Things i know:
1. boyle’s law vaguely as; as pressure rises so does temperature.
2.Peltier devices can extract electricity given a large enough temperature differential, are there devices that do this better?
3. Heat pumps can pull heat from cold air on one side and make hot air on the other side.
I know i am missing some major steps here and ifs something ive always wondered about…
In: Physics
What you’re thinking of is a thermoelectrical generator, or a Seebeck generator, which is the reverse of a Peltier device. The Seebeck generatore creates electrical current from a temperature difference, while a Peltier device generates a temperature difference given an electrical current.
The problem is one of efficiency. A thermoelectric generator is very inefficient (<10%). This means that it generates a lot of heat and/or bleeds a lot of heat from the hot side to the cold side for the amount of power generated. So you wouldn’t be able to pump all the heat back (returning the system to its original state) using just a heat pump and the energy you got from the thermoelectric generator.
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