K
krw
Guest
On Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:04:50 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
<To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@My-Web-Site.com> wrote:
On Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:24:19 -0500, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:
Jan Panteltje wrote:
On a sunny day (Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:43:15 -0500) it happened Yousuf Khan
bbbl67@yahoo.com> wrote in<4b050521$1@news.bnb-lp.com>:
They are theorizing that using these quantum dots, that they can recover
close to 90% of Carnot efficiency!
Yousuf Khan
Harnessing waste heat from laptop computers, cell phones may double
battery time
"Theory says that such energy conversion can never exceed a specific
value called the Carnot Limit, based on a 19th-century formula for
determining the maximum efficiency that any device can achieve in
converting heat into work. But current commercial thermoelectric devices
only achieve about one-tenth of that limit, Hagelstein says. In
experiments involving a different new technology, thermal diodes,
Hagelstein worked with Yan Kucherov, now a consultant for the Naval
Research Laboratory, and coworkers to demonstrate efficiency as high as
40 percent of the Carnot Limit. Moreover, the calculations show that
this new kind of system could ultimately reach as much as 90 percent of
that ceiling."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091118101403.htm
Of course the Carnot limit is (1-Tcold/Thot), where Thot is the absolute
(Kelvin) temperature of the hot reservoir (e.g. the boiler in a steam
engine) and Tcold is that of the cold reservoir (the heat sink).
So if your computer is running at 50C and dumping heat at 30C (due to
the heat sink's inefficiency), the Carnot limit is 1-303K/323K = 6%.
Good luck doubling battery life with that.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
You forgot the Obama multiplier ;-)
Is that the same as dividing by Slowman's IQ?