Could we use thermopiles to efficiently reuse heat generated from computer hardware and cool components down? If not, why?
In: Engineering
ELI5: you have a hundred pennies. Anything you do costs two pennies, one to me, one to the your friend. No matter what. I will always get my pennies. Efficiency, is your friend getting three pennies, and I still get one. No matter how efficient the system, eventually you give me all the pennies.
My name? Entropy.
You can’t use energy to “cool” things. Coolness is the absence of heat. You can use energy to move heat from one place to another, that’s how your computer’s cooling components work, but that’s strictly energy in to make one place cooler and another more hotter.
Thermoelectric devices generate electricity by utilizing the difference between their hot side and their cold side. None of them is nearby efficient enough to be powered by the waste heat they collect. That would clearly violate the 2^nd law of thermodynamics, creating a perpetual motion machine.
Computers need to be kept cool. If you put anything between the heatsink and the chip, it is going to make it harder for the heat to get to the heatsink and escape, making the CPU hotter. And a hotter CPU uses more power, is less efficient. And thermopiles are very inefficient, so you are playing a losing game.
But sometimes people do use thermopiles to cool electronics. When they need to be cool, but don’t use much power and don’t make much heat, a thermopile or peltier device can be used to cool it down. But if it makes a lot of heat, the amount of power that thermopile needs to move the heat away gets too high.
Apart from the entropy issues, thermophiles don’t “eat” heat. They typically eat naturally occurring chemicals, or produce energy through photosynthesis, and have adapted to be able to withstand and thrive in very high temperatures.
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