Question:

If microwave ovens rapidly heat things...?

by  |  earlier

0 LIKES UnLike

why isn't there an "anti-microwave" device to rapidly cool things? Things that are already cold, like ice cubes, dry ice, etc don't count because they're cold already.

 Tags:

   Report

2 ANSWERS


  1. Peltier coolers are about as close to an anti-microwave as you can get in that they cool themselves rapidly and don't use the adiabatic expansion of a gas to do it (like a refrigerator).  But for an anti-microwave to exist, it would have to extract heat from the inside of a solid body.  A detailed explanation for why this isn't possible is so technical it would be too long to type, too boring to read, and just not pleasant for anyone involved.  

    The impossibility of creating an anti-microwave, reduced to absurdly simplistic terms, results from the fact that extracting energy from something using a process similar to what a microwave uses to put energy into something would require a complete violation of blackbody radiation.  That isn't likely to happen given the physics of the universe as we know it.  

    Here are some messier details, but don't read them.  Really.  Don't say I didn't warn you.  

    If you want to think about this more for yourself, find Planck's law and for a reasonable temperature, say 300 K, figure out how much total energy is radiated in the microwave at around 2 GHz (which is where microwave ovens operate).  It's not a lot.  You can't get something to radiate spontaneously more than the Planck number.  A microwave works because it doesn't follow Planck's law and pumps huge amounts of energy in at 2 GHz, where water absorbs strongly.  But water can only emit as much as determined by the Planck number.  So instead of taking out 1000 watts (which is what a microwave puts in), your getting back out microwatts at most.  There isn't any way to "suck" more energy out that defined by Planck's law.  Again, this is a gross simplification of why it isn't possible, I've elided a lot of details of radiative transfer and convection and conduction.  If I hadn't, well, you would have wished I had.  


  2. There is already,but it is called a "REFRIGERATOR" an it uses nitrogen gas to make it work.But microwaves can not cool things because they release heat radiation which absorbs water from what u cook an makes things hot so we can't call it antimicrowave

Question Stats

Latest activity: earlier.
This question has 2 answers.

BECOME A GUIDE

Share your knowledge and help people by answering questions.