Scientists May Have Discovered How To Extract Power From the Earth's Rotation (scientificamerican.com) 85
Long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam writes:
No more burning fossil fuels, playing with fissile material, damming rivers, erecting wind mills, or making solar panels. All of our energy needs could potentially be supplied by the angular kinetic energy of the Earth — and because of the mass of the planet, doing so would slow its rotation down by a mere 7ms per century. [Which is similar to speed changes caused by natural phenomena such as the Moon's pull and changing dynamics inside the planet's core."]
Normally this would be considered impossible as the Earth's large and uniform field does not induce a current in conductors, but researchers believe that a hollow cylinder of manganese, zinc and iron can alter the interaction with our planetary magnetic field and allow the extraction of energy from it. So far, the results are positive but still below the level where they cannot be explained by multiple possible causes of experimental error. Further research is required to confirm the effect.
"The effect was identified only in a carefully crafted device and generated just 17 microvolts," reports Scientific American, "a fraction of the voltage released when a single neuron fires — making it hard to verify that some other effect isn't causing the observations."
But if another group can verify the results, the experiment's lead says the next logical step is trying to scale up the device to generate a useful amount of energy.
Normally this would be considered impossible as the Earth's large and uniform field does not induce a current in conductors, but researchers believe that a hollow cylinder of manganese, zinc and iron can alter the interaction with our planetary magnetic field and allow the extraction of energy from it. So far, the results are positive but still below the level where they cannot be explained by multiple possible causes of experimental error. Further research is required to confirm the effect.
"The effect was identified only in a carefully crafted device and generated just 17 microvolts," reports Scientific American, "a fraction of the voltage released when a single neuron fires — making it hard to verify that some other effect isn't causing the observations."
But if another group can verify the results, the experiment's lead says the next logical step is trying to scale up the device to generate a useful amount of energy.
Don't do it (Score:1)
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Just what we need. Longer days. I can see how the billionaires will rejoice at the extra "efficiency" to be extracted from their slaves...I mean "employees" ;).
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Night follows day as ... well, night follows day.
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No worries, they'll reserve the night shifts for the corporate cocksuckers who make the excuses.
Re: Don't do it (Score:2)
Re:Don't do it (Score:4, Informative)
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This is exactly what tidal energy is. The energy comes from the Earth's rotation. The difference is, that energy is already getting extracted and used to move the ocean around. Turbines in the ocean skim off a little of the energy along the way. In this case they claim to be doing it more directly.
I'm skeptical it would actually work, but even if it did, the amount of energy we could extract would probably be tiny compared to the amount already flowing into the ocean every day.
You aren't one of those weenies (Score:2)
that claim your house is powered by nuclear fusion because you have a solar panel on the roof?
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Outside of those few, whose houses are powered by fission, everything is powered by fusion.
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This is exactly what tidal energy is. The energy comes from the Earth's rotation.
Tidal energy is caused by the moon's rotation around the earth. Maybe earth rotation also assists but I haven't seen anything definitive on that but it is also outside my wheelhouse.
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Wrong. If that were true, high tides would come on a monthly basis, not twice a day.
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This explains tides. Moon's rotation and to a much less extent but still noticeable is the Sun itself. https://science.howstuffworks.... [howstuffworks.com]
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There's a tide driven by the sun, and another driven by the moon. When the two coincide, which happens sometime in the spring for much of the Earth, this is called a "king tide". The gravitational pull of the sun and moon create a kind of egg shaped effect on the water, a large bulge nearer to the gravitational body and a smaller bulge on the opposite side. How and why this happens escapes me at the moment but I can see kind of how that works.
If this works as I expect then high tides should roughly corre
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Tidal energy is caused by the moon's rotation around the earth. Maybe earth rotation also assists but I haven't seen anything definitive on that but it is also outside my wheelhouse.
Technically, the first part of that is correct in that it is caused by the moon's rotation, but where the energy actually ultimately comes from is the Earth's rotation. Basically the moon's rotation around the Earth causes a tidal bulge on Earth which shifts the center of mass of the Earth. The moon is pulled towards that center of mass. Think of the Earth's center of Mass as being a point, moving in a circle around the average center of mass. So, in the Earth-Moon system, the point the moon is being pulled
Concerns on this in 2011 & on open manufacturi (Score:2)
Something I posted to the Open Manufacturing mailing on June 4th, 2011 (as part of a larger thread and a subsequent one that sadly ultimately ended my participation there): ... The rest of this just explores issues in understanding the limits and benefits of applying the second law of thermodynamics in understanding various types of now commonly accepted phenomenon.
https://groups.google.com/g/op... [google.com]
====
To amplify on this point on thermodynamics, there are at least four ways to explain getting more energy out
Need equation of manufacturer energy vs energy gen (Score:2)
(Energy needed to mine raw resources, manufacture and produce the machine) divided by (energy generated by the machine)
How much more efficient will the machine need to be to get this ratio so that the energy payback time is less than 15 years?
