'10,000 times faster than a human scientist' — New AI tool designed ultra-efficient heat-to-electricity generators at lightning speed, a breakthrough that could slash the cost of energy harvesters and help enable cheaper, high-performance home heat pumps
TEGNet could help lower the cost of turning waste heat into electricity
by https://www.techradar.com/uk/author/wayne-williams · TechRadarNews By Wayne Williams published 28 April 2026
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- AI tool speeds thermoelectric generator design while matching leading prototype performance
- TEGNet cuts simulation time from thousands of seconds to fractions of one
- Cheaper waste-heat harvesters could follow, although manufacturing still has to prove itself
Researchers in Japan have built an AI tool that can design thermoelectric generators far faster than standard simulation methods, pointing to cheaper ways of turning waste heat into electricity.
TEGNet was developed by Takao Mori and colleagues at Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) and the University of Tsukuba.
In the paper published in Nature, it predicted generator performance with more than 99% accuracy while using only 0.01% of the computing time needed by commercial finite-element solvers.
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Acting as a fast emulator
Thermoelectric generators turn heat differences directly into electricity, with no turbines or moving parts.
They already power spacecraft, remote sensors and some isolated infrastructure, but cost and middling performance have kept them out of wider use in factories, refineries, vehicles and electronics.
Designing thermoelectric generators is slow because researchers have to balance materials, geometry, temperature conditions, electrical resistance and heat flow.
A conventional solver has to solve coupled physics equations again and again, which can take days or weeks for broad searches.
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