Questions tagged [thermodynamics]
For questions about the relationships between different forms of energy. Typically involves the distribution and transfer of heat, especially in a science-based or hard-science setting. Often involves specific technology or engineering to achieve the desired energy transfer.
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What limitations would prevent the effective use of a giant heat sink to solve global warming? [closed]
In the year 2050, a United Nations summit is held to finally take decisive action to stop global warming. Lobbying by the fossil fuel industry blocked the first proposal to cut emissions. Other ...
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Population impacts on temperature
By what amount (if any) would ambient temperature sink if a metropolitan area (lets say ~12M people) would be reduced to a fraction of its population (lets say ~10k) by an apocalyptic event.
I'm ...
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Bicolor/double-sided feathers as part of a thermoregulatory apparatus?
The project I'm working on right now has a much longer day than ours, which would result also then in higher thermal swings. Looking at earth and humans, depending on the solar radiation an area gets, ...
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Is it possible to create a Maxwell demon where entropy doesn't get stored in the brain of the "demon"?
So say for example in a hypothetical world where someone wants to extract energy but the temperature is in perfect equilibrium and they have no way of getting a thermal difference but there is a a ton ...
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If you had a fusion reactor the size of a suitcase, would it be possible to power a car with it via a steam turbine with 1950's level technology?
The specifics of the reactor are intentionally vague. It would be a form of lattice-confinement, produce very little radiation, and be scaled up or down very easily. I'm working on a Fallout-like ...
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How might heat management in a large hab dome work?
I hope this is more focused D:
Setup; Hela is a exoplanet in the fictional Eurydice system, about 4 Ly from Earth. The exoplanet is significantly younger than Earth, and life on her is in a late ...
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Potential problems with magic creating energy
Context
When hit by sun rays, the moon creates excess energy, it increases the energy & reflects it back to earth as mana rays to make magic possible (the exact process is not important). Most of ...
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Developing a Theoretical Quantum Effect and Experimental Methods for 'Heat Death' in a Science Fiction Universe
I am currently crafting a science fiction story in which humanity confronts an unprecedented threat: a novel form of 'heat death' that causes matter to cease to exist when it reaches certain ...
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Can just heat be used to power ATP production?
I want to have some lifeforms that live around and in hot environments and absorb the heat around them to produce ATP without using any other energy sources. Is this possible? How can this be done? ...
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Would a diamond mountain floating in the mantle cause a supervolcano or lava pool in the crust above it?
I was looking for ways to make gigantic mountains, and found Willk's answer to such a quandary, where a giant diamondberg forms in an ice giant and is incorporated into a terrestrial planet's crust, ...
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Can I use the Peltier effect to cool down an underground city on Venus
In my fiction I have a city deep underground on the planet of Venus. I know this is deeply impractical, and there are far easier places to build an underground city, but that is not what I have done.
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Feasible? A natural geothermal water pump the scale of multiple Mississippi rivers
I want a continent of waterfalls: a place on the scale of South America where the land is broken terraces from mountain heights to sea level. And I want massive waterfalls to be ubiquitous, like ...
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How can we cool a computer connected on top of or within a human brain?
Assume the ability to cybernetically implant a powerful enough computer to operate an AI inside the human skull, on top of or within the brain. Thin wires connect the computer to the various parts of ...
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Heated Adamantine "Bricks" as a Fuel Source
I was pondering a situation where adamantine could be harvested from deep underground, amongst lavaflows, to work as a fuel source.
Facts:
The Adamantine has been heated for millennia at thousands of ...
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Could a person survive a high temperature environment by only cooling the blood supply or will parts of the body eventually overheat?
Obviously not temperatures above the boiling point, but could you theoretically survive in an environment hotter than a normal human could thermoregulate in if you attached a blood-cooler and if so ...
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Channels of fluid heat interchange in the endless underground dimension
Note: I'm asking a science-based question yet I'm doing a lot of handwaving for certain counter-scientific aspects of the world. Please don't be snappy and remark that I should just handwave this ...
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Cooling body suit inside another insulated suit
So in my story the protagonist is a genetically enhanced vigilante that uses a full bulletproof jumpsuit in her activities.
But because of her accelerated metabolism, dealing with the heat of getting ...
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Accelerated Metabolism Thermal Sensation
If a person has an accelerated methabolism, and thus a higher body temperature, would this person feel more hot or cold than a normal person in the same ambient?
(Question edited for the sake of ...
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Would radioisotope thermoelectric generators be more effective on Titan than in space?
Since radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) operate by turning the flow of heat into electricity, and Titan's atmosphere can absorb heat faster through conduction than a vacuum through ...
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Could an aircraft power its flight only by heating the air around it?
Your typical aircraft propels itself by expelling something, may it be air, combusted fuel or even ions. Would it be possible for an aircraft to do none of those things and simply heat the air around ...
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Cryogenic weapon
Lots of games have a type of "freeze" or "ice" element effect to their weapons, like for instance cryo weapons in Borderlands, but I'm trying to work out how that might be ...
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Can kinetic energy be converted into cooling?
In a hypothetical scenario, I'm trying to design an object where, the faster it moves, the more it cools something it comes into contact with it.
There's all kinds of materials that can convert energy ...
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Can a button cell battery power car cigarette lighter (in the shape of a ring)?
Is it possible to make a fake golden ring which can light a candle on the push of a button and power it with button cell battery (either coin cell or watch button size)?
I have a fraud guy trying to ...
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A tidally-locked planet's dry ice caps
An exactly Earth-sized tidally-locked planet orbits its host star, which is functionally identical to our Sun, at an average distance of 1 AU, the same distance that the Earth orbits the Sun. The ...
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What can run the condensers on this Hell Train?
