“Apple is purportedly talking to small development company Eneco, which has developed a chip that converts heat into electricity. If it works, it could have a big impact on how IT equipment, and in particular laptops and other mobile devices, are designed and powered. However, there are still several technological issues to be resolved,” Dennis Sellers reports for Macsimum News.
Sellers reports, “According to articles at Green Business News and Macworld UK, Dr Lew Brown, president and CEO of Eneco, told investors that its new chip technology ‘will revolutionize the way we generate electricity.'”
Sellers reports, “Eneco is a development stage company that claims to have invented and patented a ‘solid state energy conversion/generation chip’ that will convert heat directly into electricity or alternatively refrigerate down to -200 degrees celsius when electricity is applied.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Rainy Day” for the heads up.]
Ummm, you all are getting this entirely wrong: this is heat _recovery_ technology. In other words, you slap this chip on your processor and/or GPU, and it’s wired into the power supply. As the CPU heats up, electricity is generated, and is pumped back into the power supply and then to the battery for charging.
This isn’t some magic “we can get rid of batteries” thing. It’s a way to recover lost heat (due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics) and turn some of that into useful electricity, therefore increasing the time you can use a laptop away from a power supply.
Now, as some have noted, the real question here is how efficient is this little beastie? If it’s only a few percent, then it’s unlikely to make much difference to your battery life. If it’s up around 40 or 50%, then we could see significant bumps in “on the road” computing. Here’s hoping it’s the latter!
Now if they could only recapture the methane Peterson spews, or the compost of the .dmg dorkuses, Macs could almost be a perpetual motion machines.
re: “what happened to the second law of thermodynamics? The heat within a closed system can never deminish (it has to output heat in order to cool).”
Daniel, how is that a closed system if its being supplied with energy/current fron an EXTERNAL power source! However this appears to be a heat pump mode, albeit a VERY efficient one…
Just my two pence’s worth
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http://www.eneco.com/ == http://www.powerchips.gi/?
“I dream of wireless AC and DC current to eliminate all those terrible power cords. “
Isn’t that what killed Tesla? That’s dangerous shit.
Info on Tesla’s wireless AC
http://www.braincourse.com/wirelessa.html
Apple busted by the physics police for breaking the Second Law. News at eleven.
If this is for real, the best utilization for computers would be for the chip makers to design their chips to run cold using the cooling mode of this technology. The key is that the efficiency of this thermionic emission technology, like the old vacuum tubes, must be far more efficient than available Peltier coolers — which are very inefficient.
This would result in chips that use far less power than chips running at much higher temperatures. So the power efficiency of the accelerated chips would have to more than compensate for the power to cool them.
To Daniel and others
The Second Law of Thermodynamics actually states that the *entropy* of a closed system can only remain the same or increase. There is nothing in it that says that it must involve heat.
Consider a cup of milk and a bucket of water, both at the same temperature. If you introduce the milk into the water, you will find that the milk begins by being concentrated around the place in which you poured it into the water. Over time, however, it spreads to finally be spread evenly throughout the water. The entropy of this closed system has progressed to its maximum level without any heat being exchanged whatsoever.
Pouring hot water into cold is an analogous example, but as you can see the concept of entropy is far broader than heat alone.
Converting heat into electricity is not new. In fact photovoltaic cells have been around for a while, they convert light (high frequency heat) into electricity by pushing electrons into higher energy states around their atoms so that they can be skimmed off with an electrical field. In this whole interaction, you can expect entropy overall to increase. Some of the heat is lost in the apparatus, some of the electrons fail to be captured in the current, and the electrons will generate heat in any wire they travel in, resulting in their being captured by the nearest atom, and the heat radiating into your desk or whatever.
King Mel says: “It is not clear to me how Apple could effectively employ this technology on mobile electronics. The power generation aspect seems next to useless to me unless you can locate a thermal source (it would be simpler to find an electrical outlet).”
Unless of course that thermal source gave off a particularly large amount of heat … Perhaps Apple knows something about the consequences of scaling up Intel’s mobile chips that they’d rather not be a showstopper for them in the future?
Steve Jobs CNet inteview circa 2009: ‘Well, yes, the thermal dynamics of Intel’s new Core2Duo2Squared ARE roughly 80 times worse than the competition … and yes, IBM’s new experimental PowerCell3 has actually demonstrated the ability to preserve raw ham on a Georgia roadside in the summer … But look – we can generate 50 Gigawatts of power from Intel’s CPU! We call our new computer: The iPerpetualMotionMachine. What’s that? NO I’m not exaggerating the performance! Of course not. Why would you even ask me, of all people, such a preposterous question?!’
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Ah nice to see people know about this technology. Don’t forget gel ponds, used by the asians to take advantage of temperature differences at different depths of water.
Love Tesla.
Can you say infinite power? Imagine having heat generated by your laptop, recycled and used to recharge your laptop’s battery. Interesting concept, eh?
Holy icicle Batman!
From the story: “The chip is based on the principles of thermionic energy conversion whereby the energy of a hot metal over comes the electrostatic forces holding electrons to its surface. These free electrons then pass across a vacuum to a cold metal and in the process create an electronic charge that can be harnessed.”
Holy Atwater-Kent! Vacuum tubes will change the world!
nukeman: re thermodynamics … the point is that heat must be produced somewhere in order to cool elsewhere (check your refrigerator). The net heat produced (heat – “cooling”) is always positive. Indeed the Peltier effect produces heat at one junction while cooling another. So what we have is a (hopefully efficient) method of heat transfer.
McGherkinstein Jones: Indeed the second law speaks to the change of entropy. And the change in entopy is defined as the change in heat of a system divided by its temperature.
I’m hoping this is a way to quietly cool (by transferring heat without fans). I greatly prefer quiet computers as does Jobs. When he introduced the first Macintosh he said computers should be as quiet as toasters.