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by choosername 3602 days ago
Why can't the heat be converted to electricity?
3 comments

Because heat is pure entropy; it's what you ultimately end up with after electricity has been used to do work, and the process is irreversible due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#G...

Only a difference in heat levels can still be converted to electricity, for instance by reverse Peltier effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling

And on a space station, most of your heat differential is created by active cooling, so recovering that via Peltier elements is a bit… counter productive.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics just means the conversion can't be a hundred percent efficient. Indeed, I didn't think of that as a problem.
I think you need a temperature gradient to generate electricity from heat
The space station is in, uh, space. I'm fairly certain a temperature gradient could be arranged.
It's actually the complete opposite - space is not "infinitely cold" it's more like "infinitely isolating" - like the perfect giant thermos. Space suits for example have a whole layer of water tubes just to cool down the astronaught, otherwise they will pass out from their own body's temperature.
Indeed, black body radiation isn't very effective at dissipating heat!
The ISS has an 28 tons active cooling system that barely radiates away as much heat as a one ton HVAC unit on Earth (70kW).

It's hard to generate a temperature gradient when you're blasted from the unfiltered Sun on one side, and reflected IR from Earth.

And surrounded by a near vacuum.
And yet thermos has somehow made billions by assuming the opposite.
Some of it probably could be, but the effiency of those processes are low enough that you'd still have a heat problem. Also, recall that the energy originated with the solar panels to start with. It's a very wasteful way of generating electricity compared to the solar panels, so although it might be worth considering to recover some of the energy investment and eliminate a fraction of the heat, the net output of such a process will probably be an order of magnitude lower than the initial energy investment.