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The rule of thumb in electronics circles is that any energy source generating less than 1.5 VAC is not worth pursuing, even for battery powered applications. I spent some time on this when I was a kid. I was trying to figure out if radio waves could be harvested to power something fun (like an LED.)
The basic passive energy conversion circuit is a bridge rectifier. It uses two silicon diodes with 2*0.7VDC = 1.4 VDC voltage drop in series for each half-cycle. There are other circuits, some involving tran
How Big? (Score:3)
Re:How Big? (Score:5, Informative)
It looks like the approximately 30 cm length and 1 cm outer radius cylinder produces up to 50 microvolts and 60 nA or 3 picowatts if I'm reading the article correctly? So to power a 12W LED light bulb you would need to build 1.2 million km of cylinders. I don't know if you can scale up the size of the cylinders, but let's say you can chain them together to increase the voltage and current. If you built a 200m tall power plant full of them, you could stack 20,000 cylinders. If the building was 600m wide, then you could have 60,000 cylinders wide, and the building would be 1km long. So you would need a 1000m x 600m x 200m size power plant that would likely cost billions of dollars to build to power a single LED light bulb... Actually larger to account for space for more than the cylinders. Obviously the building would need lighting, so it wouldn't even produce enough power for itself.
For the example of charging a cell phone that someone else posted, you would probably want about twice that (24W). So two power plants to charge a cell phone.
Obviously they hope their research leads to advancements in scalability. It seems more likely to me that the experiment won't be repeatable and some other interference was the cause of their results, but this is not my area of expertise.
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If it does work I suspect it
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the answer, as always, is likely carbon nanotubes
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That is assuming that the only way to scale this is a linear increase of copies of the original experimental unit. There are plenty of reasons to believe that this would not scale in some linear fashion, but possibly exponentially with some factor -- probably the radius of the unit.
At last! (Score:2)
At last!
those specs are perfect for my EM drive!
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So ... do they have reasons to believe it could be scaled up, or do they just hope that it could be scaled up?
Awhile back I watched a video discussing some cold-fusion type effect, and at some point they had a diagram involving stacking like a 7-orders-of-magnitude effect with an 11-orders-of-magnitude effect with another 10-ish-orders-of-magnitude effect, and I was like ... if you could get 30 orders of magnitude improvement on *anything* you could generate power from it. The amounts involved were far gre
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Now, now, don't be skeptical. People are always publishing their world-changing research in Scientific American.
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It's published in Physical Review Research:
https://journals.aps.org/prres... [aps.org]
That comes with lots of scary math and a lot less imagination though.
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It is probably better than those Chinese "nuclear batteries" that you read about last week, which were actually invented in the 1950s.
17 microvolts for 7ms (Score:5, Funny)
Anything more would instantly stop the rotation.
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All of our energy needs could potentially be supplied by the angular kinetic energy of the Earth — and because of the mass of the planet, doing so would slow its rotation down by a mere 7ms per century.
Reading is hard?
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Anything more would instantly stop the rotation.
So, the equivalent of regenerative braking with the earth's rotation.
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Yeah, except it "regenerates" nothing.
More Free Energy BS. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:More Free Energy BS. (Score:5, Funny)
Considering the path the US is on, they'll soon be reporting on why electrolytes are what plants crave.
I don't think the grandparent has a fair assessmen (Score:3)
Realistically wind and solar can pretty easily meet our energy needs if we would put the effort into building it out but there's a wide variety of political reasons that's not happening at the pace it should be
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So yea, safe investment options now are solar and wind. The more s
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Anything claiming barely-detectable results based on an until-now-we-thought-this-was-impossible mechanism sounds like wishful thinking to me.
Remember the EmDrive [wikipedia.org]? Or the E-Cat [wikipedia.org]? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
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Results for our simple laboratory demonstration systems appear strongly to confirm the effects predicted by Eq. , as do the proposed relevant control experiments. The results have been confirmed at a second
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The biggest problem is the tiny amount of voltage generated could be from 'noise' such as RF or the AC power grid.
What's wrong with that? The noise energy or electric/electromagnetic field energy radiated from the power grid would otherwise go to waste. If someone can find a way to collect what is otherwise dissipated, and in usable amounts, then why not? It isn't as if the Earth's rotation is our only potential source of energy.
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Not just bullshit. (Score:3)
“The idea is somewhat counter-intuitive and has been argued since Faraday,” says Paul Thomas, an emeritus physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. But the experiments, led by Christopher Chyba, a physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey, are very carefully done, he adds. “I find it very convincing and remarkable.”
