[Physics] Can Thermal Energy be converted into usable energy

energyenergy-conservationthermodynamics

I'm going to go out on a limb and ask a question that will probably be a bit humiliating: Can Thermal Energy be converted into usable energy? I've been reading about conservation of energy, and I know that in no conversion is all the energy usable. There is always some thermal energy (which leads to the conclusion of the inevitable heat death of the universe). But couldn't this problem be avoided by turning the thermal energy into forms of usable energy?

Nothing I've read ever said that thermal energy couldn't be changed back, so why don't we do it? Is it impossible? (Which I find hard to believe). Is it too inefficient? (That would mean that the thermal energy is converted into, well, more thermal energy. Which we can make more usable energy out of. Still more inefficiency? Do it again.) Is there some other reason? Or is there an actual theoretical way to turn thermal energy into usable forms of energy?

Best Answer

To turn thermal energy into useful work completely one would need a thermal bath at the temperature of absolute zero. This is explicitly forbidden by the third law of thermodynamics. The best one can do is given by the efficiency of the (theoretical) Carnot cycle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle. Th efficiency of the Carnot cycle only depends on the ratio of the temperatures of the cold and the hot thermal baths that a cyclical thermodynamic machine has access to:

$\eta= 1 - T_{cold}/T_{hot}$.

As you can see from the formula, if $T_{cold}=0$, then the efficiency would be equal to one, i.e. all thermal energy would be converted. That, as we said, is forbidden, because of $T_{cold}>0$. On the other hand, if $T_{cold} =T_{hot}$, then the efficiency of any thermal machine is zero, i.e. one can't extract any useful energy from just one temperature bath.

Practical efficiencies that can be reached with real thermal machines range up to 60% (in combined cycle natural gas plants, I believe), but it becomes increasingly more expensive to improve efficiencies, so at some point the cost of the improvement is higher than the cost of the lost energy, at which point economics sets a limit to energy efficiency. A better way to use the lost heat is for heating purposes. Combining a small power plant with the heating systems of buildings makes almost 100% use of the energy in the fuels that are being burned in the power plant. These cogeneration facilities (named so because they produce electricity and useful heat) are playing an increasingly larger role in energy efficiency improvements.