Slashdot Mirror
LED's Efficiency Exceeds 100%
New submitter Paul Fernhout writes "Physicists from MIT claim to have demonstrated that an LED can emit more optical power than the electrical power it consumes. Researchers suggest this LED acts like a heat pump somehow (abstract). Is it true that 230% efficient LEDs seem to violate first law of thermodynamics?"
...
They must have used the wrong cable, causing the light to go faster than C and mess with their readings.
either the researchers are wrong, or physics is.
... and predict that they measured something the wrong way.
BAM, free energy!!!!
Or we will freeze the earth over cause we are eating heat....
So if I get the article right - LED cooling?
Really puts a whole new perspective on LED clad 'gaming'-machines, which as you know - should have blue LEDs for cooling, and red LEDs for superior overclocking.
Or you could read the damn links and find out. But I guess easier to make guesses.
"In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
A loose connection may be skewing the results.
From the article: "The researchers didn’t try to increase this probability, as some previous research has focused on, but instead took advantage of small amounts of excess heat to emit more power than consumed. This heat arises from vibrations in the device’s atomic lattice, which occur due to entropy." The other thing to note is that these LEDs are being run at REALLY low power.
Does Slashdot keep jumping on the band wagon of snake oil and miracle cures to every problem on the planet?
What morons keep publishing this shit on /.? Better yet, what morons believe it?
For those wondering about conservation of energy, it's intact. The extra energy comes from heat / vibration in the system.
For those concerned about the second law of thermodynamics, it's not specifically addressed in the article, but the smart money's on entropy increasing in this experiment. The second "law" is really just statistics though (law of large numbers anyone?), and as with most statistics people are still arguing about what it really means. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#Controversies and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem
"30 picowatts and measured an output of 69 picowatts of light - an efficiency of 230%. The physical mechanisms worked the same as with any LED: when excited by the applied voltage, electrons and holes have a certain probability of generating photons. The researchers didn’t try to increase this probability, as some previous research has focused on, but instead took advantage of small amounts of excess heat to emit more power than consumed. This heat arises from vibrations in the device’s atomic lattice, which occur due to entropy."
They are not claiming more than 100% efficiency in total terms.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
These guys must have been hanging out with Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons .
Put the LED in a vacuum in chamber that doesn't let light back in... and then leave it on for as long as possible. How cool would the LED make itself before it breaks? Absolute zero? Probably not, but it would be a cool experiment to try.
11 comments down and finally someone has actually understood enough of the summary to know that they aren't claiming that conservation of energy is dead.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
The lasers mounted on their 'Symmetric Hybrid Analogue Reflecting Chronometer' bounced back doubling the measured light output.
No brain, no pain.
As far as I can tell, this doesn't violate any laws if the LED is taking energy from the surrounding environment, in addition to the electrical energy, in order to produce optical energy.
That we have yet another Cold Fusion experiment?
No, it is not. The linked article is quite clear: the LEDs are geting colder, so the extra power output comes from the environment.
Now, 230% efficiency suggests that it is operating as a >100% efficiency heat pump, and that's also impossible. It might be decomposing itself in an endothermic(sp?) chemical reaction, or something.
It says in the summary (and in the article) that the LED at very low electrical input levels, acts as a heat pump. It absorbs local heat energy and converts into photons.
So you get more light out than electricity in, because you're stealing heat and converting it to light. It's not more than 100% efficient, it's multiple energy sources being used. No breaking the laws of thermodynamics.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Definitely GPS timing error.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Why don't you just read the fucking article? I know its slashdot and everything, and nobody reads the damn articles, etc. You could at least give a try before spouting off with your reasons why it can't be so.
Fucking idiots.
The LED is "consuming" external heat to produce the additional light. The article is pretty clear and an enjoyable read.
"Physicists from MIT claim to have demonstrated that an LED can emit more optical power than the electrical power it consumes. "
Bazinga!!
While my knowledge and understanding is limited I think that the extra power in the light output comes from heat. So light power out is greater than electrical power in but if you consider thermal power AND electrical power then total efficiency is under 100%. Thus the first law of thermal dynamics is safe.
[FUCK BETA 2.6.2014]
for a glow-in-the-dark refrigerator now?
It sounds like it violates the 2nd and 3rd laws of thermodynamics if not the first.
We are the 198 proof..
So if you had enough of these, you could air condition your house with them?
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
It's a good example. The hub of a wagon wheel will be warm to the touch. That heat comes from the motion of the wheel. A sympathist can make the energy go the other way, from heat into motion. I pointed to the lamp. Or from heat into light.
There was an art to choosing your projects in the Fishery. It didn't matter if you made the brightest sympathy lamp or the most efficient heat-funnel in the history of Artificing. Until someone bought it, you wouldn't make a bent penny of commission.
I didn't follow through to the abstract, but the article didn't claim to be creating net energy. There could be other causes for more net energy emitted than applied, such as the device being on fire.