Hell turns out to be a real, physical place. It’s a physical planet. I have most of the science figured out for this literal hades, except the heat engines used in here need a cold sink—a strong one ...
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How can my character cool her tea quickly? [closed]
Let's say I have a character that is obsessed with drinking warm tea (or cider, or...).
Tea needs to be steeped at a high temperature; say, 90°c. However, drinking it at that temperature will result ...
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How big can a young mad scientist make their homemade Clifford before he overheats?
Long story short, a child mad scientist wants to scale up their pet dog - they read about Clifford, and wish to replicate that story, as a young mad scientist generally does. The billionaire mad ...
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How would Superspeed be Explained?
In the comics, superspeed,- being the ability to move (in particular, run) at speeds typically at least as fast as something like a racecar), whenever it is shown, seems to tend to have the ...
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Consequences of having a device that can transform heat back to stored energy in a limited way? [closed]
My setting uses reactors that work on a fictional gas-like inert substance that can safely store an impossibly high amount of energy in itself (breaking the e=mc^2 equation and causing Einstein to ...
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What would the structure of a biological thermocouple be?
For reference: a thermocouple is a device that converts heat to electricity.
What would an organic, naturally-evolved one that's part of a biological organism look like in terms of structure?
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Breaking the Laws of Thermodynamics without Invoking Magic or the Divine
Title pretty much says it all honestly. I wanna design a character for my fantasy story with abilities that are not only shown to break the laws of thermodynamics (the first and second laws ...
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The Best Materials for Heatproof Armor [duplicate]
In the Kingdom of Fire, those with the ability to bend the burning element to their will have the unique secondary ability of being able to withstand extremely high temperatures and are able to set ...
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Could a photon with negative, dark, or anti energy be used to create a freeze ray?
I'm not really a science whiz, but I know lasers generally use photons to increase the kinetic energy of atoms in their path, thus raising the temperature. Now I know electrons have negative energy, ...
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Viability of laser cooling a person (trying to create a freeze ray)?
So in my story, I'm trying to develop a plausible freeze ray. Now many people suggest liquid helium, but it seems to have a number of practical setbacks, such as being hard to obtain, needing vast ...
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What would happen if entropy works in reverse?
Entropy is the measure of how chaotic a system is analogous to a box containing many dices, the dices can be stacked properly together forming a cuboidal structure or scattered everywhere even outside ...
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In fictional world with two time dimensions could I still keep laws of thermodynamics as they are in modern physics? [closed]
There was this question about spacetime with two time dimensions here, but I wonder what could that mean particularly for thermodynamics?
To be more precise, could such a universe (none of dimensions ...
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Bathroom Mirror vs Eye Lasers
There is this scene where the main good girl is fighting the big bad alone. The big bad fires his eye lasers at the good girl, who uses a bathroom mirror to reflect the rays. The big bad can control ...
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Flammability in denser atmospheres: is it a serious problem?
Take a planet with an atmosphere somewhat similar to Earth's but denser, say 9-10bar incl 2-3bar O2, rest mostly N2 with some CO2 (0.1-0.3bar?) Temperature likewise similar to Earth, in the liquid ...
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Lizardmen, gigantothermy, and the energy demand of resting muscles. Could it work out?
One common trope, associated with lizardfolk from Castlevania to Overlord, is their weakness to cold. Now, while it is a fun gimmick, it leaves the problem that lizardmen in Overlord are shown to be ...
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Linguistics in a society with contrapositive thermodynamic philosophy
Our philosophy is based on the concept of energy as a positive, because we generally live on a planet in a low energy state which does work via fuel. As such, we don’t really have articulate language ...
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Is telekinetic cooling plausible?
(Note: this is similar to is Cryomancy scientifically possible?, but not exactly the same.)
In my story, I have "magic" that amounts to telekinesis powered by the user's metabolism.
It seems that ...
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Thermocoupling a mega-structure
I have a mega structure that is for all intents and purposes two halves of a planet that have been split in half and turned into opposite habitats connected by a central column. One of these ...
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Entropy, enthalpy, and energy through rapid mitosis
So I'm pretty new to chemistry and all this, but my world involves superpowers, which of course involves immense energy to have the characters use these powers. However, I want to stay consistent with ...
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Does "kinetic magic" (essentially telekinesis) imply unlimited energy?
In another question, I talked about a form of magic that converts metabolic energy (i.e. the energy produced by biological processes in "animals", which for this purpose includes e.g. yeast) into ...
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Making 4D Radiators Good Enough for Stealth, Unremarkable for Power
I am trying to find a solution for a specific subset of the Stealth in Space Problem: dealing with waste heat without tipping off properly positioned observers. This question is scoped specifically ...
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Biological Coolant System for Massive Organisms
The larger an animal, the harder it is to cool down. Ignoring the problem of bone/muscle strength vs size/weight and saying an animal could get to outlandish sizes, would a second cardiovascular ...
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Magical Heat Sink - Mobile
In this world there is magic but it works on the basis on moving either a property or energy from/between objects. Hopefully I can have this make sense!
Using Matweb.com to get my numbers. Working ...
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Viability of using temperature difference to generate energy on a tidally-locked planet
In Larry Niven's Ringworld, the Outsiders lie with one half of their body in the shade and one half of their body in direct sunlight and use the temperature difference to generate energy. Would this ...
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Would that heat-engine provide power to the colony on Titan?
I have an idea for an energy source for a colony on a cold world with not enough solar power. Is my idea workable, or is it debunked as perpetual motion machine? Here is the set-up and my plan:
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What is a realistic useful life of a calcium carbonate pulse jet deflagration chamber?
My jet-propelled squid uses a scavenged shell for its pulse jet deflagration chamber, I am trying to determine how often he’ll have to replace it.
Including the shell it’s a 5 kg animal using a ...
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