Heat is just energy right? So why can't we capture some

>>57189518
Heat is wasted energy.
Instead of thinking of reusing heat as energy, you should try to find a way not to have wasted that energy in the first place. That would be much more efficient Anon.

>>57189518
every time you transform energy, part of it is transformed into heat, which can't be reused

Entropy

>>57189518
Interesting, but nothing interesting will come from this board, filled with lesser IQs, go to /sci/ my friend.

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>>57189562
>heat can't be reused

>>57189562
Isn't heat basically how most power plants like nuclear, collaminated solar arrays, gas, coal etc generates electricity? How is waste heat any different from that kind of heat?

>>57189518
You make a radiator which connects all heat-generating sources within your computer and use them to warm your hands. Yes, some energy will still leak, but you will rise your body's heat slightly (making you comfortable!) and the metabolic process will speed up somewhat.

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>>57189590
>>57189612
We're talking about wasted heat here. What literally happens is your computer parts get hot, that heat is either sent out through the vents/fans, or absorbed into the case, which then spreads through the air and dissipates. Those power plants, they also have to deal with wasted energy released into the air as heat. It's not like 100% of the heat gets utilized, it's generally not even close to 100%.

The reason your computer is releasing this heat, is that if the internal components exceed a certain threshold they will be physically denatured and will function at a reduced capability or cease to function whatsoever. In a coal plant, for example, coal is burned, producing heat to turn water into steam, which will move upward and rotate a turbine. That turbine is what produces electricity. At any step of the way, 40-80% of the energy is actually utilized for its intended purpose and the rest is wasted somehow, either due to friction, or heating up the components/building structures/air, and will eventually dissipate into the atmosphere as wasted heat. We as humans have not figured out how to achieve 100% efficiency within any system, because due to the nature of energy some of it is ALWAYS wasted as heat. Well, one exception: an electric heater is technically 100% efficient, because all of the wasted heat is still achieving the goal of spreading heat throughout a room. I say technically because in reality there will be heat-energy which escapes the room intended to be heated and will still be wasted, unless you live in a completely airtight enclosure (although the walls would STILL absorb heat and waste it). Heat always transfers from a hot substance to a colder one.

Tl;dr unless you put a fucking steam turbine INSIDE your computer, and make a completely airtight enclosed system, AND find some material which reflects 100% of heat it contacts, AND find a way to design a completely frictionless system, it's never gonna happen.

Thermodynamics, bitch.

There is a point here. Why isn't there a solar cell in there that absorbs infrared?

There is a limit to the efficiency with which you can use waste heat. The efficiency is proportional to the temperature difference between the heat source and the surrounding environment.

Power plants are (fairly) efficient because they use a very large temperature differential - the steam in their turbines may be 1,000 C hotter than the outside air. The engine in your car is fairly inefficient (about 70% of the energy produced as heat from burning gasoline is wasted) because there's a limit to the temperatures they can operate at - so that they don't boil off their oil and fluids, and so that it isn't dangerous to open the hood for an hour after you turn the car off. A 50C temperature difference between a chip and the air is almost impossible to harvest usable work from. It can be done (google Stirling engines - a mobo maker once put one on the chipset sink), but you'll get maybe a watt or two of power from the thing at most.

Basically for domestic use in ordinary electronics, you can never come out ahead on harvesting waste heat, since the cost of an apparatus to harvest it is more than it will ever be able to pay back.

>>57189518
I love overclocking in winter because it turns my computer into a space heater. Get creative OP

>>57190767
engineer here, the newest coal powerplants have an efficiency of 52% roughly, steam and gasturbine installations are generally higher combined, but still nowhere near 80%. most of the loss is in the condensor

>>57189518
If you have an electric heater, you will know that it costs a fortune to run. You'll have heard that it's because heaters are 'inefficient', but the truth is that electric heaters are very efficient. There's very little wasted energy, because the waste is heat.
Converting energy from one form to another, however, is usually very inefficient. Using motors wastes a lot of energy because of all the work being done against friction and gravity, and by extension, generators also waste a lot of energy. Now let's turn your question into a more abstract question: If you used a generator to power a generator to power a lamp, would your net energy output be higher or lower than if you just had one generator powering a lamp?
There's your answer.

>>57189612
Not at all, spinning magnets around copper wire or vice versa is how any power plant in existence generates electricity, certain ones (nuclear, coal) just use heat (more accurately for nuclear, steam) to spin the turbines. Dams use water.

>>57189518
You can funnel your computer's heat into your chair to keep you warm in the winter. Put a mug of hot chocolate inside your computer to keep it hot.

>>57189518
conservation of energy, OP; any time there's a conversion of energy into another form, you will always lose.

In the end, trying to turn that "wasted" heat energy into something useful is a waste in itself.

perhaps we can use sterling engines on top of CPUs?