Power Generation With Nanotubes

NubKnacker writes "Business World is carrying an article about how an Indian scientiest at IIT, Bangalore has come up with a new innovative method to produce power by blowing gases over carbon nanotubes. The underlying physics of the idea is quite simple yet no one had thought of it until today."

Comments

Re:Very cool, related story in Nature

[ToshiroOC]

It costs energy to blow gas over the wire.

Gedanken experiment:
You have two tanks of air at equal pressure, and a nanotube setup like the one described in the article in the valve connecting the two tanks. You open the valve - and no air moves across the nanotube, since the tanks are at equal pressure. Now, you pump air from tank 1 to tank 2, and the nanotube will generate energy - but only an equal or lesser amount of energy than it took to pump the air across the tanks.

Re:Cost prohibitive for non-sensing applications

[Delf]

RTFA, it's not just nanotubes that demonstate the effect:

Ajay Sood, professor of physics at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and his student Shankar Ghosh blew a gas over a piece of wire and watched it generate electric current. Two years ago he had blown water over ultra-tiny wires - carbon nanotubes - and watched them generate a current too. Carbon nanotubes are bits of exotica for the layperson; you expect them to behave in ways that you had not known before. Some of the wires in the second experiment (apart from the nanotubes) were semiconductors, not too different from the ones inside your the ubiquitous personal computer. They are the stuff of everyday life. You could build the device with a few thousand rupees.

Re:Very cool, related story in Nature

[hawkbug]

Fortunately, that's why we are able to use the sun to heat one tank of gas (Aka green house) and then open the valve - so during the day, solar power heats the gas so we can use it to generate electricity.

IISc and not IIT

[florist]

It is Indian Institute of Science Bangalore and not IIT