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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's going to be able to essentially deliver a very small current virtually indefinitely.
That's how I understand it as well. It harvest the brownian motion of atoms in graphene. I definitely don't know enough about this subject to judge the plausibility of the claim but "graphene" and "limitless power" in the same headline does trigger a few red flags.
> In the 1950s, physicist Léon Brillouin published a landmark paper refuting the idea that adding a single diode, a one-way electrical gate, to a circuit is the solution to harvesting energy from Brownian motion. Knowing this, Thibado’s group built their circuit with two diodes for converting AC into a direct current (DC). So, they built a full-wave rectifier (albeit with only 2 instead of, say, 4 diodes)? Pretty nea…
Working link for the lazy:
https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.102.0...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how I understand it as well. It harvest the brownian motion of atoms in graphene. I definitely don't know enough about this subject to judge the plausibility of the claim but "graphene" and "limitless power" in the same headline does trigger a few red flags.
You’ll still need a source of heat. This is a power converter not a source of free energy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's how I understand it as well. It harvest the brownian motion of atoms in graphene. I definitely don't know enough about this subject to judge the plausibility of the claim but "graphene" and "limitless power" in the same headline does trigger a few red flags.
You’ll still need a source of heat. This is a power converter not a source of free energy.
Could also use geothermal heat I guess
Naive question, wouldn't this (converting Brownian motion into electricity) violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics? (edit, this is explicitly addressed further in the article: That's an important distinction, said Thibado, because a temperature difference between the graphene and circuit, in a circuit producing power, would contradict the second law of thermodynamics. "This means that the second law of thermodynamics…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's going to be able to essentially deliver a very small current virtually indefinitely.
That's how I understand it as well. It harvest the brownian motion of atoms in graphene. I definitely don't know enough about this subject to judge the plausibility of the claim but "graphene" and "limitless power" in the same headline does trigger a few red flags.
I'm rooting around for alternative sources of the paper without success, but for those who have read it, what kind of graphene did they use (monolayer, CVD, GO, rGO, etc.)? I suspect that will somewhat throttle the manufacturing supply chain.
Batteries are the least interesting application to me. This brings "sensor dust" out of solid fantasy into the realm of possibility in the far future; at first it will be "sensor clods", but let it follow the same evolutionary Shockley-to-ARM development path, and let's see where it goes. Permanently implanted medical chips to measure the blood, nervous and other internal medicine metrics we want to get our hands on might be more miniaturized; need to figure out how to extract out the incredibly weak signal.
But in all seriousness, it seems this converts ambient heat (not a heat differential) directly into electricity. Therefore it must necessarily cool its surroundings by the equivalent energy extracted?
So it’s a kind of air conditioner which doesn’t use electricity to move heat but rather converts heat directly to electricity? I thought we “knew” this was impossible...
If this is representative of press releases from universities it's no wonder that people can't tell the difference between free energy scams and real physics. Sounds like nonsense to me but the article is so badly written that it's hard to tell. In fact it is hard to be sure whether they have actually created a prototype or merely simulated it.
Probably have to read the journal paper to get accurate details.