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"Spin Battery" Effect Discovered
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Miami and at the Universities of Tokyo and Tohoku, in Japan, have discovered a spin battery effect: the ability to store energy into the magnetic spin of a material and to later extract that energy as electricity, without a chemical reaction. The researchers have built an actual device to demonstrate the effect that has a diameter about that of a human hair. This is a potentially game-changing discovery that could affect battery and other technologies. Quoting: Although the actual device... cannot even light up an LED..., the energy that might be stored in this way could potentially run a car for miles. The possibilities are endless, Barnes said.'"
This sounds cool, but what they are not telling you is that it will stop working if you bring it south of the equator. :)
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Is this due to the scale of the device/experiment or is it a limitation in the output that they can get it to generate so far?
...the energy that might be stored in this way could potentially run a car for miles. The possibilities are endless, Barnes said.
Awesome, I have yet to travel miles by car.
I am the lawn!
Oh, yeah. We know how the spin works. But it works only in the PR side of things.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In THIS house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics. So you create a magnetic field, okay. Great. What's to prevent everything that's metallic in the area from moving around it, inducing current in it, and converting it into useless thermal energy? In other words -- what's preventing the battery from discharging? It might be good for a really high-capacity capacitor, but a battery? Batteries are long term.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
You will see that the main use of this is to replace moving parts in computers (and apparently can act as a replacement for the transistor).
Pretty interesting stuff but I would wait for an actual tech demo, it all seems pretty pie in the sky right now.
Can't we just extract it without having to put some in first?
Did anyone else think that this was going to be a scientific explanation about why your batteries last a bit longer when you take them out and rotate them and put them back in?
Cue dildo jokes in 3... 2... 1...
from the article: "The new technology is a step towards the creation of computer hard drives with no moving parts"
Maybe we could give it a cool 3 letter acronym. Maybe SSD, Solid State Drive, yeah! This could revolutionize things!
Yes, I know I'm taking it out of context, but that was really poorly written.
I think they invented the flywheel already.
Anyway it will be interesting to see how KERS plays out this coming season. With the amount of money spent on research in Formula one they are bound to come up with some innovative but expensive technology for storing energy.
Do not open or crush battery. Severe risk of releasing a life-sucking vortex.
Do not dispose in fire. Doing so could loose a storm of flaming vortices.
Do not use this battery on carnival rides, while figure skating, or place in spinning clothes washer. Risk of severe gyroscopic reactions, which may lead to property damage, personal injury or death.
If this does prove to be useful for batteries, would it eliminate issues related to battery memory?
It appears current rechargeable batteries "age" due to chemical reactions even if not used. Even more so due to repeated charge cycles.
With no chemical reactions in play, does this mean people won't be forced to upgrade their phones simply because their battery is all but dead?
I though someone had got the induced decay of Hf spin isomers to work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_gamma_emission
1300 megajoules per gram would be a good battery.
but how about you wait and tell me about it WHEN I CAN GO BUY IT AT THE STORE FOR $19.99...
Although the actual device... cannot even light up an LED...
So you're telling me this thing is less powerful than a potato?
The next step would be to determine how this could be made more dense and mass-produced. GaAs is already a common semiconductor substrate, but how difficult is it to deposit all those layers? 1nm = 10 angstroms is pretty thin to try to make consistenly if I'm not mistaken...
www.purevolume.com/martyd
if you spin up a mechanical flywheel, you can later pull back out the energy.
there are datacenter UPS that run on this principle.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flywheel+ups&start=0&sa=N
the thing is, if they get off balance, the uncontrolled release of the kinetic energy
(ooh, a car analogy) is similar to a gas tank explosion in destructive capability
What happens when the spin stored energy releases in an uncontrolled fashion?
what is the failure analysis of a commercial grade 'spin battery' going to look like?
if laptops 'splode-- buring human laps occasionally....
now imagine a spin battery rated with 10X the stored electrical juice on your lap
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
... and not all of it from the magnets themselves.
This sounds like a cool new device. How come they can't state the actual wattage. If they said pico-watts. I would have been cool with that. I am very interested in nano-batteries and even something that produced a pico-watt would be of interest. Especially if it can scale up.and be combined with other batteries to boost the overall power.
I am not asking for the secret sauce (yet), I just want to know how excited to really get.
It spins to produce power? And it can run my car? Does that mean that I can use a hand-crank to charge my car, just like my XO Laptop?
Hmm...maybe in addition to computers, we can bring cars to children in third-world countries with no schools....
