![](/static/253f0d9b/assets/icons/icon-96x96.png)
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a8207a32-daa2-4b31-aab4-2d684fc94d18.png)
also: you can calculate the carnot cycle efficiency of a solar cell as if it was a classical heat-power-machine, even though it has no visible moving parts.
the reason why this works and yields realistic results is because the basic principles of thermodynamics stay the same no matter if you are working with steam, combustion gasses or photons and electron gas inside a semiconductor.
There has been some fusor research going on for decades. The issue that killed that direction of fusion research was ultimately that the electrons do not behave as the initial simple models suggested and in the real world the power loss from the fast electrons is just too big for any reasonably sized device to allow for self sustaining fusion.