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Absorb heat around into one point?

Physics Asked by user635988 on April 22, 2021

As now my country is in summer season and it’s hot out here ( around 37-40°c in the afternoon ) Someday ago, I took a nap and wondered if it is possible to absorb all the heat and concentrate into one point or one object. You know if that happened, we could just deploy it everywhere so it could cool down the earth. I might sound childish here ( I’m sorry ) and I dunno if this technology already exists but I want to know the physics about it. Thanks in advance everyone

One Answer

You can take heat and concentrate it, but it will require energy.

Heat energy normally flows from hotter temperatures to lower temperatures. This is a fundamental fact in thermodynamics, and you will not find any spontaneous process doing the opposite. But obviously refridgerators work, making a cool interior cooler (and the warm outside slightly warmer). They do this by using a heat pump, a device that pumps a "working fluid" in such a way that it absorbs heat from the inside of the fridge, lowering its temperature, and then becoming hot (because of a compressor doing work on it) and releasing the heat on the outside.

You could imagine an inverted fridge where we take ambient heat on the outside to heat up a cool fluid, then compress it so it becomes hotter, and release the heat inside a box.

This would work, but the efficiency would be low. The reason is that the hotter the interior is, the more the compressor needs to work to make the fluid even hotter so it releases the heat. Eventually this would become impractical, especially since even with good insulation heat would start leaking out from the box.

So the answer is, yes, heat can be concentrated to small volumes or points, but it will require energy (and this energy will also produce some waste heat).

Correct answer by Anders Sandberg on April 22, 2021

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