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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.
This looks pretty exciting, although this is not going to replace nuclear power as the main hope for renewable energy, its always good to know that we have other options if need be.
Here in the lab we've been researching a new method of providing power to small devices such as watches, which is almost a new way of generating electricity although it has many similarities to maxwells devil device.
The main component of our device is a ratchet wheel that can only turn in one direction, which we place inside a box containing a pressurised gas. As the gas molecules hit the ratchet they will cause it to turn in one direction only, and so small potentials can be genrated. The beauty of this device is that as the collisons are perfectly elastic there will be no energy losses and so no bulky power supply is needed. Hopefully within 10 years most cell phones could be powered this way.
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
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