/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

>ambient temperature power source

So it can run an air conditioner, big fucking deal.

>>91503
Questions and answers as I find them:
1
Q: how much energy can we effectively get out of this in a decent amount of time?
A: 10 microwatts per 10x10 micron sheet, meaning we'd need about 5 square centimeters to generate a single watt.
Source: googling conversion rates and 1st article

2
Q: how expensive will it be to accomplish this?
A: unsure as of now, I'm too tired to look for all the extra info to calculate this and I don't even know how half the system they proposed would be able to work.
Source: N/A

3
Q: will the amount of energy produced be enough to warrant its use as a power source by being able to pay for necessary equipment, upkeep, and personnel to manage both?
A: In my personal opinion, no. It seems like it would be very expensive to set up initially and would generate enough power only for small-scale situations, if even in any situation, and may not be as reliable as they hope.

Don't get me wrong, it sounds cool. I'm just trying to figure out if it'll even be slightly worth it in short-term or long-term as we are now. If any of you have information that would prove me wrong or any contrary views and the information to back it up, then by all means post it. I'd love to be proved wrong here.

The "unlimited energy" bit reads like click bait garbage.

Reading through all of that, this looks like it's just another means of converting heat to electricity. So far the most efficient way to do that is to boil water to use steam to turn a turbine.

I suppose the angle that the article may be trying to emphasize is that this works at room temperature, or in other words we don't need to bring water to its boiling point. But at that point it's just another type of solar panel, since it's drawing energy from the heat that was ultimately supplied by the sun. So the real question is how much electricity can it generate in a given unit of space? I suspect that the answer is not much and that we won't be replacing our turbines with graphine any time soon.

I don't see it in the Newtonian mechanistic way at all. The quantum flux is spacetime. It is always gyrating and bubbling. The trick is to find a way to get that energy up into a macroscopic usable force. A lattice of atoms bumped around by that, causing ripples which can be used to generate microwatts, then that just needs to be upscaled. A building size of this stuff would produce how many watts?

It might just be this is turning ambient heat into watts. That is still very useful, drop a few buildings of this in a desert or in every electronic device as the video says. Normally we move energy around and extract the energy by converting its high potential to low potential. This takes no transportation of energy and requires no generating of high potential in the first place. The natural environment is already the high potential to be extracted from.

This is a subatomic effect made macro.

Graphene is so small, 100 layers stacked on top of each other would accomplish the thickness of a pencil tip (less than one centimeter)
A few questions raise then;
Would a giant sheet of graphene generate more voltage due to its immense volume?
Layers stacked on top of each other still generate energy?
How many graphene layers and how big do they need to be to be a reliable power source?

From an electromechanical perspective, this seems like sound physics. The fact that wires have a thickness is in most cases a great source of resistance, because a moving electon creates a magnetic field that hinders the electrons around it, creating concentrations of charge that you otherwise wouldn't see.

This ~1Å wide sheet could, by the slightest vibration, cause magnetic fields that push the electrons in the sheet around, without those then hindering the others around it. I can totally see that generating pockets of charge "for free".

My chemics and mechanics aren't all that great, but the stuff about it being 2D is bullshit, atoms have width in and by themselves. What I think they failed to convey is simply the structure of graphene, which is a sheets of carbon atoms with some connections to atoms up or down. These outward connections are in my limited understanding there because of a discrepancy between the sheet's pattern and the amount of bonds carbon atoms need to form. Great for them for making it work though.

I'm pretty sure these things are inherently fragile, so you can't heat them or anything without everything vibrating apart, and if it didn't vibrate apart, the pockets of charge would probably get more numerous rather than larger, so you'd need smaller electrodes to extract from it.

The thing to stress here is that this would pretty much be the uncontested most efficient way to turn heat into electricity, since there's no steps in between causing additionall losses. Combine it with some nearly-loss-free electrode and wires (carbon nanotubes?), and that's as efficient as converting atomic movement (heat) to electron movement (electicity) is going to get at room temperature. The W/m^3 is maximal if you can assemble it optimally. More conductive materials like copper and silver don't form enough bonds to form such sheets as far as I know, so they might not beat graphene even theoretically. Straight solar power is theoretically even more efficient, but requires exposure to the sun, this doesn't. It will happily keep generating day and night.

