The Thermal Floater

What it does

The Thermal Floater is a modular device that helps decrease greenhouse gases and generate renewable energy from the Sun's thermal heat extremely efficiently without using valuable land area, unlike solar & wind farms by floating on unused water bodies.

Your inspiration

I was encouraged by the idea of emerging renewable technologies and wanted to develop & research the same. The present technologies use inefficient methods to generate energy from solar heat. They use large spaces of land to build a solar-thermal factory and use the concentrated heat to boil water, creating steam & rotating the turbine. Still, a large amount of energy is lost in the conversion process. The designs originally didn't justify the price per output ratio due to the Peltier's efficiency but Sir James Dyson's story motivated me to create more designs & after long ideation and iteration cycles, I came up with The Thermal Floater.

How it works

The light from the Sun converges using a fresnel lens onto a highly conductive thermal surface (copper). The concentrated light rays heat the copper plate, which is in contact with a Thermoelectric Peltier. The Peltier modules work on the Seebeck Principle, which can be used to produce an electric current. ¶ The Seebeck Effect states that electricity can be generated when two dissimilar metals are joined, and one side of their junction is cooled while the other is heated. Since the Peltier needs temperature differential to function and produce electricity, the cooling mechanism is attached to a heatsink further in contact with the water body, which causes the hotter electrons to move to the colder side. ¶ So, this system converts the thermal energy into a high-power output with voltages enough for powering various household devices. It has a modular design & can easily be connected with similar modules to create an array for supplying power to the utility.

Design process

Numerous prototypes have been fabricated & simulated in harsh environments to test their durability to achieve the maximum level of energy output possible. Initially, the design wasn't stable in water, and only 10% of the sunlight was able to be captured. I further improved by adding a concave mirror to increase the area captured, but it overshadowed and covered the sunlight for other models in the array. It was modified to have a hemispherical concave lens which was improved upon by the suggestion of my mentors to use a Fresnel lens to reduce cost & increase sunlight concentration on the hot plate. ¶ The surface area for the hollow tubular membranes was expanded to achieve high stability even in the ocean's harsh dynamic environment for a sustained period. ¶ Moreover, multiple iterations were designed to be modular while keeping in mind the cooling efficiency of the heatsinks, intermodular stability, & the current distribution throughout an array. Due to the modular design, the thermal floater can be deployed at specific locations with a suitable configuration. Many such units can be combined to develop a vast floating facility, thereby multiplying the power generation capacity. The heatsinks also underwent a lot of change from extended fins to a stamped fins radiator model.

How it is different

It currently produces 3x more energy than a typical solar panel in the same amount of area & compared to an available single solar panel that produces 300W per hour and 3 kWh per day. The energy generated by an array of thermal floaters the same size as a solar panel will come out to be about 10 kWh per day which puts it at a significant advantage compared to the rest of the renewable technologies in the market. This has many other benefits compared to other competitors. It's more environmentally friendly as most of its materials are recyclable & non-toxic, and the materials used here are more durable than those used in Solar Panels.

Future plans

The thermal floater originally started as an idea and has developed into a product with the potential to change the renewable energy market entirely. I plan to fabricate multiple prototype designs so as to achieve the greatest possible efficiency and reduce the costs to a minimum. Furthermore, I would patent the final design, ready it for mass production and bring the product to the market as soon as possible.

Awards

• Youth Ideathon: Recognized as the State Winner, and received funding for the fabrication of my idea. • Achieved the People's Choice Prize in an international competition hosted in Berlin by Stiftung Entrepreneurship • Young Scientist India: Shortlisted in the top 25 teams amongst students from all over India.