Published in ScienceNOW, 10 May 2012
Heat is the great enemy of modern electronics—it can spawn errors and fry components. But now scientists have turned heat to their advantage by creating devices that run on heat instead of electricity. The advance could lead to thermal computers that run off of body heat or other waste heat from our surroundings.
A heat current is simply the flow of energy from a hotter object to a colder object. Imagine heating a metal pipe at one end: Heat flows from the hot end to the cold end, and at every point along the pipe the temperature diminishes. In physics terms, there’s a “uniform temperature gradient.” The heat takes this simple path because the pipe conducts the same amount of heat in every place and in every direction. […]
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