Thermopower waves

Point out news stories, on the net or in mainstream media, related to polywell fusion.

Moderators: tonybarry, MSimon

Post Reply
DeltaV
Posts: 2245
Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 5:05 am

Thermopower waves

Post by DeltaV »

Probably hype, but, in case not...
http://www.physorg.com/news187186888.html

Giorgio
Posts: 3061
Joined: Wed Oct 07, 2009 6:15 pm
Location: China, Italy

Post by Giorgio »

Very interesting.

Nextbigfuture has some additional links and supplemental material worth of reading:
http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop ... 714-s1.pdf

Let's see if in the next monthes some other team will be able to replicate the experiments and confirm the measurements.

Skipjack
Posts: 6805
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 2:29 pm

Post by Skipjack »

This whole thing leaves me mighty confused and I have a feeling that it is being overhyped.
Also, why do they compare a combustion generator (more or less, from what I understand) with a Lithium Ion battery?
Then why would you want to inject something into yourself that will use combustion to power itself?
Does this thing now store energy, or does it produce electricity via a certain way of burning something?

tombo
Posts: 334
Joined: Fri May 09, 2008 1:10 am
Location: Washington USA

Post by tombo »

With the right absorbing additions a photon of say bremstrahlung or IR could create a pulse like a splash.
It would not be ongoing but could well travel the length of the tube like a soliton.
I'm just speculating here. It says it is not very efficient yet.
-Tom Boydston-
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?" ~Albert Einstein

DeltaV
Posts: 2245
Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 5:05 am

Post by DeltaV »

At first glance, it looks like the CNTs are consumed in the process, a one-shot device.

I wonder if this would work with CNTs in thermal contact (at one end) with a metal plate that gets hit from the other side with thermal pulses. Not enough energy to destroy the CNTs, but maybe enough of a gradient to produce a voltage, repetitively.

It would also be interesting to know if this works with unrolled CNTs, better known as graphene. Ordinary graphite is just many layers of graphene, so the parallel structure is already there.

Post Reply