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Re:New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electr... by icris on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @05:19AM (#21920057)
does this imply an overall entropy reduction for a whole system comprising a device and support apparatus for reusing its heat as energy source supply?
Re:New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electr... by 0xBA5ED on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @05:23AM (#21920069)
No you can't make a perpetual motion machine with it ;)
Re:New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electr... by Zenst on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @05:27AM (#21920086)
But could you produce a cooling system that this could power?

Or at least recycle some of the heat fridge/freezers produce back into electricity.

Re:New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electr... by 0xBA5ED on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @05:36AM (#21920118)
>Or at least recycle some of the heat fridge/freezers produce back into electricity

This was already possible. Now you could just do it more efficiently.

Re:New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electr... by mping on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @05:42AM (#21920141)
I was thinking more like CPUs and GPUs
Re:New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electr... by 0xBA5ED on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @05:45AM (#21920151)
Right. I'm thinking about server farms.
Re:New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electr... by icris on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @06:44AM (#21920396)
i am aware of it. i was not pretending we could reach zero entropy but nevertheless it manifests entropy reduction compared to an energetic non-optimal raw material doesn't it? meaning if we need less energy for the same amount of work we do it more efficiently and therefore require less (but not null!) entropic output
Re:New Material Breaks World Record Turning Heat into Electr... by lopmotr on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @01:07PM (#21923035)
Are you asking if it violates the 2nd law? Of course not.

It's just a heat engine like any other electrical generator so it's not going to have fundamentally new kinds of applications.

Don't forget you can also use the waste heat from a device (like a computer) to run a mechanical heat engine to generate power to help run the device. But only partially. I guess we don't do that much because it's probably not economically feasible. That's kind of what turbochargers in cars do though.