Gently reply
It cannot violate the laws of thermodynamics, there must be an energy source that is unaccounted for. Some time ago, Prof. Claus Turtur made a straightforward calculation that the electric field emitted by a charge carrier, such as an electron, emits energy. This energy does not come out of nowhere, it is continuously converted by the charge from the zero-point field or whatever you may like to call it. I personally like to call it the aether.
See his article "Conversion of the Vacuum-energy of electromagnetic zero point oscillations into Classical Mechanical Energy" : http://www.wbabin.net/physics/turtur1e.pdf
In the chapter "A circulation of energy of the electrostatic field" (pages 10-14) he makes a straightforward calculation of the energy density of the static electric field surrounding a point charge using nothing more than Coulombs law and the known propagation speed of the electric field, the speed of light, and shows that there must be some kind of energy circulation between the vacuum and charge carriers:
-:-
If electrostatic fields propagate with the speed of light, they transport energy, because they have a certain energy density. It should be possible to trace this transport of energy if is really existing. That this is really the case can be seen even with a simple example regarding a point charge, as will be done on the following pages. When we trace this energy, we come to situation, which looks paradox at the very first glance, but the paradox can be dissolved, introducing a circulation of energy. This is also demonstrated on the following pages.
The first aspect of the mentioned paradox regards the emission of energy at all. If a point charge (for instance an elementary charge) exists since a given moment in time, it emits electric field and field’s energy from the time of its birth without any alteration of its mass. The volume of the space filled with this field increases permanently during time and with it the total energy of the field. But from where does this “new energy” originate? For the charged particle does not alter its mass (and thus its energy), the “new energy” can not originate from the particle itself. This means: The charged particle has to be permanently supplied with energy from somewhere. The situation is also possible for particles, which are in contact with nothing else but only with the vacuum. The consequence is obvious: The particle can be supplied with energy only from the vacuum. This sounds paradox, so it can be regarded as the first aspect of the mentioned paradox. But it is logically consequent, and so we will have to solve it later.
[...]
Important is the conclusion, which can be found with logical consequence:
On the one hand the vacuum (= the space) permanently supplies the charge with energy (first paradox aspect), which the charge (as the field source) converts into field energy and emits it in the shape of a field. On the other hand the vacuum (= the space) permanently takes energy away from the propagating field, this means, that space gets back its energy from field during the propagation of the field. This indicates that there should be some energy inside the “empty” space, which we now can understand as a part of the vacuum-energy. In section 3, we will understand this energy more detailed.
But even now, we can come to the statement:
During time, the field of every electric charge (field source) increases. Nevertheless the space (in the present work the expressions “space” and “vacuum” are use as synonyms) causes a permanent circulation of energy, supplying charges with energy and taking back this energy during the propagation of the fields. This is the circulation of energy, which gave the title for present section 2.2.
This leads us to a new
From the Article: "When the LED gets more than 100% electrically efficient, it starts to cool itself down, which is another way of saying that it's stealing energy (in the form of heat) from its environment and converting that heat into those over-unity photons." The article doesnt say what happens when the led finishes cooling down. is it still above 100% efficient?
Wow I'm totally shocked, what's the world coming to? :) All you have to do is actually read the linked article to see there's no sort of thermodynamic violation of any sort implied, not that most of the people posting here will bother to RTFA.
They obviously need to take a look at what their "closed system" is. Once they do, they will find that the first law of thermodynamics is in no danger of being violated.
as most people think Light Emitting Diode when they hear LED.
But in this experiment they are referring to a Large Entropic Dilemma.
So the results make perfect sense.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Seems to break the laws of entropy, but take a trillion of these and point them at a solar power plant? Pulls the heat out of its surroundings, creates enough electricity to power the LEDs *AND* to provide a modest amount of power also. Now how the hell do we make a trillion of these? lol
Now, all we need is a solar cell with 100% efficiency and we're in business.
A Beowulf cluster of 20 picowatt LEDs!
Sorry, it had to be said.
Surely if this is true the "light" is not the big story.
If you can take "heat" and convert it into another form of energy that is HUUUUUUUGE NEWS- yes I know, steam engines, etc, but they require a large difference in temperature.
Imagine if your fridge/freezer- GENERATED power- by taking heat energy and converted it into electricity?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Interesting to see the number of posts saying that this is absolutely not possible - reading through the article, it seems possible and maybe there is enough here to study the phenomena enough to warrant more investigations.
The LED seems to be emitting 69 picowatts (pico = 10^-12) when only 30 picowatts of electricity is being pumped in with a measurable decrease in the temperature of the LED. This implies that the LED is acting as a heat pump, converting heat energy into light. If you've ever seen a Peltier cooler in action (or worked through the operation), it seems like to me this is possible.
Note that the power level this phenomenon is observed at is extremely low - the result is maybe good enough for cooling a few molecules of beer - but I think there is something here that should be investigated to see if any usable applications could come out of it.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
either I didn't read the article, or I read it before posting this crap.
FTFY.
A new entrant into the solid-state heat pumps field would be rather nice... I wonder if they can get this thing to scale up a bit?
