Dissipating heat in outer space... how??

[rjain]

Originally posted by: Matthias99
effective, but IANANE (I Am Not A NASA Engineer).

I first read that as "effective, but INANE".

 

[VictorLazlo]

Originally posted by: everman
Radiate the heat in a way to aid propulsion?

Slap a peltier on there, and turn your waste heat back into electricity.

Actually, I asked a friend who works at NASA, and he said the problem in space is keeping things warm, not keeping them cool!

 

[sao123]

simple infrared radiation is higher energy than visible light due to wavelength

Infrared radiation has a longer wavelength than visible light, however it has lower energy.
The ultraviolet and shorter waves have the higher energy.

It would be more efficient to radiate the infrared heat into the heat vacuum of space (provided you can have a large radiation surface area), rather than converting between infrared to another higher energy wavelength, and then emit.

but... INANE

 

[MadRat]

tp

 

[MadRat]

tp

 

[MadRat]

Originally posted by: VictorLazlo

Originally posted by: everman
Radiate the heat in a way to aid propulsion?

Slap a peltier on there, and turn your waste heat back into electricity.

Actually, I asked a friend who works at NASA, and he said the problem in space is keeping things warm, not keeping them cool!

I figured the same. Heat is only an issue for astronauts when the sun is pointed their way, else its cold as hell. Even the vacuum of space has matter in it, its not empty. Low earth orbit is probably thousands to billions of times more dense then the typical density of deep space. That is if dark matter is not as prevalent as recent data suggests.

 

[HVAC]

Use the heat to generate electricity via a Carnot engine. Store the electricity in a battery.

 

[MrDudeMan]

dont you guys think you are missing something important? if everything in space cooled to 3k, shouldnt the problem be you cant generate enough heat to keep things functioning? i dont see how heat dissipation would be a problem, but instead heat production...

 

[ZeroNine8]

The thread isn't about how to make things function in the cold of space, rather how to dissipate heat in space, so I wouldn't say we missed anything.

 

[Pudgygiant]

You know... could one put excess heat (or electricity, for that matter) to use powering something that gives off virtually no heat, like a CCFL?

 

[ZeroNine8]

you could, but it still comes down to dissipating the energy somehow. A CCFD just dissipates the energy in a form other than heat.

 

[Jeff7181]

They could convert the excess heat to electricity to power their 8-way Opteron Server

 

[Howard]

Originally posted by: rjain
And there's nothing to conduct to and no medium to convect heat.

There's, uh, ether.

 

[Apathetic]

Originally posted by: Matthias99
You can't cool by convection or conduction in space, as obviously there's no matter there to dump heat into. However, it's certainly possible to cool by radiation -- that is, a hot heatsink emitting infrared radiation out into "empty" space.

Honestly -- how do you think the Sun heats the Earth through a few million miles of vacuum? Same thing.

Bingo

Dave