harvesting_ambient_heat 2021-12-19 16:52:08 -1000

Open Basics Awesome Energy Source by Charles M. Brown

Let's crowd develop a cheap, clean, abundant, reliable, safe, quiet, scalable, day and night, summer and winter, indoor and outdoor, anywhere, zero carbon, new energy source. It is mostly a promise now, but it seems newly possible to extract energy from the background heat on our planet. This heat is usually a loan, which is repaid after the energy of the heat is used. Therefore the planet is largely ultimately undisturbed. This promise is based on a possibly more advanced understanding of the physics of heat. There should be no economic extortion for the utility of new physics in and of itself.

Devices manifesting its' utility may be subjected to economic consideration in their manufacture, distribution, and release to users. The manufacture should be commoditized in standard uses in several clases of power magnitude, and input and output parameters for easy adoption by civilized society at low cost.

Many uses would be too obvious to patent, even though they are new products. Widespread and expanding synergy throughout civilization renders attribution of creativity or allocation of rights to enforce exclusionary licencing on new products increasingly untenable. Therefore I foresee these burdens diminishing.

Planetary Ambient heat may become a vast reservoir of free and reusable useful energy if physics can advance beyond the limit of the second law of thermodynamics.

Brief history in two highlights:

1. Newton observed that heat would flow from fire in a fireplace to a colder room but not flow from the room to the fire
2. Carnot in careful study determined that the maximum ideal thermal efficiency of a steam engine is a ratio of the boiler absolute temperature minus the condenser absolute temperature over the condenser absolute temperatutre. This means that a steam engine needs a temperature differential between the boiler and condenser to work, and a large temperature difference to work efficently. Uniform ambient heat has been declared to be impossible to convert to another form of energy because a steam engine with its boiler and condenser, different parts of a uniform temperature realm, at the same temperature would have zero efficiency.

This progressive understanding became codified as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Here is a Thought experiment device which transends that Law. Thought experiments are not meant to be practical and may make difficult demands on materials and manufacture. They are meant to be easily seen as workable in principle and sometimes similar to other thought experiment devices with a similar purpose and subject to similar analytics:

Imagine a thermal barrier wall supporting billions of submicron tacks stuck through the wall, with heads on one side of the wall and the tack points protruding from the other side of the wall. Next imagine that the tack heads are replaced with paddlewheels oriented like the tack head, and fixidly mounted on a similar shaft. The shafts rotate freely and extend into friction bearings on the other side:

The paddlewheels rotate at random speeds in either direction, moved by random impacts from heat driven Brownian motion. The shafts carry rotary mechanical enrergy through the wall. The brakes, fixed in grip, better understood as friction components, convert the rotary energy into heat. Its hard to see, but the paddlewheels and the surrounding gas become colder as they move slower than equlibrium as the brakes draw off power.

Via all the submicron paddlewheels, the gas volume gets colder, while via all the submicron brakes, the gas volume gets hotter.

Having explored the above thought model, a more application focussed embodiment is described in my patent for the rectification of Brownian Motion of electrons:
United States Patent 03890161-1498415933454707630 Diode Array Rectifies Brownian Motion.

Aloha,
Charles M. Brown