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Turning Heat Into Sound Into Electricity

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the sounds-like-a-hot-idea dept.

WrongSizeGlass writes "Science Daily is reporting on work by physicists at the University of Utah who have developed small devices that turn heat into sound and then into electricity. 'We are converting waste heat to electricity in an efficient, simple way by using sound [...] It is a new source of renewable energy from waste heat.' They report that technology holds promise for changing waste heat into electricity, harnessing solar energy and cooling computers and radars."

1 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. Maxwell's Daemon Rides Again? by overshoot · · Score: 5, Informative
    Unless they're claiming to have found a way around the Second Law, the efficiency of any such conversion is going to utterly suck. My CPUs run less than 10C above ambient, so the absolute Carnot limit on any converter recovering that heat is going to be about 3%.

    Why bother?

    [1] Thermodynamics, not Robotics

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    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."