Yeah, but man, a it's a completely solid state heat pump that dumps waste heat as usable light - now that's something. Just imagine: every server, instead of needing cooling, can have this stuck to the heatsink and mounted on a tall pole. No more datacenter, we'll have datapoles, and our streets will be full of them :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Is this effect they are explaining similar to how a piece of metal will glow when hot? I've always wondered how glowing metal aligns with the second law of thermodynamics. It seems to directly convert heat (lower order energy) to light.
When metal glows when hot is it consuming anything or utilizing the difference in temperature in some way?
Or said another way, if you put a piece of metal in a perfectly insulated hot box would it still glow forever?
For example, is the LED getting colder? Could it be converting heat to electricity? Are magnetic fields near them weaker? Is the LED losing a minute amount of mass?
Can we try it again with 100 LED set at low power?
Can we set up a closed loop of a series of low power LED's illuminating a photovoltaic board?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Obligatory wanna bet?
In their experiments, the researchers reduced the LED’s input power to just 30 picowatts and measured an output of 69 picowatts of light - an efficiency of 230%. The physical mechanisms worked the same as with any LED: when excited by the applied voltage, electrons and holes have a certain probability of generating photons. The researchers didn’t try to increase this probability, as some previous research has focused on, but instead took advantage of small amounts of excess heat to emit more power than consumed. This heat arises from vibrations in the device’s atomic lattice, which occur due to entropy.
This light-emitting process cools the LED slightly, making it operate similar to a thermoelectric cooler. Although the cooling is insufficient to provide practical cooling at room temperature, it could potentially be used for designing lights that don’t generate heat. When used as a heat pump, the device might be useful for solid-state cooling applications or even power generation.
Does this mean that one can use an array of such LED's to cool the ambient temperature while producing light at the same time ? It sounds extra-ordinary. Can we say goodbye to overheating cabinets ?
A third option is that you didn't read the article.
You must be new here...
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
herpa derp!!
Read the article? Heck, I didn't finish the headline. As soon as I realized it didn't mention iPads I went straight to the comments to argue we should instead discuss iPads.
Why don't we have iPad 4 speculation yet?
1. I for one welcome our new iPad 4 overlords and their app that allows you to put hot grits on Natalie Portman and disguise it in a bad car analogy.
2. Ask if it runs Linux, and then cite another failed year of Linux on the desktop.
3. ???
4. Profit.
What were we talking about again?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
To achieve this "above unity" efficiency, they are running these LEDs at 135 degrees C with a "light power" of 10^-10 watts.
So essentially, from my not-very-good understanding, they are able to exploit the motion of particles in the lattice due to heat (Kb*T) to overcome the energy gap in the diode. Hence the high temperature. I assume the wattage input must be kept low enough to not completely overpower this phenomena.
I would thusly conclude that the only reason why it can keep going with this >1 efficiency is because of the heat being supplied to the chamber in addition to the energy through electricity. Take away the heat, and it would slowly cool itself down.
It's like the alternator. It requires electrical excitement before it will produce electricity. But, once excited, and using the energy from the engine, it will produce more electricity than what was required to excite it.
How many orders of magnitude is 'a bit' in your world?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
When used as a heat pump, the device might be useful for solid-state cooling applications...
The logical conclusion is, of course, a glowing refrigerator.
I support this line of inquiry.
Didn't David Brin use this idea with lasers to keep his sun skimming ship cool, or did I dream that?
I did RTFA but do have a thermodynamics question.
Thermodynamics is based on the idea that energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. It also supposes that the total amount of energy and matter in the Universe remains constant, merely changing from one form to another.
The second half of that appears to be wrong the total amount of energy and matter in the universe does not remain constant by my limited understanding of quantum mechanics and membrane theory. Potential particles are converted to particles of matter as they emerge from the plank level as a wave form.
Did I miss something?
This is why I love Slashdot- really BRIGHT news.
So shiny, and if these LEDs work, splendidly brilliant!
So the lights sucking the heat out of the air and feel physically cold to the touch?
Does this 230% conversion ration only work in really high heat location or is this in room temperature?
Would this technology not really work in -40 degree winter environments?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Like the recent faster than light that turned out to be a loose cable, lets see if others can duplicate those results.
In theory.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Yes, as long as you shine the excess light somewhere outside. Though the question is how big the cooling panel with "enough of these" will be.
Please just shut up.
Entropy-powered LEDs?
from TFA:
[...]instead took advantage of small amounts of excess heat to emit more power than consumed. This heat arises from vibrations in the deviceâ(TM)s atomic lattice, which occur due to entropy.
Is this environmentally friendly? If not curse it!
The semiconductor PN junction is amazing. That's what's fundamentally inside LEDs. When appropriately tuned, PN junctions (a) permit electron flow in only one direction, demonstrating their diode nature, (b) convert current into light, like an LED, (c) convert current into a heat differential, like a Peltier junction cooler, (d) convert light into current, like a photo cell, (e) convert heat differential into current, like a solid-state thermionic energy converter, (f) act like a voltage-tunable capacitor, like a varactor, and more. In fact, to a very coarse first approximation, all PN junctions exhibit each of these characteristics to a greater or lesser degree.
