A New Transformerless Power Supply Concept

william chan

Lately, I was thinking of such a device, but it's not a SMPS.

A AC mains 110v or 240v supply could be used to heat up an enclosed container using an heating element.
Then a thermopile will convert the heat back to some low voltage DC like 5V that can be used by common electronic appliances.
The result would be ripple free.

What do you guys think?

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MarkS

All of that heat that is escaping out of the container is electrical energy that you've just lost.

Franklin

You probably can't get an efficiency high enough to make it worthwhile except maybe for scientific equipment where the cost is no object.

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- Stephen

Dennis Ferron

Read a physics textbook. The laws of thermodynamics state that you can't draw energy from a single temperature reservoir; you have to have a high temperature source and a low temperature sink and you can draw the energy off the difference. Even if you could somehow perfectly insulate it and keep the heat 100% in, you then wouldn't be able to draw any electricity from it! So the only way you're going to get any energy output is if you generate the heat and then dissipate that heat to the room during the process of drawing off energy - wasting a very large portion of the input energy from the wall current. Furthermore, thermodynamics also teaches us that very hot things have high-grade energy and things that are merely warm have low-grade energy. The lower the temperature, the lower the "grade" of energy, the less efficiently you can convert that to other forms of energy (that's the principle of entropy). You will have to run it very, very hot to get any kind of significant energy throughput - i.e. it would have to be hot enough to burn things and be a fire risk.

The theoretical best any heat engine can ever do is 40% - again that's a law of physics, from thermodynamics. Switch mode power supplies can achieve 85% or greater efficiency without violating thermodynamics because they are not heat engines.

Anyhow it's good that you're thinking outside the box, but this is an over complicated solution to a non-problem. You can achieve low enough ripple to power any common electrical circuit using good filters on a switch mode supply, or go with linear regulation if you're paranoid.

If for some reason you had something like a scientific experiment that absolutely requires ripple-free power, just use a battery!

LoopyByteloose

You might consider the use of microwaves to create the energy transfer and localize the creation of heat.

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