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What if I told you that I had invented a panel of ordinary materials that converted light to heat? What could you do with that? Well, one application is to make a thermal display for the blind. Place an image via photography, lenses, printout, or LCD display in black and white over the light to heat converter and the areas that are brighter get hotter while the darker areas stay cooler. Then the blind person can touch the panel and with some practice learn to feel the image by it's temperature profile. I've built such a prototype and it works just fine.
What about skin cancer treatment? What they do now is put a hot water bag on your skin that is the approximate shape of the cancer. What if you could place a panel on the skin and light up the EXACT shape of the cancer, heating it up to precise cancer-killing temperature and no surrounding healthy tissue? Now THAT would be cool. The Light to Heat Converter Can do that.
How about paper printing or printed circuit board manufacture, XEROX machines and such where you want to apply ink with heat? This can be accomplished with the proposed invention to a resolution that would be satisfactory for many situations and have various advantages.
It's so simple that you're going to laugh out loud for real when you get the light bulb over your head. Here we go: A cadmium sulfide (CDS) cell is also known as an LDR, or light dependent resistor. That's because it's resistance is a strong function of the light that is incident upon it. OK, we all know that but how does that make a light to HEAT converter? Simply put a fixed voltage such as a battery or regulated supply across the CDS cell and when it's resistance changes it will draw a different amount of current. The heat dissipated by the cell is of course P=V*I, or power equals voltage times current. So with a fixed voltage and a varying current, the power fluctuates in proportion to the current change. And the current changes in proportion to the resistance which changes in proportion to the light. In fact, it'll change by more than a factor of 10 from bright sunlight to darkness.
Got it? That was a bit of circuitry mumbo jumbo but if you glossed over those details, the bottom line is when you put a fixed voltage across a cadmium sulfide cell it becomes a light to heat converter.
I'll expand this article later once i get feedback on it. I'll wait to see what people say and respond accordingly. Until then, have a great day!