So what's this group done? Shown that an appropriately tuned PN junction (or stack of them, I'd imagine) can be used to simultaneously act as a solid-state thermionic energy converter *and* an LED. Thus, it converts applied electricity to photons, but also converts a heat differential to electricity, which gets converted to photons as well, meaning it's sucking heat out of its immediate evironment. Cool stuff, if you'll pardon the pun.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
So, in other words, all one has to do is design a photovoltaic cell that has something like 80-90% efficiency when exposed to the specific light wavelength that the LED emits and then you can just sandwich these into a stack of LEDs and PV cells and have (for all practical purposes) "free" energy - a battery that runs off of ambient heat.
I once observed a low threshold LED (has a much less than 1.4V on-voltage) that was only attached by one lead, with the other lead hanging freely in space. The LED was quite clearly "on". When you put your finger closer to the free hanging lead (but not touch) it got brighter. It was just acting as an antenna in a room with lots of EM radiation around, and the induced current was enough to light it up.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
This is not as incredible as it sounds. To explain how it works, it is perhaps easiest to start with a simpler device. I could take a brick, connect a battery to it and say "Look! This brick is only consuming one milliwatt of electric power, yet it is emitting one Watt of infrared radiation. That is 100 000 % efficiency!" If I did the same thing at 1 000 degrees Celcius, the brick would even be emitting visible light (wether connected to a battery or not.)
What the people at MIT do is a little more complicated. They don't use the black body radiation directly. Instead they take electrons that would have emitted infrared photons, add some more energy to them, and get visible light. For this to work, they only have to add the difference between the energy of an infrared photon and a visible photon, yet they get the light output of a visible photon. At a temperature of 135 degrees Celcius (that is 275 degrees Farenheit if you happen to live in Belize or the United States) the difference between the black body radiation and visible light was small enough that they managed to get over 100 % efficiency. No laws of thermodynamics were violated.
I wonder about the error sources here.
They are working with very low power here. The wiring can act as a capacitor, storing a small amount of charge. If you gradually lower the voltage, the LED draws less from the power source because it draws some power from this capacitor effect instead. So you get more light than power spent - becasue the capacitor was charged up when the apparatus was first turned on.
Ruling out this effect is easy - just do the measurements while powering up instead of while powering down. If there is a capacitor effect, you will observe excessive power draw.
*NEWS FLASH* The internal combustion engine used worldwide for over a century produces a jillion percent more output power than the electrical input power used to fire the spark plugs.
Or you made a mistake by not reading the article.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah, but man, a it's a completely solid state heat pump that dumps waste heat as usable light - now that's something. Just imagine: every server, instead of needing cooling, can have this stuck to the heatsink and mounted on a tall pole. No more datacenter, we'll have datapoles, and our streets will be full of them :)
You're not thinking like an evil genius. You've got a 10MW data center. You have a way to convert the heat load into light. And now you want to distribute it all over and make street lights out of it?
Whatever. I want my huge frackin' laser.
Great news, especially with incoming global warming. We create a power loop of LED's and tuned solar cells, such that the electrical efficiency is >100%. If the LED is 230% efficient then the solar cell needs to be around 44% or so. We don't care about waste heat as the device is actually a heat to electrical converter. So waste heat gets sucked back in. The real enegy source is the sun which heats the planet.
Yes it is on a small scale but integrated and packaged and stacked we get air conditioners that produce power.
The article says that the LED has to be operated at high temperatures in order to achieve this efficiency. So basically what's happening is that when electricity is run through the LED, the LED emits photons, which carry energy. Because energy is leaving the LED, its temperature goes down. Since the environment around the LED is very hot, heat will flow from the environment to the LED, supplying additional power to it.
In other words, >100% efficiency is only achieved when the environment contributes a significant amount of energy to the LED, as efficiency only takes into account the electrical power supplied.
I don't know about that. It is not easy to mount a data center on a sharks head.
"In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
dup
You honestly didn't think you were being original did you?
While my knowledge and understanding is limited I think that the extra power in the light output comes from heat. So light power out is greater than electrical power in but if you consider thermal power AND electrical power then total efficiency is under 100%. Thus the first law of thermal dynamics is safe.
Only temporarily. If this device is converting heat into light as a byproduct of converting electricity into light, it's still LESS THAN 100% efficient, it just means it's getting the energy from the environment around it, NOT making it itself, OR it is using its own internal heat, meaning the longer it does this trick, the colder it gets. This provides a fundamental limit, namely 0 Kelvins, assuming it can even operate at all anywhere near that cold. Once it reaches this temp., it should start operating at below 100% efficiency, per the laws of thermodynamics.
Don't get me wrong, if they have figured out a reverse amplifier transistor, one that uses a small current to bias a PN junction, and then receives energy from the background, they've effectively done what Tesla was trying to do around the time he died, just in a completely different way, making a device that can receive the sun's power indirectly, like an antenna, only it would use the environment itself as the antenna, the very air around it.
