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