*sees business opportunity* /. in the future, by the people who actually did do something with this*
*passes it up*
*waits for patent lawsuits to spring up on
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Here's an old article about the battery technology of the electric car by General Motors(EV1) of the 1990's, being kept from the public by the 'Evil' oil company Chevron, buying up the patent rights to the technology from GM (also an 'Evil' company, or just plain stupid).
http://www.ev1.org/chevron.htm
~ awaiting spiritual enlightenment ~
At least for the proof of concept stage, they might want to make a light source that consumes significantly less juice than an LED, and has a greater tolerance for fluctuation.
From Wikipedia:
"LEDs must be supplied with the voltage above the threshold and a current below the rating. This can involve series resistors or current-regulated power supplies." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Led#Disadvantages
Using an LED as an example of what this tiny power souce can't power seems futile at this point.
I'm thinking space. Like in ships with huge engines and a safe way to store large amounts of power for inter-stellar travel.
...would it create a black hole?
Like those deer whistlers on cars. Gotta make sure they're polarized properly.
Punch drunk, and without bail.
Readers with subscriptions can see the whole paper.
Dog is my co-pilot.
I for one welcome the new SI unit human hair diameter overlord.
You're thinking of a single rotating mass, such as a big hunk of metal cut into a flywheel. They're using lots of tiny, independent masses.
Force = mass * acceleration
Yo momma's so fat, even duracell doesn't wanna see her spin.
www.isoHunt.com
That we're talking about _spin_ here, as in a property of subatomic particles corresponding to an 'intrinsic' angular momentum, not as in something that's physically 'spinning'. Electrons spin +1/2 or -1/2 and that's it. They can't stop. The energy here is being stored in the form of the _orientations_ of these spins, not the spin itself. What's keeping them that way is conservation of spin. Which is analogous to conservation of angular momentum. (Bound) Electrons can't change their spin state spontaneously. Which is why stuff which is magnetized stays that way for a long time. It's also the reason for phosphorescence. While I think what they've done here is undeniably pretty cool, in turning spin-state transitions into electricity directly, it's probably not going to create any real competition for conventional batteries, for fairly simple reasons. Batteries store electricity in the form of chemical redox states, which means adding/removing electrons from atoms/ions. The energy differences between spin states are typically an order of magnitude smaller than the energy difference between redox states.
Have they really been able to reduce friction enough to be able to store mechanical energy for long periods of time?
Wow, that actually is really really cool.
Device that stores energy in a magnetic field. How is this not just an inductor?
I guess if they want a car to go miles they are thinking of getting these things to spin a few thousand RPM per minute? either that or weight tons.
I guess if you ever had a car crash and the spin battery fell out of its case you would have a pretty dangerous projectile.
Theres a limit on how much a material can be magnetized before its self-repellent magnetic energy rips it apart.
Spintronics is a little too far out of my ken (I was always more of a radiation physicist, where everything comes in nice little packages instead of fields), but if I'm reading the paper correctly, they're saying that they can apply a static magnetic field to one of these devices and then can measure a voltage drop across a resistor hooked up to the device. They can get a few millivolts from a 1.2 Tesla field, which persists for at least ten minutes but does decay in that time frame. When they remove the magnetic field, the voltage disappears.
I guess my question is that if the field is static, where is the energy coming from that drives the current giving rise to the voltage? I'm also wondering how one regenerates the voltage after it discharges completely.
"More spin" is really "more aligned spin". In normal matter spin is disordered and aligned randomly in either of two states.
During the Bush era we could have placed the founding fathers in special spin battery caskets, and the millions of RPMs they would have generated during every press release and speech could have solved our dependency on non-renewable energy!
A battery on the scale of a hair may be fine for driving a car the size of a grain of salt. SInce one always has to take these announcements with a bag of salt, it may work out fine.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I would rather imagine someone actually understanding what the article talks about before posting on slashdot.
Closes eyes *mumblemumblemumble
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Bypassing the layers of blogs, here's the actual paper. But it costs $32 to read more than the abstract.
This is an application of superparamagnetism. Paramagnetism is ordinarily a weak phenomenon, but there are some new materials for which this effect is much stronger.
It's too early to tell if this is useful. Right now, it's in the category of "minor development in materials science overpromoted as a major breakthrough". It might turn out to have some relevance to MRI imaging or disk drives, both of which rely on fine-scale magnetic effects.
How refreshing! It's been quite a while since the last big claim where some tiny physical effect from someone's doctoral thesis or obscure scientific research was overblown far beyond physical reality, and projected to solve great social and economic problems, produce enormous wealth for its inventors, bring justice to the world, cure herpes, feed the hungry, blah blah blah.
Article describes that nano-magnets apply a large magnetic field to "wound-up" the spin-battery.
