Far Future: Eternal Battery?

[FutureBoy]

Physicists Just Found a Loophole in Graphene That Could Unlock Clean, Limitless Energy
April 27, 2018 Science
By all measures, graphene should not exist. The fact it does comes down to some neat loophole in physics which sees with an impossible 2D sheet of atoms behave like a good 3D material.

New research has delved into graphene’s rippling, discovering a physical happening on an atomic scale which could be manipulated as a means to make a virtually limitless source of clean energy.

The group of physicists led by researchers in the University of Arkansas didn’t set out to discover a radical new way to power electronics.

THEIR AIM WAS MUCH MORE HUMBLE — TO ONLY OBSERVE HOW GRAPHENE SHAKES.

We’re all familiar with the gritty black carbon-based substance known as graphite, which is often blended with a ceramic substance to generate the so-called ‘lead’ in pencils.

The thing that we see as smears left from the pen are actually stacked sheets of carbon atoms arranged in a ‘chicken wire’ pattern. Since these sheets aren’t bonded together, they slip easily over one another.

For years scientists have believed if it had been possible to isolate the individual sheets of graphite, leaving a 2-dimensional airplane of carbon ‘chicken wire’ to stand on its own.

In 2004 a set of physicists in the University of Manchester achieved the impossible, isolating sheets by a lump of graphite that were an atom thick.

To exist, the 2D material had to be cheating in some way, behaving as a 3D material in order to offer some level of robustness.

It turns out the ‘loophole’ has been the random jiggling of atoms popping back and forth, giving the 2D sheet of graphene a handy third dimension.

TO PUT IT DIFFERENTLY, GRAPHENE WAS POSSIBLE BECAUSE IT WASN’T PERFECTLY FLAT AT ALL, BUT VIBRATED ON A NUCLEAR LEVEL IN SUCH A WAY THAT ITS OWN BONDS DIDN’T SPONTANEOUSLY UNRAVEL.

In order to correctly measure the level of the jiggling, physicist Paul Thibado recently has directed a team of grad students in a very simple study.

They placed sheets of graphene across a reassuring copper grid and observed the changes in the atoms’ positions with a scanning tunneling microscope.

While they could record the bobbing of atoms at the graphene, the numbers did not really fit any anticipated version. They could not replicate the data they were collecting from one trial to another.
“The students felt we weren’t likely to learn anything useful,” states Thibado, “but I thought if we were asking too easy a question”

Thibado pushed the experimentation into another direction, searching for a pattern by altering the way that they looked at the information.

“We separated each image into sub-images,” states Thibado.

“Looking at large-scale averages hid the various patterns. Each region of one image, when viewed over time, generated a more purposeful pattern.”

Patterns of small, random fluctuations combining to form sudden, dramatic shifts are known as Lévy flights. While they have been observed in complex systems of climate and Science, this was the first time they’d been seen within a nuclear scale.

While Thibado was measuring the rate and scale of those grapheme wave, he figured it might be possible to exploit it as a ambient temperature power source.

Put electrodes to both sides of sections of the buckling graphene, and you’d have a miniature shifting voltage.

This movie clip below explains the procedure in detail:

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[FutureBoy]

Can I get some of this power source in a "battery" big enough to power a CT but small and light enough to not overburden the CT?

That would be nice.

The example in the video is of a single 10-micron x 10-micron sheet of graphene producing 10 microwatts of power. Of course, one would also need the added infrastructure to harvest this energy.

 

[Crissa]

Hum... that might be a way to turn minute 'heat' (the vibration) back into something we can use, electricity.

At first I thought it was another silly perpetual energy machine, but given grapheme's conductivity... huh.

I don't see how to make it a practical amount of energy, tho.

-Crissa

 

[Bill906]

Isn’t there a law against limitless sources of energy?

 

[CyberGus]

Isn’t there a law against limitless sources of energy?

Physics is the law. Everything else is a suggestion.

The sun has been burning for 5 billion years or so. That’s sufficiently limitless for me, although I feel the article was poorly written and did little to explain the phenomenon.

 

[John K]

Hum... that might be a way to turn minute 'heat' (the vibration) back into something we can use, electricity.

At first I thought it was another silly perpetual energy machine, but given grapheme's conductivity... huh.

I don't see how to make it a practical amount of energy, tho.

-Crissa

When you add magnets, it is perpetually amazing.

 

[John K]

Limitless energy is a self-filling raw energy hold cleanly converted to usable energy.

I have accumulated three rolls of duct tape, four rare earth magnets, twine and one undersized brown chicken egg. Limitless energy is just a few pieces of tape away.

I am open to investors. We can achieve greatness if you donate your 5 digit reservation number.

 

[JBee]

Isn’t there a law against limitless sources of energy?

Well first law of thermodynamics is the law of energy conservation, which says energy cannot be created or destroyed.

By this definition "energy" is already in and of itself perpetual. It can change form but can never cease.

The question is if through it's conversion into another form of energy, you can do something useful with it. For some, this is more a perception problem rather than a scientific problem.

For example an EV converts chemical energy stored in the battery to turn a electromagnetic motor to do work to displace air and increase gravity potential energy to move a vehicle from position A to position B.

Perpetual motion machines, or at least the common perception of them, tend to be machines that seemingly have the capacity to convert energy in excess of what energy has been put into the system. However, this does not always mean they don't necessarily work, rather that we lack the understanding of where they source the energy from. Hence the perception problem.

A simplified example would be to consider a otherwise insignificant vibration or footstep at the top of a snowy hill, and one not being aware of gravities potential, that from that minute disturbance can create a avalanche at the bottom of the hill.

Essentially, a little bit of energy can "cascade" to gather and release more energy as it falls from one potential to the next. Domino's work like this as well. As does a "chain reaction" in nuclear devices, which also release more energy than was put into them to start off with. Interestingly, that is also why the international nuclear conventions also cover forms of perpetual motion, and exclude their use specificly to those who are members of such treaties. So yes, legally there is also a law against that, if you aren't a "internationally accepted" nuclear power.

 

[ldjessee]

My problems with this article are many, but let’s start with ‘graphene should not exist’?!

Is this like how the myth that bumblebees should not be able to fly? Ie, wrong and was never true?

At no time before has so much knowledge been collected and so widely available yet we seem still capable and happy to spread complete garbage.

 

[charliemagpie]

The interchangeability of a wave and a particle

There is a momentum right there.

Infinite free Blue Energy

Buy $TSLA lol

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