Could we use thermopiles to efficiently reuse heat generated from computer hardware and cool components down? If not, why?

Question

Could we use thermopiles to efficiently reuse heat generated from computer hardware and cool components down? If not, why?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

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.