‘Thermal cloak’ designed, could solve major chip, spacecraft issues
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/28/thermal_cloak_excellence/
Not so wild about the idea of scientist being referred to as ‘boffins’ (which sure sounds negative to me), but that seems to be the norm in Jolly Old England.
Anyway, the idea is that by using some of the same techniques they have used to provide cloaking (at single wavelengths of microwaves) of objects they might be able to direct heat away (or towards, which is what I am interested in) from objects.
The amount of heat stored in warm water is quite amazing but currently there isn’t any practical way to extract that energy in any useful form (other than warming our tootsies). However, if it were practical to focus that heat somehow, so that we could increase it to the ~400F temperature difference needed to get efficient conversion to electricity (I won’t bore you with why that is the magic number), then in principle much of the energy now going to waste (typical power plants (be it gas, oil, coal, nuclear or solar-thermal) are only converting 35% of the energy into electricity, the rest goes into the environment) could be recycled and converted to electricity. If that were practical, somehow, then almost immediately we get a nearly 3 fold (300%) increase in our power generation potential (this won’t do anything for hydroelectric or solar cells, though). I am going to look into this and see if I can grok any of it…
