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Power Generation With Nanotubes

Posted by timothy on from the now-we-need-magic-tail-generators dept.

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."

1 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Very cool, related story in Nature by ToshiroOC · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.