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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
Can't we just extract it without having to put some in first?
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.
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?
This wasn't a flywheel and isn't kinetic energy.
Magnetic.
I guess maybe you could say it's billions of electron's functioning as flywheels, but still, no.
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.
I took from the article that the main use for this would be to replace chemical reactions in batteries.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
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.
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
Cheapskate. Anyone who's anyone gets their batteries by funding research projects, not visiting Radio Shack.
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
This is /., aka "News for Nerds" - not "Consumer Reports".
I'd ask you to turn in your geek card but obviously you don't have one.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
... and not all of it from the magnets themselves.
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.
Wow, that actually is really really cool.
Theres a limit on how much a material can be magnetized before its self-repellent magnetic energy rips it apart.
moving parts in computers (and apparently can act as a replacement for the transistor).
I don't think this is a replacement for the transistor, there certainly wasn't any indication that these can perform any logic operations. A replacement for your hard drive, which besides the fan (which you will probably still need), is the moving parts of your computer. It remains to be seen whether this process could be useful at scale. You need billions of these little things, along with some method for reading and writing to each unit. The HDD industry has been working for years (still in R&D phase) on spintronics to store data, and there is still a long way to go. But there is indeed great promise in it as well.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
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.
That's actually the mental image I had upon reading TFS. Millions (I guess I didn't stack as many together as you did) of little flywheels storing then giving off 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.
Don't worry, the current conversion to socialism should get them spinning quite nicely.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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.
Really? What I took from the article was that the author did not understand anything the researchers were telling them.
No. That is what THEY were looking at it. They also mentioned about car batteries. Chances are that the research is being funded by some Hi-tech company such as Hitachi.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
(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"
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.
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!"
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.
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.
All I can say is "Whoosh!" Attacking the Bible as if it were meant to be completely literal in all places is a straw-man argument that lazy people make when they want to dismiss it out of hand. Sure, there are people who believe it _is_ meant to be taken completely literally, and they are as silly as you imply, but they represent a small minority of Christendom both in numbers, and especially historically.
What about the people who understand that much of Scripture is allegorical, that it does not contradict history, or science, but supplements it by allowing for the possibility of something larger, and more subtle, than what we see with our eyes or conceive with our minds, that it is based on a divinely-inspired oral history that expresses powerful and sublime ideas in a sometimes simplified context that promotes human understanding, and that it is not some kind of goofy textbook on planetary evolution, zoology, or strange human endurance records?
It does not take faith to lack belief, only to believe something.
Indeed. An agnostic can use that defense, but not an atheist. An agnostic admits he does not know and cannot know that God exists. He correctly recognizes that only faith can decide the issue either way for any person and that he, the agnostic, does not have faith. That's a position I can respect as a completely logical one.
An atheist does believe something positive: that God does not exist. Given the ethereal nature of the definition of God, Who is unseen, all-powerful, can do anything He wants how can you prove anything? Let's face it, Someone like that is rather hard to pin down, or to rule out. He could, to be brutally honest, have created the world 6000 years ago and planted fossils as some sort of practical joke. And why just the Judeo-Christian God, what about all the other belief systems, including pantheism? Some people think God is the sun, or the moon, or the winds, or the clouds, or... everything. Ruling all those out seems like rather a mounting task.
Believing He doesn't exist is ultimately as much a matter of faith and believing He does. You are free to believe it and to defend it, and can certainly find reasons to back it up, but you are deluding yourself if you claim you can prove it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.