Others agree that the results are striking, but remain sceptical. Rinke Wijngaarden, a retired physicist previously at the Free University of Amsterdam, has followed the authors’ assertions since 2016 and failed to find the effect in his own experiments in 2018. He finds the work very interesting, but is “still convinced that the theory of Chyba et al. cannot be correct.”
Heard this before (Score:2)
Isn't the ancient aliens crowd into theories like this one? That lunar tidal energy or rotational energy of the Earth (or both) provided limitless clean power to some past civlization(s)? And that Tesla was on the verge of figuring it out for himself but got shut down by people like Westinghouse?
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Da, tovarische
Interesting (Score:2)
A neat idea, if they can make it practical, but I didn't see anywhere they mentioned the size of the apparatus to generate this result. How long would it take, I wonder, for the cost of building it to pencil out?
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Have a pretty good idea (Score:2)
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One of my favorite moments in Doctor who (Score:3)
Yet another invention reified from science fiction (Score:2)
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Gods, that book was such dreck I gave up after a couple of chapters. My college Biology textbook was far more interesting and better written. Kudos for having the stubbornness to slog through it.
Great Idea! (Score:2)
Re:Great Idea! (Score:5, Funny)
What could possibly go wrong?
I imagine the days might get longer, and eventually mess up everybody's sleep cycle.
The good news is, if they slow down the Earth's rotation by 2.75%, then one Earth day will be the same length as one Mars day, and that could make it more convenient when trying to schedule Zoom meetings with off-planet colleagues.
What worries me is the possibility of someone coming up with a way to siphon power from the moon's orbital momentum (moon as rotor, Earth as stator). It's all fun and games and free electricity until the moon finally runs out of momentum and lands on your head :(
Future Dupe. (Score:2)
Will likely be reposted April 1.
Nikola Tesla knew the answer (Score:2)
But (Score:4, Insightful)
we already extract much power from the Earth's rotation, which contributes lots of energy to the winds.
Always some new load of crap (Score:3)
TANSTAAFL (Score:2)
Right, so you're reading my post, and the last thing you want to read is what a scientist is. I've put that last.
If the earth's rotation was used to extract a useful amount of energy, that would mean that the Earth's inertial mass' rotation was converted to another form that we can use -- let's posit electricity. In doing so, that energy is MOVED from the earth's rotational mass to that electric bank (and let's pretend it's 100% efficient so we can avoid another mindfuck.)
That necessary REMOVES that energ
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We already get energy from the earth's rotation. where do you think tidal energy comes from, for example?
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They are claiming their maths shows getting energy this way would slow the planet but not by enough that it would be an issue.
What
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That's a whole lot of text, including the "I'm not the math science guy" and a bunch of irrelevant ranting just to poorly restate something that's in the summary.
We found the people ... (Score:2)
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I noticed that the discussion forum on the European Seismic centre (https://www.emsc-csem.org/) had been quiet for a while, so I prodded it in the side to see if it was still alive. Almost immediately afterwards - quake.
Sorry, my bad.
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Remember the NASA "warp drive" which 5 years work failed to replicate. I do. Colour me unimpressed.
Angular Momentum (Score:1)
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This tech already exits (Score:1)
It's called "tidal energy" (Score:5, Insightful)
Tidal energy is partly Earth's rotation energy because tides are caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon acting on Earth's oceans, while Earth rotates beneath that bulge.
The friction from ocean movement and tidal drag slows Earth's spin very slightly, transferring rotational energy into the motion of water. Tidal power plants capture that water movement—so they’re extracting energy from Earth’s rotation.
Tidal power has been frought with problems (Score:2)
It has been exceedingly difficult to scale up tidal power capture beyond the prototype stage due to a combination of engineering and environmental challenges. I don't know of anywhere in the world a practical power plant has been made that captures tidal power.
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Actually, there are fully operational tidal power plants. France’s Rance Tidal Power Station in Normandy has been running since 1966 and produces up to 240 MW—it powers around 130,000 homes. South Korea’s Sihwa Lake Tidal Power Station is even bigger at 254 MW. The UK’s MeyGen project in Scotland is also active, feeding power into the grid. So yeah—tidal power isn’t just prototypes. It's rare, but it's real and working.
Low energy density = expensive (Score:2)
Great, instead of erecting wind mills or making solar panels, weâ(TM)ll just build this even bigger and more expensive thing.
Fox News in 9725 (Score:2)
..."Global-Slowing is fake news. The woke left media is hyping the idea that human activity can slow Earth's rotation. Commie Balderdash!"
Something about this idea seems plainly sinister (Score:1)
Circling the drain... (Score:2)