I know every conversion of energy has loss, whether its heat, light, noise, etc. But why is there no way to combat it?
In: Physics
Probably due to natural forces that cannot be overcome long term. Let’s say you make one of those perpetual motion wheel type generators you see on line. You’re always going to have some sort of friction within the bearings which in turn produce heat lowering efficiency.
Not sure if this is the answer you’re looking for, but nuclear fusion reactors theoretically can have an efficiency of larger than 100%.
ITER, a fusion reactor being built right now, is designed to have a 500 MW output at a 50MW input. Construction will be completed in 5 years and the first operational tests will start in 2035, so it will take a while to confirm its possibilities. But at least on paper it should be possible.
Thermodynamics are a discipline that deals with transfer of energy. Whenever you transfer energy from one object to another, there’s a tiny bit that’s lost as heat. There’s not a strict reason that this *has* to happen, but we’ve observed it enough to know that it always happens at least a little for all the things we know how to use/do/make. Heat loss isn’t the on li y way you can lose energy, but it’s one that will always prevent you from 100% efficiency.
Efficiency is the measure of how much work actually gets done vs. how much you put in, so if you always lose even just a little bit as heat, you still won’t be 100% efficient.
Most of the time this heat loss isn’t the problem, and there are lots of things you can do to improve efficiency, but that’s a limit we don’t currently know how to overcome.
100% efficiency would require the complete lack of energy around a system, and a complete lack of energy would require a lack of reality. This, of course, can’t happen.
It might be useful to conceptualize energy as multiple opposing forces as opposed to one.
Imagine you fire a bullet from a gun. The moment the bullet leaves the barrel there are several different forces working on that bullet at the same time. Some of those forces are actually directly opposing forces… for instance… the force generated by the exploding of the gunpowder vs. the wind resistance generated by the atmosphere. This is why eventually the bullet stops.
Theoretically if you flicked that same bullet while in space and it never hit anything or got sucked into some field of gravity … it would go on forever because there is no force to oppose it…unless I’m mistaken.
Waiting for somebody to tell me why all of that is wrong lol
You combat it by reducing it. You can greatly reduce electrical losses with superconductors, but you have to cool them to cryogenic temperatures, and since we want to live at warm temperatures cooling costs energy.
If you had some sort of absolutely 100% perfect machine then you might be able to have 100% efficiency (sometimes theoretical limits make it so that you still can’t).
So achieving 100% efficiency means building a 100% perfect machine with zero flaws whatsoever. Can you see why this is impossible? We can get less and less flaws, but not zero.
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