I’m talking about air conditioning. Why can’t we just use the ambient energy to move the excess energy out of the room somehow?
In: Engineering
I think what you’re missing here is that heat is the ‘lowest’, most basic form of energy. Almost every interaction and energy transformation produces heat as a byproduct, and nothing makes any other form of energy using heat.
Two masses collide? Heat.
Two masses rub against each other? Heat.
Light hits something? Heat.
Sound goes through something? Heat.
Most chemical reactions produce heat.
Nuclear fission and fusion produce heat.
The only way we’ve come up with to “convert” heat into another form of energy is by making hot gasses rise through a turbine. But even that is really the atmospheric pressure pushing the hot gasses up, which is ultimately gravitational potential energy and not heat.
It’s helpful to think of types of energy as in a hierarchy. A form of energy is more useful if it can be converted into a lot of other forms of energy. By this definition, heat is the least useful type of energy. There is virtually no way to convert heat into anything else, any action performed will only increase the overall heat.
This ties into entropy somehow but I don’t know enough thermodynamics to say anything specific.
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