http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/543
About the Lecture
This
Nobel Prize-winning scientist admits to staying up late the night
before his talk to bone up on thermodynamics. He puts his research to
good use, discussing the history and application of the laws of
thermodynamics, which have served as “the scientific foundation
of how we harness energy, and the basis of the industrial revolution,
the wealth of nations.”
Taking Watt’s 1765 steam
engine, Stephen
Chu
illustrates basic principles of thermodynamics -- that energy is
conserved, that you can do work from heat, especially when you
maximize the difference in temperature in the system and minimize
heat dissipation from friction. Chu offers another form of the laws:
You can’t win; you can’t break even; and you can’t
leave the game.
The game hasn’t changed all that much
in the past few centuries. Nations now burn coal for electricity,
achieving around 40% thermal efficiency. Natural gas can be harnessed
at higher efficiencies still, and if we could deploy
temperature-resistant metals for boilers, even less energy would go
to waste. This is a pressing matter, points out Chu, because the
planet can no longer afford wanton use of carbon-based fuels. With
too much CO2,
our global “heat engine” has begun to tip toward a point
of no return. So the big question for Chu is whether science can
design “entropy engines that can generate sustainable
(carbon-free) energy sources.
He describes efforts to capture
sunlight with improved solar cells, but notes that a silicon
shortage, expensive chips, and a learning curve dictated by Moore’s
law mean the technology won’t be widely deployed for 10-15
years -- not fast enough in the battle against climate change. Chu
likes the efficiencies of power generation from wind, but there’s
a limit to turbine size, and the U.S. high voltage transmission
network needs a complete and expensive makeover to take full
advantage of wind. Forget corn as biofuel, he counsels, since it
“barely breaks even in terms of CO2
saved,” and focus instead on perennial grasses like miscanthus.
Chu’s lab and others are looking for microbes that can help
turn these plants more readily into fuels.
Another
potentially rich energy source, Chu says, involves converting sun
light into fuel the way plants do in photosynthesis. But “how
does nature split water?” asks Chu. Science hasn’t
entirely figured out the molecular machinery that turns water into
oxygen and hydrogen. Deriving bioenergy through artificial
photosynthesis may mean considering entropy and other basic laws in a
different light, Chu suggests. “Nature
turns out to be very good.”
The Second Law and Energy (Panel)
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/546
About the Lecture
In
this valedictory panel to the two-day symposium, 10 speakers offer
brief takes on how the Second Law of Thermodynamics might prove
useful in seeking answers to our current energy challenge.
Even
before the oil embargo of 1973, Thomas Widmer recalls, Joe
Keenan and his MIT colleagues wrote of an “entropy crisis.”
They analyzed the flow of work in industries and saw great
inefficiencies that became crippling when fuel prices spiked. Despite
30 years of improvement, says Widmer, “the effectiveness of
energy use is still less than 12%.” In selling ideas to policy
makers, he advises, talk about “energy productivity”
rather than conservation.
Ernest S. Geskin doesn’t
believe alternative energies will be viable quickly enough to make a
serious difference in climate change, so his objective is to improve
combustion. He outlines several methods he’s developing that
increase the availability of generated heat, reduce heat losses, and
integrate combustion with materials production and processing, such
as in steelmaking.
James Keck says that “improving
the efficiency and reducing emissions of auto engines and power plant
burners requires an ability to model hydrocarbon combustion.”
He recommends using a method “firmly based on the Second Law of
Thermodynamics: the rate controlled constrained equilibrium method,”
which, among other advantages, generates fewer equations, and is
applicable to any separable system.
Seeking ways to make
reactions more efficient and “less exergy destructive,”
Noam Lior recommends a detailed, top-down methodology. His lab
has been examining oil droplet and coal combustion in an attempt to
understand why exergy losses take place, and to determine “which
process will give us the highest exergy efficiency.”
Debjyoti
Banerjee’s research focuses on enhanced cooling and
explosives sensing. His lab explores phase changes for boiling and
condensation, and develops new models in molecular dynamics,
harnessing the energy of nanosphere transport processes. A
“nanobubble” serves as a heat engine, and Banerjee is
examining how “nanofins help in transferring heat.”
Richard
Peterson is taking a look “at how small you might be able
to make the classic thermodynamic heat engine, so you could integrate
it into portable equipment or other devices requiring power, and burn
fuel with much higher energy density than found in a battery.”
He notes that “your efficiency takes a nosedive as you shrink
the engine.”
Erik Ydstie is concerned with
dynamic systems like power plants, and how they can be improved, by
manipulating their inputs and outputs. By designing better controls
to regulate these complex systems, there’s a “lot of
scope to improve the efficiencies of these plants. You could get
quite a bit of mileage by running them better.”
Ron
Zevenhoven “presents the embryo of an idea: Can the
infrared radiation that causes the enhanced greenhouse effect be put
to better use?” He wants to see whether science can modify the
infrared radiation that leaves the earth, in order to cut back on
radiative forcing higher up.
Zhuomin Zhang discusses
radiation entropy and how near-field thermophotovoltaic devices “may
be another way of effectively using energy.” He wonders how to
apply the entropy concept to near-field radiation when interference
is a problem.
Ahmed Ghoniem says that while we won’t
run out of cheap fossil fuels for some time, “we need to think
about an insurance policy” in response to the predictions of a
four to six degree rise in Earth’s temperature by the end of
the century. “The dirty little secret is once you burn the fuel
you automatically generate entropy -- you lose about 20% right off
the bat.” Ghoniem asks whether “combustion and heat
engines can be reinvented to reduce entropy generation, practically
and at scale.”