3 ms·

We hit this (what seems to be a) paradoxon in a research project a few years ago, where we modelled production facilities that needed heat and cold at the same

by bipson 5y ago

We hit this (what seems to be a) paradoxon in a research project a few years ago, where we modelled production facilities that needed heat and cold at the same time (industrial bakery producing freezed goods, different pipes). Since our goal was the optimization of energy flows, being able to use e.g. energy recovery of "waste heat", we could easily get paradoxical results, when counting with "hot" and "cold' energies. The thing is, any medium can potentially carry energy (and in fact does), but if it is "usable" to you, depends on the difference to the environment you want to use it in/against. 400° hot oil? Net plus J in an oven, but net minus J for a chiller. Yet, generating a certain amount of that hot oil took x Joule. Same goes for cold water or saline solution. I think the plaintiff's argument was actually very fitting. Mine is still not technical though.

setr 5y ago
That doesn’t seem to match. In this case, AFAICT, both wanted the cooling effect. No one wants the heat. The saline solution was now being used to cool double the volume (2x the cellar space), so it seems pretty clear-cut to me — if saline cooling cost increases with volume being cooled, it should be trivial to say he’s now covering someone else’s costs. I don’t even see why we even need to bother digging into thermodynamics — looking at the cost structure of the cooling unit alone should tell us the answer. If there’s no relationship saline-usage-cost based on volume, then it still taken but no harm was done. If there is, then it’s trivial to calculate how much harm occurred If one cellar was being heated, and the other cooled, then your paradox could be triggered (but it also seems to me the “paradox” is trivially resolved by double-entry accounting — the problem is simply in the name “waste”)

by bipson 5y ago

setr 5y ago

That doesn’t seem to match. In this case, AFAICT, both wanted the cooling effect. No one wants the heat. The saline solution was now being used to cool double the volume (2x the cellar space), so it seems pretty clear-cut to me — if saline cooling cost increases with volume being cooled, it should be trivial to say he’s now covering someone else’s costs. I don’t even see why we even need to bother digging into thermodynamics — looking at the cost structure of the cooling unit alone should tell us the answer. If there’s no relationship saline-usage-cost based on volume, then it still taken but no harm was done. If there is, then it’s trivial to calculate how much harm occurred If one cellar was being heated, and the other cooled, then your paradox could be triggered (but it also seems to me the “paradox” is trivially resolved by double-entry accounting — the problem is simply in the name “waste”)