It may be possible to extract electricity directly from damp air | Hacker News Reader

It may be possible to extract electricity directly from damp air

economist.com

54 pointsjkuria15 comments

One can dream of extracting sufficient electricity to someday run a dependency-free dehumidifier, which can put a damper on the need to run HVAC in much of the world (damp air feels significantly warmer). One can dream.

Isn't the electricity 'generated' coming from energy in the motion of the air.

Ie. You could maver make more electricity than used by the fan to blow damp air through your system.

The description in the article is vague and I can't find any information elsewhere, but the reference to the functionality depending on which metal is used for the inner cylinder makes me think that it's actually a voltaic cell using the moist air as a (poor) electrolyte.

Check out the vaneless ion wind generator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator

Other weird stuff: http://www.rexresearch.com/1index.htm

Back in 1974, the 'Amateur Scientist' column in Scientific American covered electrostatic motors: http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Energy/ESMotors.pdf

There's a lot of electrical energy swirling around in the ionosphere!

I remember two Popular Science articles on electrostatic motors from old magazines of my youth. Always wanted to build one:

https://books.google.com/books?id=ngAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA95&lpg=P...

https://books.google.com/books?id=kwAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA80&lpg=P...

Imagine it were possible to scale this up and somehow harness the full lightning energy of a thunderstorm. Say 1 strike per second with each bolt representing 10^9 joules. Then that is a measly 1 GW peak, only available in certain places at specific times of day and parts of the year, not including losses and inefficiencies .

Globally you only get ~100 strikes per second, which means any location is going to be much lower than that.

> harness the full lightning energy of a thunderstorm

As in, walk into every chapel and install a device that works with the apparatus for 'catching' strikes? Not sure what they're called, but I know it's tradition of having a chapel higher than all other buildings which is used to capture potential strikes and earth the current through the ground.

That's called a lightning rod.

http://archive.is/JrlQ2

The title sounds like magic. That's what I like about this world. We do not have the great wall or dragons, but we are doing things that sound just as magical to them as great walls and dragons sound to us.

I hate stories about science written by non-scientists.

See http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_09.html

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just to be clear, I was referring to the article, and not to the research it reported on.

But yes, point taken. I should have explained my criticisms of that particular article, rather than being generally dismissive of science reporting by non-scientists.

I could have said that I found the article to be confusing and misleading. About our understanding of the atmosphere's electrical potential, and about the particular research reported. But I just made a snide comment, and pointed to the Feynman lecture.

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