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We talked about these LEDs a while back. They take heat form surrounding HOT parts and convert it to light. It takes 2 watts to make the surroundings hot and you get 39pico watts of light. The efficiency is really bad. It is not 320% but 0.000000000000?(almost zero).
My guess is that they wont be used for light, at least not right away. But who knows down the road a bit. Maybe even a new kind of refrigerator for both refrigeration and air conditioning and even CPU cooling.
The thing is though, in a normal human environment heat is everywhere. If they can extract it to use for something else that's great. Mount it on a heat sink that gets heated by something else and use that extra heat that is always just a big waste of energy.
The problem with solid state is nothing can come even close to what they can get out of a nuclear generator when it's powering a steam turbine. And solid state semi conductors do NOT handle radiation well at all.
I did read the article and more!
1) 69pico watts is almost nothing.
2) It takes watts of heat to get the magic 39pico watts of light that is above the 30pico watts that in input into the LED.
30pico watts is input in the form of electrons. But 69 pico watts is output. What they did not say is watts of energy is input in the form of heat to get the 69 pico watts. From my view if you have to input watts to get pico watts back this is a very bad idea.
Power input in this case is totally irrelevant, this is about a fundamentally new method of converting energy, the entire point is that this works at all, not how well it works. It's not like a TEC; the energy is taken directly from lattice vibrations which means it will simply function as long as the material is at a temperature where the effect occurs, and the byproduct is less heat a win win in the electronics world; it would be nice to know what that temperature is but it's really beside the point right now.
That the effect can be demonstrated means that it can now be toyed with until the fundamental process that is occurring can be understood in detail, then new materials can be tried that may take advantage of the effect and possible be turned into useful devices.
Because that's the wattage of heat it removes from the substrate when it's running, granted it emits optical radiation but that can be easier to transfer than physical heat especially if it's resulting in heat not only not being generated in a semi conductor junction but being removed from it! It's similar to a TEC except instead of acting as a heat pumpt through solid conductors it emits radiation for the cooling effect.
As for it being such a pitiful amount of power, don't for a second forget what massive paralleling/serializing has done for power Mosfet technologies not to mention solar cells. If this kind of thing could be worked into modern fab technologies one of the biggest problems of all (heat) in semiconductors has one more doorway to get out.
I virtually guarantee it will find a niche market somewhere especially if the thermal difference while the effect still functions can be scaled up. This is brand new research though and as vlaid said it's not a breatkthrough, but believe me people will throw money at this to see where it goes, and that's what I like, truly new technologies.
Ron.. You're applying this to existing technology..
The concept itself is similar to super conductivity, a state at which known matter reacts in a different manner than typically makes sense. It's novel when it's within a few degrees of 0 kelvin. It becomes useful as the temperature increases, proven by the commercial development of super conducting systems based on the last 90+ years of development of the reasons behind superconductivity.
This is PURE research, it may not pan out, but to sit there and say this is a waste of time money energy or learning is absurd!
Give the scientists that have grants and can find funding to develop this about 10 years.
I know they think further along than you do, I hope it pans out, might not. Science can blow that kind of loss off much as most people can't.
That's because you work in the private sector in an applied sciences field apparently. Basic research which is simply learning for the sake of discovering new things or documenting something to provide more information for other researchers is massively important.
If you think that's silly then you might want to ask the folks at CERN why they built the LHC at a cost of close to 10 billion US dollars when it has no practical use, it's pure research.
In the private sector results are important, results meaning profits. In Academia results are just as important but profit isn't taken into consideration, though cost/benefit analsys is important to apply to funds the money often doesn't produce anything useful.
Then again look at some of the technologies that have come out of research colleges that have been turned into commercial application. MIT specifically...
This is just the first step, it will take multiple years and much more grant money to figure out what's going on and determine if it can be used practically, that's beside the point though, when all is said and done we'll know more and another question will have an answer or at least some information.
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