Technology

37716 readers

326 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Would it be possible (at some point) cool aur by pulling heatenergy from it? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

37 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I recently had a discussion about ACs and how they heat up cities.

Then I found an article about theoretical increase of efficiency of acs by using the heat pulled from a room to run a thermoelectric device and getting some of the energy back that was used in the ac.

I‘ve had this downstream thought many times already: since hot air is basically just energy stored. Could we theoretically pull (all?) the energy from the air (depending on desired temp) to cool it and casually fuel our society’s energy needs?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Energy is only "available" when there is a region of higher energy density and a region of lower energy density, that you can extract work from by allowing that energy to flow from the former to the latter until they are equalized, at which point no further energy can be extracted from that system.

In the case of air conditioning, you can make heat flow "uphill", so to speak, by applying additional energy from outside of the inside air / outside air system, usually in the form of electricity generated at a power plant. In the very large picture, though, it's all just moving energy around from other regions of higher and lower densities, a losing usable energy with each transfer. That's what entropy means.

Veritasium did a really good video on this idea a couple months ago, if you're interested: https://youtu.be/DxL2HoqLbyA?si=bru50t1VYEKXKmKX