Chapter 104 - 81: Heat Source 3
The heartbeat sent blood of the perfect temperature flowing to the palms.
The palms transferred that heat to the ceramic plate.
The heat passed through the semiconductor, where it was carried away by the evaporation of cold water.
This cycle formed a stable channel.
As long as she didn’t wake up and the paper towel remained wet, the light could, in theory, stay on indefinitely—until the semiconductor material eventually aged and failed.
The countdown on the large screen showed 00:25:00.
Zhou Kai stood on the left, staring at the red pinprick of light.
He Gui leaned against the leg of the angle-iron table.
Wang Huashao clutched a towel, wiping the cold sweat from his palms.
Miao Shian adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses, his eyes fixed on the multimeter.
Chen Zhuo stood right in the center.
In the center of the semicircle they had formed,
Lin Yi was slumped over the edge of the table.
Her chin rested on her hands.
Her eyes were closed.
Her breathing was even.
Occasionally, a small lock of hair would slip from behind her ear and fall across her cheek.
She was fast asleep.
Completely unaware that she was, in a manner that defied all competition logic, powering a precision physics system.
The clock ticked down to 00:10:00.
A few of the patrolling judges in the venue began to walk among the workstations.
They held clipboards in their hands.
They watched the teams still scrambling to finish, jotting down notes on their pads.
One judge, his hair slightly graying, walked up to Chen Zhuo’s team’s workstation.
He was originally just making his routine rounds.
But when his gaze swept over the unusually quiet table, he stopped in his tracks.
He glanced at Lin Yi, who was sleeping on the table.
His brow furrowed almost imperceptibly.
It was extremely rare for a team member to be sleeping during such a critical moment in the national finals.
Then, his eyes fell on the system pinned beneath Lin Yi’s hands.
A dismantled baseplate.
A wad of soaked paper towels.
A thermoelectric cooling chip.
A crude breadboard bristling with jumper wires.
A hand-wound transformer.
And, a high-intensity LED emitting a piercing red light.
The judge froze for a moment.
He took a step forward, right up to the edge of the table.
He didn’t try to wake Lin Yi.
Nor did he ask Chen Zhuo any questions.
He was a veteran judge who had seen decades of work in the field of engineering physics.
He only needed a single glance to understand the underlying logical architecture of the system.
They hadn’t used solar energy.
They hadn’t used wind energy.
They hadn’t even used any form of mechanical energy.
They had abandoned all the pre-made components provided by the organizing committee.
They were using the evaporation from the wet paper towels to lock the temperature of the cold side.
They were using the constant body temperature of a person in a relaxed state as the input for the hot side.
Finally, they were using a classic Joule thief circuit to forcefully boost the weak thermoelectric potential difference above the threshold required to light a high-intensity diode.
Every single part of it utilized the most fundamental principles of physics.
Thermodynamics.
Electromagnetism.
Semiconductor physics.
And physiology.
Nothing went beyond the scope of the curriculum.
But when combined, they formed an exceptionally elegant and robustly interference-proof engineering closed-loop system.
The judge’s gaze shifted from the red point of light to Chen Zhuo’s face.
Chen Zhuo met his gaze without flinching.
His expression was calm.
The judge said nothing.
He lifted his clipboard and pulled out the ballpoint pen clipped to it.
In the column for Chen Zhuo’s team,
he drew a heavy checkmark.
Then he wrote down a number.
He turned and walked toward the next workstation.
The numbers on the large screen turned red.
00:00:59.
The final one-minute countdown.
The noise in the venue reached a crescendo.
00:00:10.
Nine seconds.
Eight seconds.
On Chen Zhuo’s team’s workstation, the red light was still dazzling.
Lin Yi’s breathing was still steady.
The number on the voltmeter was still 2.68 volts.
Nothing had changed.
Three seconds.
Two seconds.
One second.
00:00:00.
Accompanied by an extremely sharp, long electronic whistle,
the lights in the training center flickered.
The words on the large screen changed: COMPETITION OVER. ALL PARTICIPANTS CEASE ACTIVITY.
The venue instantly grew much quieter.
Only the low hum of the exhaust fans and air conditioning remained.
Chen Zhuo turned his head.
He looked at Lin Yi, still slumped over the table.
"Time’s up."
Chen Zhuo said.
Lin Yi’s eyelashes fluttered.
She slowly opened her eyes.
Her gaze was a little hazy.
She lifted her chin from the back of her hands and stretched her stiff neck.
Then, she took her hands off the black ceramic plate.
The instant her hands lifted,
the heat source was severed.
The charge carriers within the thermoelectric chip halted their directional movement.
The potential difference dropped to zero.
The current change in the primary coil ceased.
The magnetic ring lost its magnetism.
The transistor stopped oscillating.
The red LED, which had been lit for a full half-hour,
in an instant,
snuffed out without a flicker.
It returned to being a transparent plastic bulb.
In that moment, all physical reactions fell silent.
Lin Yi shook out her hands. A faint red mark was pressed into her palms from the edge of the ceramic plate.
She looked at the now-darkened light on the tabletop.
Then she looked at the five boys standing around her.
"Is it over?" she asked.
Zhou Kai nodded, the tension that had held his face all day finally easing as the corners of his mouth lifted into a smile.
He Gui nodded vigorously, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the hem of his shirt.
Wang Huashao let out a long breath and plopped down onto the table behind him.
Miao Shian switched off the multimeter.
Chen Zhuo didn’t answer.
In this vast workshop, where hundreds of people were tearing their hair out, driven to the brink of collapse and despair over a few millivolts of voltage,
they had used a pile of the most unremarkable spare parts.
A cup of cold water.
And a pair of sleeping hands.
To end this competition with the purest application of physics.
The main doors were pushed open.
Sunlight streamed in from outside.
Chen Zhuo brushed some debris off his clothes.
"Let’s go."
He turned and walked toward the doors.
His stride was steady.