3 ms·
I am not a physicist. In my (mis)understanding of things, the work you can make heat do comes from the difference in temperature, with a bigger difference allow
by aaronblohowiak 3y ago
I am not a physicist. In my (mis)understanding of things, the work you can make heat do comes from the difference in temperature, with a bigger difference allowing more work to be done efficiently. Unfortunately, the chips are kept pretty cool in order to stay in their operating range, so you end up with a large volume of warm but not hot stuff. This is hard to turn into electricity. It can be good for things where you want stuff to be warm (like heating homes, etc) but not great for electricity generation.
- namibj 3y agoYeah it's basically not worth it with silicon to recreate electricity. It's good for heat, though.
- ryukoposting 3y agoPerhaps, instead of building them in deserts, we should be building datacenters in cold places where the ambient temperature inside the datacenter should be kept warmer than outside air.
- barryrandall 3y agoI think there's a lot of potential in combining immersion cooling with utility-scale heat pumps. The heat from the coolant isn't high enough to produce power on its own, but it's constant.
- astrodust 3y agoChips these days can run as high as 90-95°C which is awfully close to the boiling point of water, and could even be past the boiling point of other liquids, at least when under pressure. It's not something you could do with a typical closed-loop water cooling system, but if you used different fluids, converted the loop into a heat exchanger, and had some kind of Sterling engine to recover energy...