Heat sinking power generation

Donagh

Here’s an idea that I have been fantasising about for a while but there is no real hint of it ever being realisable. I want to know if it’s possible to make a power harvesting heat sink that actively cools down the area around it as it leaches power from the environment. I have heard of heat pumps that us ambient cool temperatures to produce heat and also of geothermal heating which uses ambient ground temperature but they aren’t really what I mean here.
I mean like a device made out of silicon or some other semiconductor that rapidly cools down and causes a current to flow under certain conditions. One of these said conditions could be low pressure or even some sort of friction transfer.
There is such thing as a solid state fridge, but this device consumes huge amounts of power rather than generating it, and we want the best of both worlds.
What cha think?

Old post but i know exactly what you are looking for. What you would like is a three dimentional multi layered thermopile capable of capturing electricity from the ambient air temperature. All elecricity captured by the thermopile would have to be directed to one long peltier cell. So as the heat travels to the cold void it is transformed into electricity. Which gets rid of the heat. Anything left would be sucked up by the long peltier cell. On the hot side of the peltier cell you would have one more thermopile. That thermopile you could use to make your usable power. It is a solid state heat pump. I do not believe it violates any thermodynamic laws. It would need a large change in temp to get started or just jump the peltier unit. The problems to overcome are thermopile efficiency(i think stacking them would help), and blocking diode forward voltage problems(if you had high efficiency thermopiles they could eliminate this problem). For a visual think of an apple as the multilayered thermopile with a nail piercing the center (the nail is the peltier unit taking heat from the middle out to the nail head). There are many patented "chips" that do this, just a little more r&d.... Never really seen one though. Ya i think its a great idea. I will now wait for the perpetual motion thermodynamic police to throw the book of LAWS at me 😔