Now, there are some caveats, it's unusable with the technology we have today. There are no 10uW lightbulbs or motors, let alone rectifiers needed to power digital electronics or to combine multiple sheets, but they will come.

>>91527
To clarify:
>Would a giant sheet of graphene generate more voltage due to its immense volume?
What matters here is the amount of electrodes you hook up and manage to combine without them cancelling eachother out.
>Layers stacked on top of each other still generate energy?
Less so, because the field of one layer interferes with the other, and thicker material has more mechanical resistance to heat vibration.
>How many graphene layers and how big do they need to be to be a reliable power source?
Reliable meaning you can be sure of its output, it is reliable although fragile. For powering cutting-edge electronics, you'd need to develop a 10uW rectifier which right now doesn't exist to combine about 10 of them.

quote:

This large-scale movement is a consequence of graphene
changing locally its overall curvature (e.g., a curved down
to curved up transition), while the small-scale movements
are simple vibrations of the membrane with no inversion of
its curvature. We can track how this happens in the high-
temperature simulation, the random up and down move-
ment at times add together in the same direction resulting in
a long excursion to another equilibrium configuration on
the other side of the fixed boundary atoms. Given that
four such events happen in 1 ns at 3000 K, one can predict
that these events will happen several times for our STM
measurements carried out at room temperature [23].
Previously, we reported that the presence of a temperature
gradient can induce mirror buckling [21]. In this Letter, we
report a new mechanism, spontaneous mirror buckling,
which occurs without a temperature gradient.
Our measurements uncover an unexplored spatial and
temporal domain in membrane fluctuations with profound
implications both for our fundamental understanding
and technological applications of membranes. Properly
understood, the random membrane fluctuations can be
usefully exploited. For example, energy harvesting from
the continuous movement of a massive system is an
important application of stochastic nanoresonators [24].

I have a very limited knowledge of physics, but if this is proven definitively then it could be a useful power source for small emergency items like a radio. On a larger scale it would be more economical to use conventional or nuclear power sources.

>>91516
At most it's a power "source" (as you said, merely a conversion from temperature) that can supply electricity without any detectable fuel supply. Useful if you want a bunker completely sealed from the world aside from ambient temperature. It's a low-temperature thermopile.

Interesting. I am eternally skeptical about anything that claims to produce free energy, but it is certainly interesting.
>>91503
>Will they let us have it?
Never, not for free at least. Someone always needs to receive lavish profits.

>>91503
is this the key to space travel?

>>91633
Space travel is interesting because if superconductors can produce artificial gravity when cold, and space is automatically cold…
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1992PhyC..203..441P

Nuclear reactor, graphite membranes convert to electricity, electricity through space cooled superconductor, propel yourself by pushing on spacetime itself.

What should humanity do when it has excess economic capacity?

>Develop weapons to kill each other
>Try out exotic technology to go to space

Decisions, decisions.

>>91635
Space isn't necessarily cold. It's only described as that since there's almost no matter to accept the energy being poured into it. If that superconductor wasn't still in some heavily climate-controlled part of the ship, it wouldn't function if it was anywhere the sun's ambient energy output because it would serve as the matter to receive all the heat.

"Space is cold in the sense that it’s big and empty and any object placed in space can radiate a limitless amount of energy in all directions, so if there is no sun nearby to warm it up, it will eventually lose almost all its heat and grow very cold indeed—so bring some coffee." -C. Stuart Hardwick

>>91635
I don't want to venture out into space with niggers and kikes still about, problems need to be corrected on earth before we spread them to the rest of the galaxy and beyond

>>91636
Definitely problems to be engineered around. But the possibility of it automatically radiating away all heat is useful. Also if we are operating in space and travelling between stars, we would be most away from solar radiation. We turn space into an asset.

>>91637
true we don't want kikes in space, but niggers would make good shields against the Xenoscum.

>>91637
This. Hell, if we can't bring ourselves to genocide the niggers and kikes for their sins, would you want them talking to aliens and getting turned against us?

They're a liability. They're lesser. They can't survive in our era of humanity, do you think they could do ANYTHING useful in space besides act as cannon fodder? It only takes one nigger to chimpout and kill everyone on his spaceship. And in the space age, many white ships will outperform black ships. This will be blamed on "Racism" unless we as a species can finally move on from the mistake that was the R-word.