Scientists have figured out how to harness Brownian motion – literally the thermal energy of individual molecules – to make electricity, by cleverly connecting diodes up to pieces of graphene, which are atom-thick sheets of Carbon. The team has successfully demonstrated their theory (which was previously thought to be impossible by prominent physicists like Richard Feynman), and are now trying to make a kind of micro-harvester that can basically produce inexhaustible power for things like smart sensors.
The most impressive thing about the system is that it doesn’t require a thermal gradient to do work, like other kinds of heat-harvesting systems (Stirling engines, Peltier junctions, etc.). As long as it’s a bit above absolute zero, there’s enough thermal energy “in the system” to make the graphene vibrate continuously, which induces a current that the diodes can then pump out.
Original journal link: https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.108.024130
It sounds like this is a method for harvesting zero-point energy. If so, and if it works, that would certainly be a big step forward.
Sadly it’s not extracting energy from the quantum flux :) But happily, it is extracting energy from the heat of the world – of which there is plenty (enough for us to treat it as unlimited).
Thanks for the explanation.
I’m getting one scientific revolution ahead of things here.
Is it? The fact it needs to be above absolute zero makes me think it’s instead just a clever way of harvesting the thermal energy of the environment without large apparatus.
It’s definitely not extracting energy from the vacuum. It’s converting latent heat energy into electrical energy due to clever engineering and the quirky properties of graphene.
Even that could be huge, if it’s scalable and cost effective.