Of course, at the picowatt level, unless they can use 22nm or smaller silicon printing tech to make HUGE numbers of these, I would think they'd be prohibitively expensive. People concerned with what color light they output are not seeing the big picture. This allows us to finally, (and don't mod this funny, I'm not joking) use solar power 24 hours a day, since the sun bakes the earth, and the heat remains even at night, (unless you're some poor SOB who lives in Northern Montana, at high altitude where the temp in the dead of winter, at night, gets real close to absolute zero, they say...)
I once had an idea like this myself, but never pursued it. My version used conventional refrigeration... It feels good to be vindicated. Guess I should have thrown caution to the wind and built that prototype after all.
Or, just maybe... they cocked up the experiment, which seems vastly more likely, or they're making it up. Is a bit odd for the usual Slashdot April 1 bullshit. But just to throw this out there, remember everyone, grown men are prone to playing idiotic pranks and getting a cheap thrill from believing others believe them when they make shit up, and feel that at the close of March, each year, that some archaic change to a calendar is adequate excuse to give in to those urges, and act like children. I do not look forward to this particular time of year.
Picowatts are very very dinky. 65 pocowatts of light would be useless for a display, but what about fiber optic processors? What kind of light do they use? One of the problems in normal processors is heat. It would be nice to use the heat generated to produce more light (that you are using to do your processing).
Doubtful -- as the article describes, the LED is drawing on the heat caused by the vibrations of its own molecules "due to entropy." We're talking about amounts of energy measured in picowatts -- this is not going to be noticeable to the touch.
So, we finally have the basic tech needed to make a Sundiver? Cool, now we just need to get cracking on the engineering.
I was taking a swipe at the sensationalized excerpt slashdot posted. ("Is it true that 230% efficient LEDs seem to violate first law of thermodynamics?")
If you want us to believe that this thing is "acting as a heat pump" (actually the opposite), start by defining the heat source and heat sink.
If it's the moral equivalent of black-body radiation, say so, even though that makes it boring.
As it stands, TFA seems to imply that the thing cools itself below the temperature of its environment by ejecting energy as light, which I'm pretty sure violates at least one law of thermodynamics. (Yes, I know Brin proposed the same idea in Sundiver, and says that a couple of Nobel laureates couldn't find anything wrong with it, but I didn't buy it then, and I'm still not buying it now.)
To me, it looks like another classic pathological-science result -- only discernible at levels close to various noise thresholds, and not backed by a reasonable theory. But I'm a layman, so what do I know?
We all want to not believe but certainly imagine, hope, wish or dream that one of the main laws governing our universe is, finally, breached. I mean: we all know that the answer is "no". Heat pump, taking energy from the environment, thermodynamics laws still holding in the greater surrounding system, blah, blah, blah. But...well. How nice would it be. Just like this hardrocker making an ultra-fast slide on his guitar and yelling "Einstein was wrong". ( Was that AC/DC ? )
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
If an ultra efficient solar panel was added to a setup with this LED could it power itself with AND generate power to spare?
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reminds me of the Troll Science cartoons from 4chan. "shine led at pv cell... INFINITE ENERGY PROBLEM XCEL???"
Could this be possiblem/feasible/make sense to use? I have no knowledge of either fields. But instead of using lasers in optical chips, what about these LED's techniques in order to increase thermal and power efficiency of the microprocessor while keeping the benefits of optical processing.
Am i wishfull thinking too much?
since they give off more energy than it takes to light them up, all i have to do is buy a bunch of these and point a solar panel at them! INFINITE POWER!
i could live a little longer in this prison
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is not violating the first law of thermo (energy conservation). It is getting the energy it needs from it's environment.
However it might possibly be violating the second law of thermo. Turning heat into light at high efficiency should not be sustainable. energy in the form of light has more less entropy than energy in the form of heat.
I could imagine that, in burst mode, that some energy is somehow being stored so that it can when triggered temporarily emit more or seemingly defy entropy. For example perhaps the crystal lattice is disorganizing during emission and then self healing to an organized state over time. This would be taking energy from the environment and shedding entropy to the environment and not neccessarily viloating any laws.
So some game is being played and I'm surprised anyone would publish the findings without an explanation for this.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Aren't they measuring efficacy, not efficiency?
In theory.
Thanks Data. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Bull. Shit.
This reminds me of David Brin's "refrigerator laser" concept from his book "Sundiver". The idea was that the laser was many times hotter than the sun, so you could shoot a laser out from your ship to take net heat out, while cooling the ship as it explored into the surface of the sun. Obviously heat would have to have been converted into light in this fictional concept.
Is this another case where a science fiction author proves prophetic?
--PeterM
They also recieved a message from a parallel dimension:
"pump not stop not stop we not stop pump we not hear danger not hear not hear you stop please stop you stop so we stop please you stop danger danger danger stop stop you stop pump"
Pumping out energy in wave form in the narrow band of energy we view as visible light is not the same as emitting energy across the entire spectrum, from IR (heat) to UV (rave light).
