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New thermoelectric generator converts vehicle exhaust heat into electricity, boosting fuel efficiency
(www.inceptivemind.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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Technology
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I’ve wondered about this. If this is so, and heat is molecules moving back and forth, how do the molecules stop, change direction, and then accelerate in the other direction, stop, change directions again, and go back, over and over and over?
Molecules interact with each other. Energy is transferred as they bump around. If you were to follow a single molecule it would move around randomly. What we can measure is usually the average of many molecules.
So it’s less of vibrating and more about smashing around into things?
This is easier to envision with a gas: like a chamber of balks all ricocheting like mad. It’s harder to envision for a solid. But I guess a molecule will be up smack against its neighbors, getting repelled, not so much bounding freely?
So in a solid, you can imagine each atom connected to each other by springs (bonds). They can vibrate on these springs. If they vibrate too much (by heating) then they can break the bonds and escape as a gas. Gasses basically have too much energy to bond again.