Harvesting wasted heat

Energy is neither created nor destroyed but merely converted.

A basic scientific principle and one that means that a perpetual motion machine is impossible. Basically it means that the energy you put in is converted to another energy type minus some unavoidable waste. This is the efficiency measurement of the conversion process. Nothing we have gives a 1:1 conversion and it’s likely nothing ever will. One of the wasteful outputs from, well almost everything, is heat. Obviously this is not waste from a heater but when the heater heats the house and some escapes through the windows, doors etc. this is classed as wasted heat. A car engine converts fuel to motion but wastes some in friction which heats up the engine and so on.

Now, via Ivan, a regular commenter at this site, it appears that they have a way of tapping that wasted heat and converting it back to useable energy. Read here. If this can be applied then it will make power conversion much more efficient overall and less wasteful and in fact could be used on it’s own to generate power for small portable devices. A bit like the way we can power watches just from the movement of our bodies we could use the heat thrown off by our bodies to charge our portable devices.

In fact depending on how efficiently it converts this heat it could very well allow the creation of a virtual perpetual motion machine in hot climates.

On a related note this conversion of energy, which normally generates heat, would undoubtedly do the reverse here and cool the heat source down whilst generating power to provide the cooling effect in ordinary fridges. A power free fridge could be heading your way. Think what that would do for third world countries health and food storage.