That sounds great! Can you share anything about the materials and/or performance?
I am only an armchair inventor. I once got as far as registering a company, and filing a business plan, but I noped out of it.
I just like to follow the science and noodle with the equations, hoping for something interesting.
The main problem for this application, I think, is maintaining a temperature gradient. So you add a heat sink to the cold side, but that only gets you so far. And then you have the extra cost and CO2 burden of manufacturing a heat sink (and aluminium is particularly dirty).
My plan was to look for places with a sustained temperature gradient. So, I sandwiched a peltier between the hot and cold pipes in my old house, to power some LEDs. As long as the house was occupied, there was always cold running water on one side, and hot tap water on the other.
So, if I was building, say, a power station, where cold water is being pumped in. I would arange the cold pipes close to the hot in one spot, insulate the outer surfaces, and stick a peltier generator in between. You can also use heat pipes (like on CPU fans) with coolant, to wrap the source hot/cold pipes, without needing a flexible peltier.
Gosh this is cool - yeah, it's basically BiTe pressed wafers in S form. Test results never were validated so I can't put faith in the results unfortunately, they were pretty good though.
Redesigning for temperature gradient is quite brilliant. My thinking was along the lines of an aerogel heat sync. In theory it could maintain a gradient much longer than current tech... at astronomical cost!
Reach out if you'd like to continue the discussion, I miss this project.
My friend is now at the DoE - do you have people with experience that could talk?