Earlier this year I tried to use a solar box cooker as a seebeck generator. That didn't quite work out. Okay, it totally failed. User DaveW suggested I'd use a solar concentrator instead.
Last week I aimed a solar concentrator at the same peltier I used for the previous experiment. Here's the story and some pictures.
These are the copper plates that hold the peltier. The cold side has larger holes, so the bolts from the hot side will not be in direct contact with the cold side
A piece of CPU heat sink. This would later prove to be insufficient.
This plywood disk is supposed to limit the heat that is radiated from the hot plate to the cold one.
Three more pictures of the uhm, thingy. I tested this over a spirit flame. Turned out that the cooling sucked. The heat sink became really hot and power output was near zero.
Damn, I damaged the Peltier. Hope that won't mess up the results too much.
I added four bolts with some rings, nuts and aluminum tube as extra heat sinks. They worked really great. The hot side would be really really hot while the cold side could still be touched.
Testing the solar cell. The concentrator is a 75cm diameter satellite dish with 145 50x50 mm mirrors. The peltier was hooked up to a small electro motor with fan, to provide some extra cooling. In the video it looks as if it is rotating very slowly to the left, where it's actually spinning really fast to the right. Power output was about 0,12 watt. Still not very useful, but at least it was a 1600% improvement over the SBC version.
Testing the concentrator. The sunlight instantly burns a large hole in a cardboard box.
As soon as I find an affordable peltier with some more power, I'll give it another go.