Talk:Waste heat

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[edit] Other possible uses for waste heat?

First of all I need to confess, I am no expert on these things. I gather that the efficiency of a normal fossil fuel power plant is about 35%. To me that seems pretty rubbish. I would have thought that on an industrial scale, something better than that could be achieved. Near where I live, there is a big power station operating lots of those huge natural draft wet cooling towers. As you see the clouds of water vapour rising from them, you can not help but be struck by the waste of energy. It could hardly be more in your face!

Using cogeneration, as mentioned in this article, the waste can be reduced. In the 'cogeneration' article, the claim is made that cogeneration can potentially reach an efficiency of about 70%. Nice improvement!

Where it is not practical to use the heat in this way, more work could be got out of it using a stirling engine. I wonder why this is not done?--JB001 13:18, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

To answer my own question: apparently, stirling engines can be designed to function on low temperature differences (such as the low grade waste heat source of a power station), however, at present the resultant engine would be large, inefficient and uneconomical.--JB001 10:40, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

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This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 10:05, 10 November 2007 (UTC)