Hi,
I did not read the article yet, is that the same one that came out a while back that stated that the heat energy from the LED itself could be harvested to help power the LED during normal use? If not it sounds almost the same anyway.
It's no big news that heat energy could be used to power devices by converting heat energy to electrical energy, and this has been done in a lot of devices already and even more in recent times. But we have to be careful how we evaluate the overall operation with regard to efficiency. If we have an LED then we have to rate the LED, and if we have a heat to electrical conversion device then we have to rate that separately. If we want too later then we can combine the two to form a comparative measure. Even if the conversion device is part of the LED, even part of the die, it is physically a different device and has to be handled that way.
In the future, if this works out, we might in fact start rating LEDs based on overall efficiency rather than the two individual measures, so we could see numbers like 110 percent, 120 percent, etc., but that would be a comparative measure not an absolute measure because if we measure all the energy going into the whole construction and the energy out, the energy out will always be less than the energy in. If it's not so, then there is energy getting into the system that we havent detected yet.
I had given another example i think on this web site where we have a space craft flying from one planet to another distance planet, and by taking the right path we can use the gravity of another planet to help boost the speed of the craft. Since we dont have to pay for the gravity, it seems like we are getting better efficiency, when in fact we are getting the extra energy from the third intermediate planets gravitational attraction. An interesting question then is, if we took this flight enough times would we decrease the gravitational attraction of that third planet, and mass to energy conversion might tell us that we did although it will be small.
Conservation of energy is one of the hardest laws of nature to break, and so far i dont think anyone has really done it. Comparatively it might look like they did because of external influences that have not been taken into account, but after they are taken into account we end up back to the conservation of energy