From: "James Annan" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: gmane.science.general.global-change
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, June 07, 2009 8:21 PM
Subject: [Global Change: 3226] Re: Why not rooftops covered with infrared 
LEDs? an abstract in IEEE suggested ....



Michael Tobis wrote:

>> http://parisetech.com/ECTecPaper.pdf
>>
>
>Sorry, didn't realise you had actually found the paper until I did some
>googling myself and got to the same point. I believe it's a form of
>perpetual motion machine. In particular, the "cooler" relies on
>radiating away energy in order to create a temperature differential
>which can be used to generate sufficient energy to radiate away the heat
>that passes through the generator.
>
>As such, I'm surprised it hasn't made a bigger splash with the 
>denialists...
>
>James

HA HAR HAR!  Thanks for a good laugh to start the day off.  :-)

My own favorite crackpot scheme along these lines is to generate electricity 
with IR photocells inside a power plant exhaust stack.  I suppose you could 
feed it directly to rooftop IR LEDs to re-radiate as heat, with 
thermodynamic losses all along the way.  The only possible use for the 
scheme would be to shift the IR wavelength to a band that is not already 
saturated.  I'm foggy on the physics of what happens to the beam after it 
leaves the LED, but isn't there a very thick blanket of molecules to 
penetrate before reaching the black body of space?  Maybe that's why 
superior crackpots prefer lasers - more punch to get through the fog.

-dl


--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated 
venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of 
global environmental change. 

Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the 
submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not 
gratuitously rude. 

To post to this group, send email to [email protected]

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
[email protected]

For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Reply via email to