Sure, most modern homes have much more advanced water heating systems than a big tank with an electric heater element. Systems that work on ‘point of use’ heating concepts that heat the water as it is being delivered, not heating up a large storage container for later use. One day I hope to live in such a house! Until then I’m going to worry and fret about the amount … [Read more...]
Domestic Hot Water Heating, ‘Wat-er’ Waste of Energy. Part 1: Pun Intended
Human technical prowess relies heavily on the conversion of energy from one form to another, to meet our needs. Physiological needs underpin Maslow’s pyramid of all our other ones. The availability of hot water is in turn important for that. Likely we’ve been heating water since the early Neolithic, converting chemical energy stored in wood to heat (radiative and … [Read more...]
If You’re Going to Lose it, You Might as Well Use it!
A lot of engineering involves the management of energies, converting them from one form to another, channeling off useful work to power our cars, planes, phones, lights, etc. To date, we haven’t come up with a system to channel all energy into the desired task. Even the most advanced power generation systems still end up heating water to steam to drive turbines, a cycle … [Read more...]
Thermal Bottlenecks. This is Hot. This is Why.
There are 475,000 Google search hits for ‘thermal bottleneck’. It’s a well-recognized phrase playing on a very obvious analogy. Despite this, there were few attempts to quantify such a parameter. Spurred on by its relevance in electronic thermal design, we did just that, put hard numbers to the concept. FloTHERM now has the ability to plot distributions of a thermal … [Read more...]
Blue LEDs. Since When is Improvement Invention?
Lighting accounts for ~20% of the world’s total energy consumption. This is a staggering statistic. Why so much? Historically a lot of energy had to be consumed to produce the required amount of visible light. Incandescent bulbs, where electric current is used to heat a metal filament, resulted in most of the energy being dissipated as heat. More a hot bulb than a … [Read more...]
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