Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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. Very cool, related story in Nature by tao_of_biology · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    --

    -- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."