MIT centers, laboratories, departments and programs provide a multi-faceted approach to solving the world's energy challenge.
Heat management
Thermal processes provide more than 90 percent of the world's primary energy. Improving the efficiency of those processes — including capturing and using their waste heat — can lead to significant energy savings in the near- to mid-term. Roughly one-third of an automobile's energy is released into the ambient air in the form of exhaust heat and another third is released into the coolant. In the electricity sector, even today's most thermodynamically efficient power generation technologies reject nearly half of the fuel's energy as waste heat.
Thermal systems are diverse, and there are many relatively mature technologies that, if deployed, could dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the very near term. Conventional cogeneration plants produce electrical and thermal power simultaneously by using the waste heat from a gas turbine to generate steam, enabling a single plant to provide both electricity and heat to industrial and residential customers with system efficiencies reaching 90 percent. Potential advances in longer-term, more basic research--for example on direct conversion technologies and high-performance insulation materials and liquid systems--could lead to a paradigm shift in efficient thermal systems over the next decade.
