New scientific device creates electricity from snowfall
newsroom.ucla.edu
newsroom.ucla.edu
A lot of times you'd want to measure such things away from the grid without having to worry about batteries.
Something I'm curious about is whether similar tech could be used to self sufficiently measure pollen.
"The new device could be integrated into solar panels to provide a continuous power supply when it snows, he said."
Second paragraph.
The point is, when it snows, often the sun is blocked, or the solar panels might get covered. While it is snowing this device can continue to work without batteries.
For example, some models of the Nissan Leaf electric car have a small solar panel on the roof.
Surprisingly, I think this is a selling point for the car or the option package that includes the panel because people think this car will give you many miles of free driving.
However, it's supposed to maintain the 12v battery, but its 5 watts of power might not be sufficient power for even that minor task.
* Richard Kaner (highly influential and cited scientist) and team used 3D printing to design a device that combines silicone with an electrode.
* Thanks to “the ease of fabrication and the availability of silicone” the device, which is essentially a small sheet of plastic, could be produced at low cost.
* It can work in remote areas, doesn’t need batteries, and could be used in solar panels, or self-powered wearables for tracking athletes.
PS. Yesterday posted on https://bullets.tech - I'm looking for people interested in science to help us writing summaries and selecting scientific content
Lord Kelvin's thunderstorm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_water_dropper
Vaneless ion wind generator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator
This appears to be more useful for wearables than as a replacement for solar panels in the winter. I can't imagine the amount of power generated could be that great. It reminds me of one of those stationary bikes hooked up to a toaster.
That's a degree of bullshit so high that it has me seriously questioning what otherwise sounds at least reasonable. Yeah, I know, every science paper has to connect itself to some fashionable area of research that will excite the grant writers, like renewable energy or climate change, but the idea that it would ever be practical to capture that much power from snow is absurd. This is a particularly tenuous connection. The upper bounds on this technique are tiny; any advantage it may have is in its ability to deliver tiny amounts of power to places that would otherwise have none. If snow had any significant amount of energy in it, we'd know, because we'd get shocked when we stood in it.
I think I'm going to settle on feeling bad for the scientists that they've done such interesting work and were forced by the system to spew such heavy bullshit on top of it to keep getting funded.
But....we don't get shocked when we stand out in the sun? And yet solar power is a real thing!
I am sure people scoffed back in the 1800's when scientist first worked with solar power.
The reason I said "shocked" is not that shocking is the only way that energy can manifest itself. It's because it's the way that significant static electricity manifests, the claimed mechanism being used to obtain power.
You can tell just by standing in the sunlight that it has substantial energy, because you get warm, along with anything else in the sunlight. Therefore it has at least enough energy to do that. Not to mention power the ecosystem.
"I am sure people scoffed back in the 1800's when scientist first worked with solar power."
With all due respect, you do not appear to be in a position to be lecturing people about this sort of thing. You may not understand how energy works, but some people do.
Mars is an interesting question; how charged are those sand storms? It might pose the opposite problem of excessive power density!
Titan I just don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised there's some sort of charge flowing around, it's just a question of how much. Charge is pretty fundamental to mass, after all, and when things get moving it's not that hard to end up with static electricity to at least some degree.
It's definitely not negatively charged, it just has a propensity for accumulating negative charge (like in the cloth and rod static electricity experiment).
I'm not a chemist or phyhsicist in any regard, so I can't say whether this could be the stepping stone to something more large scale down the line. Could anyone shed light on whether there are any physical limits given the materials used (slilcone, snow, etc.) to how much energy you could extract?
Solar panels produce 175W/m^2 for comparison.
If this ever produced 1W/m^2 I'd be shocked.
Plus, if I'm seeing the physics here in my head properly based on their description, you can't just stick this out in the snow like a panel and get a consistent 0.2mW/m^2 even under optimal snow conditions. As the snow accumulates on the collector it'll insulate the collector from the rest of the snow. You really want the snow to be brushing the collector and then departing having given up its excess charge, not accumulating on it. Sunlight obviously does not present this problem, since it basically is 100% made out of charge (if you'll pardon the sloppy terminology, asp precision wouldn't really buy anything here), so there's no additional mass to dispose of, just any waste heat issues that may arise.
I'm pretty sure that in real conditions the difference between the two would be another two or three orders of magnitude larger, which is why my other post is so grumpy. It's multiple orders of magnitude obviously not even remotely feasible, to the point it's almost insulting that it was said.
Just to put a little perspective out there, 0.2 mW/m^2 means that 1 square meter of this stuff would take 600 days in ideal production to match the amount of energy stored in one charge of a single rechargeable AA (~3Wh).
1 clear day, plus a tiny solar cell and a AA and you can get 600 operating days of energy really easily.
And here's the thing, if this thing gets buried, it isn't going to generate electricity. So you have to imagine an environment where the snow is constantly melting, you can get a giant sheet of this stuff, and for whatever reason there is no battery chemistry that would work.
You could say "Well, it would make a good snow detector".. but even that it somewhat silly. Because, again, if it gets buried it won't be detecting more snow. So now you need some complex rigging to keep it from collecting snow so it can register that snow is falling. Why not a camera? A weight sensor? etc. Plenty of pretty cheap and low power equipment can do just this without the additional concerns introduced by this piece of tech.
This thing is useless. Maybe interesting to make, definitely not practical for really any application.
It takes 2.09J/g to heat ice 1 degree.
I doubt the point is to replace or supplement solar. The point is probably to have a less bulky or expensive way to run remote sensors
> The new device could be integrated into solar panels to provide a continuous power supply when it snows, [El-Cady] said.
The abstract of the researh paper itself[0] also reflects this sentiment:
> We envision these devices could potentially be integrated into solar panels to ensure continuous power supply during snowy weather conditions.
Granted, it's more of a pipe dream for the future than an original design goal for the technology, which does work well for said remote sensors
[0] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221128551... (Link may not be accessable to all, feel free to reply with a mirror)