So, in short, no. Revel in your LED-equipped overlords.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
... it would add a new more truthful meaning to "cool lights".
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
From the article:
As the researchers explain in their study, the key to achieving a power conversion efficiency above 100%, i.e., âoeunity efficiency,â is to greatly decrease the applied voltage. According to their calculations, as the voltage is halved, the input power is decreased by a factor of 4, while the emitted light power scales linearly with voltage so that itâ(TM)s also only halved. In other words, an LEDâ(TM)s efficiency increases as its output power decreases. (The inverse of this relationship - that LED efficiency decreases as its output power increases - is one of the biggest hurdles in designing bright, efficient LED lights.)
Or just change the definition of power to only mean one input instead of all inputs (leaving out the heat energy that is also converted). By doing that, I can claim that my 1969 VW achieves a power conversion efficiency above 100%, too - assuming I am going down hill, with a strong tail wind and the engine at idle.
This fails for two reasons. The solar panel efficiency so still so low that it would produce less power than went in to produce the light. And the additional energy comes from ambient heat.
Think of an air-conditioner. You put energy in through the power cord. More energy comes out the condenser in the form of heat. That's because the evaporator is getting cold, drawing in heat. The output energy is the combination of all sources of input heat. Now if you find a means to convert that output heat to electrical energy to power the device, you can have some real fun. But even then you won't achieve free energy since the best you can do is move it around. But I do think there is some small potential to improve the process.
Scaled up, we might have LEDs that can pump heat away for some practical purpose, like cooling CPUs. If that can work, then some day in the future you might have a CPU (more likely a million SoCs on one chip) that is emitting an intense light from the top of its surface. That would be the new heat sink. Now you need to get rid of the light, or the heat from that light hitting another surface. But this would be a better way of cooling since that is easier to convert back to something useful.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
please please please please please!
So now we'll have to use batteries as somewhere to drain all the excess energy our LED screens generate ?
Got it.
And thanks MIT >-(
It's been done:
Take a photocell. They're very sensitive to infrared light. Hook it up to a run-down AAA cell. Hook them both up to a LED. Put it in a hot room.
The infrared heat hits the photocell, gets converted to a few picowatts of electricity, which gets added to the 31 picowatts from the run-down AAA cell, which end up sending 69 picowatts into the LED. We have converted heat to light!
ugh. fine. i'll point TWO solar panels at them. DOUBLE INFINITE POWER!
i could live a little longer in this prison
The overunity people just collectively heard the sound of cash registers. "Look it's proven by people from MIT. Our new device harnesses the power of LED at the atomic level."
Meanwhile, Steorn Ltd. calls up their investors and tells them there's been a breakthrough coming from America.
So, the LED converts free heat along with the electrical energy into light. So I suppose, yes, if you had a closed, dark room, and you made an array of these lights, and you plugged them into a power source, and you spotted them on a PVC with over 50% efficiency, and you routed that PVC's output back into the LEDs, you would have yourself an ongoing power source that would actually increase in power until you tapped some of it out for safety. Which you could then use! Furthermore, the meanwhile, the LEDs thermocoupling the heat energy along with the joules of electrical energy and transforming it all into light are steadily making the entire environment cooler.
#1:) higher efficiency
#2:) cooler house
That means you are also cooling your house while you are generating perpetual motion! This is good because you will have to keep your house heated in order to continue to supply energy to the system you have created. The sun is the most obvious source! If you switch from tinfoil to copper foil and cook the outside of it twice before wearing it, your foil hat can act as a sun magnet!
At any rate, this all seems like an argument for further complicating a field of study I have luckily not yet spent college money on. They will end up having to either re-do their study with a mind toward clarifying where energies are coming from and how they're measurable, or physics is going to have to come up with a yet even more complex unit of measurement (oh, great) in order to avoid further claims such as these.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I would like to see the entire experiment rather than an incomplete summary. here are a few questions.
1. How long was this effect present?
2. What was the temperature of the LED as the power was decreased?
3. Was the same effect there if the power was started at 0V and slowly increased?
If it only was present for short periods while the power was decreased the effect might even be a capacitance release of power stored in the LED. In the lower efficiency phase electrons may be stored in the LED and released as the power gets lower.
As I understand it, yes. But you would have to use every square inch of the skin of your house as a light output, and may even need to suspend it high enough in the atmosphere so that light emitted from the bottom of your house did not reflect off the earth back up to your house, thus warming it. I doubt that it could ever cool your house by even a millionth of a degree (either C or F), and all hopes are gone if you conducted the test during the daytime.
Buying and running an air conditioner is still your best choice.
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Next we'll have particles travelling faster than the speed of light OR maybe limitless energy generation from a vacuum... Oh wait the laws of physics still apply, my bad.
... that adding LEDs to stuff made it cooler.
Collector's Edition
in your case, will cool your case.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A true Light Beer
How many orders of magnitude is 'a bit' in your world?
That would be one order of magnitude, in base 2.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Its probably quantum efficiency....