Having charged the hypothetical battery the article claims, the one that can run a car for miles. It is possible to discharge this battery near instantaneously, that should theoretically generate an EMP without a nuke. Something the military would be interested in.
Off to patent my idea now.
Scientists think that with a few modifications the new technology could work with kilometres too, though it would still be recommended that the host country is a monarchy or at least a strongly-presidental republic.
Other technical difficulties like the extremely strong gyroscopic effect should be overcome as well.
I don't know if anyone else has noticed yet, but buzzspeak is on average, substantially down in the last few months. The recession has begun to bite and the surfing the financial high tide with radical new buzzwords is no longer a winning strategy. This is the first piece of buzz speak I've heard in quite a while to be honest.
The game has changed, and the language along with it.
May the Maths Be with you!
... a flying car, or they're just wasting our time!
Have gnu, will travel.
(search on keyword "battery" if you don't want to read all the way through)
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904/chinese-innovation/3
Some here may already have read about this, but it appears that China makes some very good batteries, mainly for the electronics industry. Now, it seems they had not long ago seen a company produce (ugly) electric cars, but batteries that rival the USA Big 3 (well, which of them's big anymore?) and even Tesla. Given that Tesla's demo/sports car ran over $100k, and despite their announced sedan:
http://www.autoblog.com/2008/02/17/tesla-whitestar-electric-sedan-to-debut-this-year/
there is going to be some stiff global competition for such batteries, especially if what Chinese companies are working on can take off.
To recap the recent Detroit Show:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901u/detroit-auto-show
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You just lost...
Finally the Evangelion units will be able to fight without an umbilical cord for longer than 5 minutes without risking pilot assimilation or precipitating the third impact!
But... the future refused to change.
Couldn't agree with you more. Shame I have to post anonymously since we're not supposed to write comments just saying, "Yea, that's an awesome post" without adding any content to the conversation (I really do have nothing to add and certainly couldn't have said it better myself).
Although the actual device... cannot even light up an LED..., the energy that might be stored in this way could potentially run a car for miles.
Although the actual pig... cannot even jump more than one foot from the earth..., [if someday equipped with wings,] one might have a fine personal aerial transport system!
That is all.
Does this mean the plot to use humans as batteries can finally begin?
This is a fantastic discovery. A new way to store energy, via magnetic spin? That is akin to finding a new form of matter, it's just amazing that we did not know this before. There are likely a few choice bits of technology--concepts awaiting us out there--before things such as Warp Drive could be possible. One could imagine some alien intelligence looking at us before today, thinking: "Well how can those Earthlings even dream of interstellar travel--they haven't even discovered magnetic spin yet!"
Here you go.
that is all
Ahh my personal favourite unit of power measurement - "How many LED's can it power". Lets log that one with Horse Power and Coulombs.
Every 3-5 years for the past 20 years, I've heard about some NEW BATTERY tech that is going to change the world. The batteries I use in my flashlight look different then the batteries from 15 years ago, I can recharge them a few times sure, but you know, they die just like the 15 year old ones just as fast or never work when the power is out. :/
When this discharges rapidly, you get thrown through time, leaving a burning trail in your absence.
We are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. I dismiss your god as you dismiss the others.
And we are also both theists. Your faith in the existence of zero gods is as strong as my faith in the existence of one God. The only difference is the number of gods.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Maybe they should strap a bunch of these things in a cars tires. Or on the hub/drum. Or inside the hubcap. :)
They can recharge as they spin !
Sorry, I just have to point out that you aren't being logical.
It does not take faith to lack belief, only to believe something. Atheism is simply a lack in belief in any particular god or gods. Saying that disbelief requires faith does not increase the possibility of your god existing or make it just as likely as disbelief.
Even if that weren't true, there is actually ample proof that your god in particular does not exist. Here's a small sampling:
There are other possibilities. For one, we know that the gospels aren't completely true, being specifically that they contradict each other (with specific reasons proposed). Then take the fact that they weren't written until decades after Jesus's supposed death. I learned about the "grapevine" in kindergarten. When stories are passed around orally, they are changed. This is almost certainly the case with the gospels, if only for the fact that most of the miraculous aspects of the story of Jesus were common to other gods of the time and the past.
Your "evidence" is a book that is illogical, contradicts itself, and draws its juicy parts from pre-existing stories. Combine this book with wishfulness, selective reading, a lot of people that say they have faith in it and a system of indoctrinating and brainwashing children into the faith and you get your unfounded beliefs.
What I wonder is why people believe that faith (belief without evidence) is a virtue. If that were the case, then why did God and Jesus supposedly perform so many darn miracles? The most certain way to become an atheist is to read the bible and try to understand it.