Richard Feymann was convinced that you cannot get energy from Brownian motion. But he didn’t have graphene available. On the other hand, Paul Thibado does. So let’s see what he achieved with it.
Image by Marijn Hubert from Pixabay
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It sounds like a modern-day fairy-tale. But this fairy-tale is true. A team from the University of Arkansas built an electrical circuit that can mine energy from graphene. It uses the thermal motion of the graphene and transforms it into electricity.
As the research lead – Paul Thibado – describes, their circuit can be built into a chip, and there it can make clean and almost endless electric energy at a very low voltage. But that should still be enough to run small electrical devices or sensors.
Thibado and his team successfully implemented a theory they came up in 2017. Back then they said that you can get electricity from graphene. And it was a bold and controversial statement because it directly refutes Richard Feynman who claimed you cannot get usable energy from the thermal motion of atom – Brownian motion.
But Thibado decided to disrespect this statement and now proved that the thermal movement of graphene can be – in a meticulously designed electric circuit – produce electric current. This was previously considered impossible.
The researchers used a relatively new type of physics, stochastic thermodynamics which uses random variables to better understand unbalanced dynamics. Such processes can be found in many microscopic systems from colloids or bio-polymers to enzymes or molecular engines.
According to the authors of the study, the graphene, and their circuit and in a physical symbiosis. And their temperature is the same which is important according to Thibado. The reasons are fairly simple if there was a temperature difference between the graphene and the rest of the circuit the Second Law of Thermodynamics would step in.
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Yeah theres a lot wrong with this guys claim. I'm calling bullshit. As do most physicists and engineers that have read this paper. You can't extract energy from quantum oscillations. Especially not from heat energy in a isothermal environment. If you are getting energy out of his system then its from a thermal flow thats leaving the bath and therefore its not isothermal like he says. But hes saying it is isothermal which means theres no gradient in which to do work. There's no thermal differential and thus the guy is simply mistaken and he's likely seeing noise of some sort from his experiment setup. I'd like to see some peer review and confirming experiments by independent parties. For a guy making a claim that violates the laws of thermodynamics his paper sure is abysmally brief and lacking much detail. Sorta a red flag.