1 electron in = 2.3 photos out.
does not violate the laws of physics.....
scientific papers?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In the book Sundiver by Robert L. Forward, a research ship traveling inside the Sun gets its drive sabotaged, and they escape by using the cooling laser as a drive, freezing everyone aboard.
Lasers are today used to cool to a few milli Kelvins, and below, very close to absolute zero temperature. The reflected colour of the laser is a little bit less pure, as the thermal vibrations are removed by increasing the entropy of the laser light.
The same principle is going on in this light diode.
Another addition to laws's of thermodynamics?
First there were:
1 - You can't get something for nothing.
2 - you can't even break even.
Then they added: 0 - Cold trumps hot.
Now what? -1 - unless it's an LED?
(TIC)
A) you would just need 40% efficient panels.
B) taking heat out of the atmosphere would be fine.
Of course, if we could get 40% efficient panels, that would be a world class break through.
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I see a lot of joke comments talking about hooking this LED, that is getting a significant amount of high entropy heat and turning it into higher entropy light, to a photoelectric cell. I can understand the heat to light in terms of thermodynamics, but assuming an efficient enough photoelectric cell isn't turning high entropy energy into low entropy usable electrons "cheating?" Could someone tell me why this wouldn't work in the real world (I just assume it can't)? Do photovolts not work at that energy level? Would the energy be so low that the photovolt would simply loose the electrons to signal loss before generation enough of a voltage gap (though this would be fixable with well insulated micro circuitry one would think)? The explanation of turning heat into light thermodynamically seems acceptable to me, but I do not understand where the loss would come when converting said light back into electrons.
all of them.
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If you heat a lump of iron up hot enough it will glow red hot. The result in this paper is little better than that. You heat an LED to 135 degrees c ( That's not as hot as glowing red iron but still hot ) and it enhances the light output of the LED.
The fine print if you look at the paper is that they are heating the LED quite a bit. So yes it takes a little tiny bit of the excess heat and uses it to make shooting out photons a little easier. In the end the amount of energy you spend heating the LED far out weighs the little extra light that comes out. So your never gonna gain anything from this system.
On a larger scale could a smaller amount of electricity(relative to current cooling/lighting costs) and a hot server room create a lighted, cooler server room? Would a hot attic in the summertime save me $ by channeling light into my home AND cooling my crawlspace? Could this cool my tower and light my office simultaneously? Sounds theoretically doable(based on TFA), but...could it scale up and preserve efficiency?
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
If this result could occur at useful energy levels, it would be revolutionary. But very likely it's just an interesting anomaly that occurs at very low energy levels. My guess is that at such low energy levels, the disordered nature of the energy in the ambient heat doesn't come into play, but at higher energy levels it would. There simply wouldn't be enough heat energy in the surrounding environment to create the same effect at higher energy levels. Please let me know if there's a flaw in my undertsanding of the science.
"In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
d'oh
You honestly didn't think you were being original did you?
TFTFY
Voltage-enhanced thermoluminescence
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Now we just need to wire up these neat little diods the right way and house it in a photovoltaic shell. We'll have a self powered, self cooling computer. Depending on how big we make it, it could even generate enough juice to power a usb port, graphics card, or a small city.
So I can get cool air and light on hot summer nights?
According this this logic my fridge is also greater than 100% efficient, and breaks the 1st law of thermodynamics. Turned on again after a defrost, it generates more heat than the electical energy it consumes from the socket. (If you ignore the cooling inside the freezer)
Yes, I'm sure that someone quoting the simpsons thought they were being original.
Yep, each time a diode on Earth draws > %100 efficiency the life force is sucked from a faery in a parallel dimension!
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Sounds to me like premeditation that's going to lead up to an April fool's joke. If not, then the joke's on the guys who believe that energy being put out can some-how exceed that being put in.
When it comes to fundamental laws for physics "Everybody's a critic these days!"
Heisenberg (spelling) kinda says your all missing the point, go back to your oven experiments, at such a low voltage ambient light will on its own have an effect on the outcome.
Is this some form of Maxwell's demon, having the same effect but in a way not so far envisaged ? It seems to me that it takes the heat energy, tops it up with some electrical energy and before that process can reverse it radiates the energy away as light. The radiating away has the effect of the trap door - preventing the reversal.
This device may not work well if there are many of them that can shine on each other, an incoming photon could knock an electron up into the conducting band leaving a hole behind and generating some heat. Thus to be useful the light that they generate would have to be directed away with little reflection.
According to TFA, the LED outputs 230% of the input energy by "stealing energy (in the form of heat) from its environment" - in other words, that LED device has a side effect of cooling things down
Will LED become next generation of cooling appliance?
BTW, I remember, about 10 years ago, /. had a post about a certain chip that can cool things down using "quantum effect" or something, that a British firm had a patent on it
I can't find that article right now, but I suspect what happened there and what is happening to the MIT experiment on LED may be similar
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
In theory.
--
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Are you out of your mind?
What if we can improve on this the way we have with computers... and then put thousands of them in an array.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!
