Electrical engineering doctoral student and research engineer Carlos Caicedo-Narvaez said the technology provides an eco-friendly approach to energy development. Photo by Esther Mathew | Mercury Staff
Researchers create generator that uses gallium to convert excess energy to usable electricity
UTD researchers are taking on global warming with new
technology that uses liquid metal to turn waste heat into usable energy.
Researchers in the Renewable Energy and Virtual Technology
lab at UTD developed a prototype generator that uses gallium to recover low
temperature waste heat from data centers. Professor of electrical engineering
Babak Fahimi said the project first began in 2015.
“We had a project at ARPAE, Advanced Research Program Agency
at the Department of Energy, and in the course of that project we were
discussing various types of generating electricity and the importance of
recovering heat from data centers,” Fahimi said. “That was the first time we
seriously looked into this problem. I had a very bright student at the time,
Eva Cosoroaba, and she got excited about the prospect of generating electricity
from liquid metals.”
Fahimi said the majority of electricity consumed by data
centers is converted into heat.
“Today, we put large fans to cool down the data centers
because a very small amount of electricity is actually used for number
crunching,” he said. “The majority of electricity that is consumed by data
centers is converted to heat.”
Fahimi said that
gallium was used as the liquid in the generator because it’s one of few
metals that’s liquid at room temperature.
“The idea is to polarize the conductive liquid. That happens
due to two different processes. One is the spin hydrodynamics that happens when
conductive liquids are subject to turbulent motions, and a polarization
happens, (then) you can harvest energy,” Fahimi said. “There will be an
electric field, that is the main source of harvesting energy, and then
Magnetohydrodynamics which is the second effect, meaning you subject that
moving conductive liquid to an external magnetic field and the interaction
between the two.”
Fahimi said the movement of the polarized metal within a
magnetic field allows researchers to generate electricity. Electrical
engineering doctoral student and research engineer Carlos Caicedo-Narvaez said
the technology will provide a more eco-friendly approach to energy development.
“If you look at data centers, they spent a lot of energy and
money and resources to remove the heat from the electronics. With this you can
recycle some of that heat to generate power,” Narvaez said. “Green power,
that’s the number one application that when we were doing this, we had in mind”
Caceido Narvaez said.