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New Device Harvests Energy In Darkness (nytimes.com) 26
His puck-in-a-dish is elevated on aluminum legs, enabling air to flow around it. As the dark puck loses warmth to the night sky, the side facing the stars grows colder than the side facing the air-warmed tabletop. This slight difference in temperature generates a flow of electricity. When paired with a voltage converter, the prototype produced 25 milliwatts of power per square meter. That is about three orders of magnitude lower than what a typical solar panel produces, and well short of even the roughly 4-watt maximum efficiency for such devices. Still, several experts said the prototype was an important contribution to a new and relatively unusual space in the renewable energy sector.
That is nothing (Score:5, Funny)
by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Thursday September 12, 2019 @10:15PM (#59188956) Homepage JournalI heard about a $30 Device Turns the Cold of Outer Space Into Renewable Energy. Not sure where I heard about it.
But this is a puck-in-a-dish.
Not just a dish: a chafing dish.
Why, it’s a traditional serving piece
used at brunches to keep food warm.
What is the minimum “dupe-distance” for a Slashdot article?
This one has 8 articles in between.
I’ve seen dupes coming one after the other, so the minimum dupe distance was zero.
Back in the day it wasn’t that uncommon to have dupes on the front page, sometimes two at a time.
I wonder if it’s a UI issue or something. Do the editors just not read the front page before selecting articles to post?
Maybe Slashdot should change their name to Fuckwit: News for nobody, Stuff that doesn’t matter.
- Don’t know about him, but for me I still enjoy some slashdot stuff but cannot deny quality lowered a lot since early days. I’m slowly switching over to phys.org
We could buy enough solar panels to power the lightbulb, then!
Seriously, this is still sitting on the front page 9 stories down.
Pay attention, editors.
Triple refundancy (Score:5, Insightful)
by Jarik C-Bol ( 894741 ) on Thursday September 12, 2019 @10:25PM (#59188994)This is the third time in a month this non-story has been posted, and the second time today. Stop it.- by quenda ( 644621 )
The article was stupid and pointless enough the first time around.
Maybe because the result was so insignificant, nobody noticed the dupe?
- by guruevi ( 827432 ) <evi@evcirc[ ]s.com [‘uit’ in gap]> on Thursday September 12, 2019 @10:26PM (#59188996) Homepage
It’s just a thermocouple, nothing new.
Any temperature differential will do and there are things that have much greater temperature differentials. You could eg. store energy in a building, in the ground or a plastic box, let’s say, filled with some type of fluid like oil or water, acid and lead or salts and then at night, you can release that energy to drive a thing called a turbine (or a thermocouple) of sorts or even a direct conversion from the stored energy into HVAC or HVDC.
A lot of things have temperature differentials. Thermocouples are piss-poor system for generating energy (5% efficiency or so)
- by whoda ( 569082 ) on Thursday September 12, 2019 @10:26PM (#59188998) Homepage
Both on the front page at the same time. That’s a neat trick.
Its a quite interesting concept from a pure physics point of view, but not (and never intended to be) a path to practical energy generation.
But yes, its been posted here before
- How long would one of these take to repay the energy cost necessary to fabricate it? I don’t think it really counts as renewable energy at a certain point.
- by Yosho ( 135835 ) on Thursday September 12, 2019 @10:50PM (#59189052)
When engineers at the University of California harvest energy in darkness, it’s all “Look at this new renewable energy,” but when I harvest energy in darkness it’s all, “Stop performing human sacrifices to your evil god.”
Hypocrites.
- You can get 100W out of football field of them. I was expecting 10W.
- by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Thursday September 12, 2019 @11:08PM (#59189074) JournalGee, didn’t we already see a different version of the same thing already once today? [slashdot.org] Also, again: NOT NEWS, Peltier junctions have been around for a long, long time now.
There’s lots of ways to produce power in darkness. Many of them work quite well. Is this device really all that better than what we had before?
This doesn’t look like a new device but an improvement on existing heat driven electricity producing devices. Seems like this could be used to improve many kinds of heat driven electricity producing devices. Or to improve on the dissipation of waste heat from any of a number of systems that provide cooling. Such as the heat sink on a natural gas, coal, or nuclea
Well.. Maybe they need to mix this with some kind of heat storage.
Cheaper materials for this.Glass | plexiglass, some air to work as thermal insulator, a metal black painted, a working&storage fluid behind the solar receiver (the black metal) and just pipes to create a better hot side to the generator.
I can see disconnected streetlights with these. Just an alternative to solar panels + chemical batteries.
https://www.ted.com/talks/aasw… [ted.com]
I think I can make a device that harvest energy from duplicates! Please call, editors!
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