A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine

Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.

The heat engine is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel’s photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source and converts them into electricity.

Image Credit: Felice Frankel

[Cellidor]

This is absolutely fascinating to watch. I hope to hear more about this technology in the future, I always wondered what the steps beyond steam turbines would end up looking like when the time came.

[Tore_Lund]

Not only for renewables, This is obvious technology to generate electricity from a lot of industrial processes.

[BloodBlight]

Could you harness solar energy directly into a heat storage system? Skipping the PV stage and further increasing efficiency?

[mrteja]

Multiple heat engine in bunch
In chamber makes
More effective efficient
And high power generation
I think

[G]

Stick this thing in the ground and you now have a persistent source of as much electricity as you want. You can either go deep for the 1900C and above heat or run a compressor to concentrate temperatures from shallower depths. The next consideration is durability. Nonetheless, sweet.