how an electric iron doesn’t have an efficiency of 100%

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Thermodynamics won’t allow anything to have an efficiency of 100% because some energy will be converted to heat. What about electric irons and pretty much any other heating equipment that has a working principle revolving around losing energy to heat

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Anonymous 0 Comments

This is a problem with definitions of what your machine does. If you define a machine as a heater, or electric iron in your example, and the only constraint is that energy eventually becomes heat than yes it is 100% efficient. But is that really a useful definition? If you think about it any machine is a heater in that sense.

So in reality it makes more sense to talk about work done rather than just where the energy ends up. In this case some energy will be lost to sound or light and not do any work, leading to <100% efficiency.

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