Technically it is still at 100% efficiency... It just uses two power sources, heat AND electricity which gives us a bogus reading because we are only measuring the electric consumption and not the heat consumption. It is an LED that just uses 50% less energy and is twice as bright as a conventional LED, but putting it that way doesn't make headlines.
Indoor lighting could be powered directly by cheap solar THERMAL energy directly, instead of inefficient and expensive low temperature solar thermal turbines. Buildings in Europe already use heat pipes for heating and cooling, instead of ducts here in America. Storage of thermal energy is already cheap and wide scale. I just hope it can scale up.
If you took the screen and the crap out of an iPad 4 I bet you could mount a lot of LEDs in the good part. That would improve it 230% and be a BRIGHT idea for those who "thunk different".
I'll write an instructable !
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I've just realized something remarkable: the slashdot comments are less stupid than those in the surrounding environment, where people are having trouble grasping that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is the issue, not the 1st.
Now, if only we could harness this gradient of stupidity.
Sounds like more thermal emissions than operation of a diode.
"That's a bright idea, he said coldly."
Also, heat-activated lighting. Also, if you can suck heat from the environment to make light, and then pump the light to solar cells to make electricity, you have a heat-to-electric converter.
Maxwell's demon must be rolling over in his randomly displaced bed right about now.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/48882
What an intriguing idea. A light that actually consumes heat and emits it as light. One energy source is as good as another -- I have to wonder if there are many other areas of research where we've focused on electricity as the power for a device when there might be alternative transforms from other sources available.
In short, no, it doesn't sound like they're breaking any laws of thermodynamics or energy balance equations. Instead, they're just using an unusual source to boost the inputs: heat.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Foolish science it is
Or worse, good basic semiconductor research overhyped into a new kind of physics that brakes all of our expectations..
New physics my ass.
smaddox is basically right, but so is quarterbuck: blackbody radiation is a bad comparison, the photons' energy isn't thermal but determined by the band gap, the color the led was designed for. A better comparison would be a crystal that gets heated up: If an electron that was captured in an excited state drops down it releases a photon. Except that they now also got a pump mechanism to lift the electrons, like in a laser. The energy for that lift comes from heating the diode. At 130C the probability would be pretty small, and I guess that's where their pico-current comes in: Creating regions, where a thermally excited electron can make it to the upper band.
Overall, it is kind of a heat driven led with electrical control.
You could probably also speculate about tunneling or electron-phonon resonance effects.
But calling it 230% efficient? That's like me calling a npn transistor 10,000% efficient after comparing I(BE) to I(CE). Don't get me wrong, they used thermal energy to pump photons, that is cool. But their hype is something neither I nor Einstein would have ever done, just plain assholery.
sounds like these guys could go missing soon, since everyone who has discovered free energy technologies has mysteriously disappeared .
Hmm, reminds me of a perpetual motion engine.Which does not exist.
eh
Don't you know, the first law of Thermodynamics is: We don't talk about thermodynamics!
130% of it is coming from the neighbor's outlets. Very sneaky, you cheapskates.
Great answer to this news here: http://tinyurl.com/7lofx2d
Although were not talking a lot of power it might be something if you could get the components small and efficient enough such that for each combo led+photocell you could power at least 1.5 other units. Not base 2 but still significant if you can get a billion such micro units working.
A think there are more efficient ways to harvest power from heat. I'm still waiting for process with micro rectifiers for converting heat vibrations directly to electricity.
I can only see this being usefull in server room light fixtures. Use the excess heat to help power these led's . I cannot see this being usefull any other time. IN colder climates these would take the heat out of the room thus requiring your heat to be run longer correct?
Hmm, it may be used as optical pumping for a laser!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Reed my lips : no new physics.
"Perpetual motion describes hypothetical machines that operate or produce useful work indefinitely and, more generally, hypothetical machines that produce more work or energy than they consume, whether they might operate indefinitely or not." link
AccountKiller
Operational amplifiers do it all of the time.
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My research topped that ~ a half decade ago. We're getting Infinite efficiency. They will learn that when the diode is sufficiently undisturbed that it will produce DC power without *any* known input. I've spent years addressing every possible source. It's been replicated by notable academic scientists. One has a PhD in Physics with also a degree in Electrical Engineering, who specializes in diodes, LEDs, and lasers, who has numerous published scientific papers. He replicated the experiment and to his surprise the shielded LED produced DC power without any input.
The key is the E-field. It has nothing to do with diode rectification. Raw piezo elements also have intense internal E-field, stronger than diodes, and they produce more DC voltage & current. Recently a highly shielded passive piezo element was producing 9.54 volts at over 10pA DC.
For details about the research see -->
http://www.globalfreeenergy.info/2011/10/13/scientific-discovery-how-to-replicate/
This is a Light emitting diode operataing in the IR spectra, if it has properties that allows it to do sorting (=dioding) on thermal (IR) photones - we are on to something very intresting. Making the high energy photones go to one side and hence getting a cold side and a warm one? Airconditioning and heating without running up the electrical bill or burning fossile fuel... Next question is if this can run without the input of electricity? and if the ammounts of energy are intresting or just a novelty?