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

Very cool, related story in Nature

[tao_of_biology]

The journal Nature just ran a seperate news story a couple weeks ago about carban nanotubes' properties with regards to temperature. That story can be found here.

From the Nature article:

Ortwin Hess from the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK and colleagues say that if you took the temperature at one end of a 10-micrometre nanotube, it would not necessarily have the same temperature as the other end, no matter how long it was left to reach a thermal equilibrium. Such a nanotube is about as long as a sheet of paper is thick.

Now, I'm definitely no physicist so please pardon my ignorance--maybe someone can help me out. Does this mean that the temperature differential created on the carbon nanotube wire that causes the current to flow won't ever reach equilibrium? Doesn't this seem too good to be true? Just keep blowing gas over the wire, and you'll have limitless energy.

Re:Very cool, related story in Nature

[mdielmann]

And at night, when the tank cools down, you can generate energy again, from the air going in the opposite direction. This system generates energy in much the same way as a stirling engine does - moving heat to generate kinetic energy vs. moving air to generate electric energy.

I haven't read the article (I'm not that new here), but if there was an issue with the direction of flow, a simple system with 2 bi-directional valves and a little extra pipe could guarantee the gas flowed in a given direction that section of pipe, regardless of which tank was the source and which was the destination.