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New Method To Generate Electricity from Water
spaceling writes "The BBC reports reporting on research published in the Institute of Physics Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering of the first new method of generating electricity in over 150 years. Larry Kostiuk and Daniel Kwok 'created a glass block, two centimetres in diameter and three millimetres thick, containing about 400,000 to 500,000 individual channels...[and] generated about 10 volts with a current of around a milliamp. This allowed the team to successfully power a lightbulb.'" This has also been covered all over the place.
BTW, nuclear reactors are not a new way of generating energy that was discovered in the last hundred and fifty years.
The energy comes from the water pressure requiredd to force the water to flow through the channels.
As far as I understand it, The glass around the chaneels is charged; for easy let's say it's positively charged. When water with ions (read: salt) is pumped through the tubes the positive ions cannot pass: they are repelled and stay behind, whereas the negative ions can move freely through the tube and out the other end. Entrance is positive, exit is negative, hence the potential difference and current can be extracted. The energy comes from the pumping power and is converted to electrical power. I just don't see how you can keep water pressurised for months while the floodgates (tubes) are open, because that's what you'll have to do if you want to make it into a battery...
All in all it's not as intricate as the BBC makes it out to be...
See, for instance, http://www.amasci.com/emotor/kelvin.html
Which operates under a very similar principle, but with macrochannels. I built one of these when I was a kid, thirty-some years ago. It is so damn cool, your tongue sticks to it!
So it seems like there must have been a few new technologies for generating electricity in the last 150 years. Many people mentioned that nuclear power plants use steam driven turbines, an old method of producing electricity; however, I have read about some that heat a conducting liquid and then the energy is converted into electricity using magnets and the Lorentz force. This must be fairly new, since it probably couldn't even have been understood until the mid to late 17th century. I've certainly never really heard of people using this sort of method until more recently.
Also, what about photovoltaics and like technologies in solar cells. Clearly, those must have been around since before 1905 (when Einstein explained the effect); however, I'd guess they are newer than 150 years old.
What about fuel cells? Getting energy from converting oxygen and hydrogen into water (or a similar reaction with methenol or whatever) is not a new concept, but using a membrain to harness the electrical energy seems to be a fairly new idea. Unless you don't consider it to be different from a battery.
I'm not sure the claim is false, but it seems quite dubious.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
Correct. Discovery of the photoelectric effect is credited to Hertz in 1887, so it's less than 120 years old even if you use that discovery, rather than Einstein's explaining how it works.
No it is not.
For anyone with university level knowledge of chemistry this is extremely fascinating because it harnesses the biggest pest in electrolysis and battery design. The so called dual layer phenomena.
So even if it never ever makes it to become a decent generator the reseach may still give insight in making existing devices and fuel cells more efficient
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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