The high resistance piece of wire in incandescent light bulbs glows as a result of electrons incoming through a low resistance material being squeezed through (bombard electrons that don’t want to be moved in) the high resistance material with a certain pressure (voltage). We are using the high resistance material to usurp (convert into heat and then into light) the kinetic energy of the electrons in the low resistance material (commonly copper wire).
We do the same thing with electrical heating elements and microphones.
Are we also doing this in electrical appliances from which we don’t expect a certain “end product” (heat, light, sound)? For instance, computers. When we were still using actual physical relays to build logic gates, I can imaging electron flow being converted into the energy (eletrco magnetism?) required to actuate/move the switch inside the relay. But what about today’s transistors? The processing units inside CPUs and GPUs heat up, but that’s a side effect of something I don’t understand. We are not trying to reap that heat. We are after manipulating groups transistors into expressing boolean logic by either giving them a voltage or not.
I know very little of electricity, so please do correct any incorrect assumptions! I’m very eager to learn! 😊💡
simple answer, yes, but that depends what you are going for.
for something as simple as an electrical heating element, it works by a short circuit. non shorted circuits have grounds (of which voltage is 0) this is accomplished by adding resistors, capacitors, or inductors in parallel/series (generally speaking). Now a short circuit is where you have a source connected to a wire and as current goes through that loop it will increase the amount of current since you have no element disappating the voltage/current and that energy must go to heat.
this is why I say “never to use floor heaters” since they are incredibly inefficient, energy costs go up which will end up costing more for a few hours than if you just turned on the central heat a few degrees.
as for modern transistors, its different than just doing a short circuit, there’s actual resistors and capacitors inside it than it just being a short circuit as per my previous answer. where the heat accumulates is the 20+ billion of those that’s 5 cm x 5 cm in size. for integrated (IC) circuits, electrical/electronic engineers usually work in the mW or 10^-3 W the fact that CPU’s/GPU’s (especially the desktop varients) use 120 W to 400/500 W puts into scale how much fucking energy these motherfuckers use. Heat is a given in these circumstances, were talking 10^5 larger in wattage than most IC circuits and elements (op-amps, resistors, capacitors, inductors) would ever use.