This is a guest post by John Schmitz. John E.J. Schmitz holds currently a senior management position in semiconductor technology research. He was awarded his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1984 from the Catholic University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). He holds six patents in the semiconductor field and has published over 45 scientific articles and one technical book in the field of integrated circuit technology. Before, Schmitz was the Chief Operating Officer Manufacturing Technology of SEMATECH (Austin, Texas) a consortium that develops semiconductor manufacturing technology, materials, and equipment for their member chip maker companies. Schmitz has dealt with thermodynamics and entropy for 25 years on a professional level. He currently lives in a small town in Belgium with his wife, Pieternel, and his children; Lucas, Juliette, Emmeline, and Jasper.
There are many instances that we can see that in our attempts to transform energy into as much as possible usable work, we are always left with this "rest" amount of heat that we can not use anymore to generate even more work¹. Clear examples of these imperfect transformations are the coolant radiators in our cars and the cooling towers of many factories or power plants. In powerplants that use fossil fuels we can have an efficiency as poor as 50% or often even lower, meaning that only 50% of the energy enclosed in the fuel is converted into electrical power, by means of burning fuel, heat generation that leads to steam and steam that will drive then turbines and generators. 50% or less is that not a shame? Of course the question arises why that is the case?