Recent content by metastable

It seems with enough vertical layers underwater in the ocean, you could get more power for the same surface footprint (W/m^2 ocean surface area) than with solar which can only use 1 layer on the surface. Also since it would be running off thermal radiation from the water rather than sunlight it...

I sat down with a thermodynamics professor at Chico State University a week or two ago to discuss the idea, and he insisted it wouldn't work because it would violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. If it works one could achieve the same outcome as Maxwell's Demon by putting the 3.5 micron...

For example if it works as I described then I could charge a battery with an 80F (300K) heat source like the ocean for a long time day or night (depending on the area of the panel) and then use the stored energy from the battery to boil some water in an espresso machine. Boiling water 373K...

If you talk to a thermodynamics professor they'll likely say the concept is the problem because extracting usable energy from a single temperature reservoir is considered a violation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and it's also considered a perpetual motion machine of the 2nd kind...

It is actually photovoltaic since it's a photodiode operating with zero bias voltage... Photodiode article from wikipedia:

Well if you lowered 1 square meter (m^2) panel into the 80F (300k) ocean at night (horizontally), and it generates a certain amount of power (W), voltage (V) and current (I) from the water's 3.5 micron infrared black body radiation to charge a battery connected across the terminals of the 80F...

Lowering the temperature of the Earth's oceans by 1 degree C yields around 1.5*10^9 terawatt hours if I did my calculations correctly.

Well the power is proportional to the surface area, but in a stack the surface area is proportional to the volume, but the energy is proportional to the enthalpy of the Earth which is far larger in total than the world's oil reserves. More interesting to me is if it works even slightly it...

Right but since it would be running off of invisible infrared light from a room temperature thermal source like the ocean, not light directly from the sun, you could put the panels in stacks, so the power would be based on volume not surface area. There's also the possibility of tuning the band...

I know this will turn into a heated discussion about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, so I will just state the facts as I understand them. The question is: can a battery be charged by any amount via the following method? Facts: 1) This research paper about photovoltaic infrared detectors...

I ran a simulation of a BLDC vehicle that I tried to make similar to a Leaf (same drag coefficient, frontal area, loaded mass) and find with 80kW output the vehicle could reach ~126mph if geared appropriately, but the actual top speed with the gearing of a Leaf is around 90mph, which suggests...

Found some videos of variable field motors online... seems to achieve the same desirable properties as continuously variable transmissions with reduced complexity. With the stator inserted, one gets max torque per amp, and with the stator retracted, one gets max rpm per volt...

True but similar travel time on the flat route takes 25x the initial kinetic energy. For longer routes the practical depth limit, say 2450m, precludes fully optimizing the travel time. Even so, 2450m depth gives ~490mph of acceleration almost for free, then most of the rest of the tunnel could...

...I’ve been having some interesting conversations over at physics forums adding friction into the equation. Suppose you want a “traversable” pathway optimized for travel time between 2 points horizontally separated by 5000m in 9.8m/s^2 gravity in a vacuum, and your magnetically levitated...

“designed to eventually hit speeds of around 1,200 km/h (745 mph), which would make it possible to travel from LA to San Francisco in just 30 minutes” Virgin Hyperloop completes its first ever passenger test