to make a peltier light a 100 W light bulb? Anyone know how hot I will need to make the peltier to get this amount of power?

Thanks

[NoTime]

Certainly not a 100 W light bulb, but you might get enough to light a led.
Also it is not how hot but the temperature difference across the device.
You could melt one without getting any power at all.

[Physics_wiz]

Thanks, you saved me some money there! :biggrin:

[Mk]

The Seebeck effect, says that heat can be directly converted to electricity, if the peltier got hot enough, you'd get some electricity out of that.

[wire2]

It may or may not be the same thing, but there's a cordless, no battery electric fan designed to sit directly on a wood stove. It has an aluminum heat sink at the top to create a temperature difference across the active device. As the stove gets hotter the fan speeds up to blow the heat around. It's not very powerfull, more of a novelty.

[Averagesupernova]

It may or may not be the same thing, but there's a cordless, no battery electric fan designed to sit directly on a wood stove. It has an aluminum heat sink at the top to create a temperature difference across the active device. As the stove gets hotter the fan speeds up to blow the heat around. It's not very powerfull, more of a novelty.

There may be more than one, but the fan like that I'm thinking of is powered by a sterling engine.

[brewnog]

Hmm, wire2 said it was an 'electric' fan in which case it could be a peltier driven thing rather than a sterling engine, but those sterling ones which run off the heat of your hand are pretty cool...

[russ_watters]

Hold on a sec - the only place on your computer where you would get enough heat for this to be useful is on the processor itself. And doing so would make the processor run hotter. Not a good idea.