• MIT’s photonic crystals lead towards nuclear batteries everywhere
    68 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Zero-Point;34565822]Actually, DARPA usually doesn't invent anything on it's own, it funds research by other companies/universities more often than not.[/QUOTE]DARPA does a lot of in-house work, but they also provide incentives and such from outside organizations.
I fucking love science
[quote]Any source of heat could be turned into electricity, without the need for turbines or any other moving parts. [/quote] you kids and your photonic crystals back in my day when we wanted heat converted into electricity we used a stirling engine and a turbine and that's the way we liked it
It seems to me like this would make deep space travel much more feasible. Sort of like a Stargate Universe charging mechanism
[QUOTE=Lick;34566735]It seems to me like this would make deep space travel much more feasible. Sort of like a Stargate Universe charging mechanism[/QUOTE] It only answers half of the constraint, if any. You still need to actually breach the speed of light before you'll get anywhere in your lifetime.
[QUOTE=MendozaMan;34562155]That hunk of plutonium looks like candy I want to lick it[/QUOTE] Then proceed to bleed out of every pore of your body and slowly die a painful death. Worth it.
Photonic stabilizer? [img]http://images.wikia.com/megasxlr/images/b/b6/Photonic_Stabilizer_Warning.jpg[/img]
[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;34567139]Then proceed to bleed out of every pore of your body and slowly die a painful death. Worth it.[/QUOTE]At least you got to die like very few little men get to in an excruciating state brought on my radiation poisoning
hot
GOod
As cool as it's be to have an photonic crystal based RTG powering an electric car, the fact that it uses radioactive isotopes pretty much guarantees that plan will never get off the ground (Russia used portable RTG to power things like unmanned light houses, but now scavengers are pulling them apart for the metals and such in them, which isn't good for anybody involved) A cheap "device" that could convert excess heat to electricity would be quite useful, things like normal car engines put out most of their power in heat (and vibrations)
Wouldn't this also reduce the amount of heat emitted from the area? like a heatsink?
do they need a temperature gradient to operate, or just being in a hot place is enough? Cause classical thermodynamics would flip out if so. Any word on their efficiency?
[QUOTE=Nikita;34569622]do they need a temperature gradient to operate, or just being in a hot place is enough? Cause classical thermodynamics would flip out if so. Any word on their efficiency?[/QUOTE] hm, that is an interesting question in regards to temp gradient. I hadn't considered that. Given that it is operating off of light directly, rather than simply heat itself, I would imagine that it doesn't, but I am merely making a haphazard guess. It seems that these share more in common with solar panels, than they do with conventional RTG's.
Photonic crystals eh? Yeesh, did Pixar predict the future? I know Buzz Lightyear mentioned "crystallic fusion", but I never figured that shit would WORK...
[QUOTE=DrLuke;34561892] [Quote=Milkie]Some objects emit infrared radiation that only photonic crystals can catch. We can also convert that radioation into electricity.[/quote] No, it doesn't convert radioactivity into electricity. Radioactive material heats up when it decays, thus you only convert the heat radiation to electricity.[/QUOTE] That sentence was nothing about radioactive radiation in the first place. The second sentence refers to the infrared-radiation in the first sentence. So all Milkie posted in his summary was right. [editline]6th February 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=Phaselancer;34562081]So would these work in conjunction with solar panels so that they capture the light and heat of the sun? Another cool idea would for people who live off the grid and have wood stoves, put a bunch of these behind the stoves and make electricity while heating up your home.[/QUOTE] Solar panels are quite of inefficient, too expensive in the production and create a lot of carbon dioxide during the production. The best would be to collect the sun's energy, warm up e.g. water or any other material and extract the energy with a turbine and this new device in conjunction. [editline]6th February 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=macerator;34562138]I don't get it. I understand the value this has for IR, VL and probably UV, but why not X-rays or Gamma rays? Those are all around, chop full of energy, and harmful if not contained.[/QUOTE] There is way less UV or X-rays than IR emitted by the sun or any body which got heated up. If you take a look at the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%E2%80%93Boltzmann_distribution]Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution[/url], you see that in order to get significant amounts of UV or X-rays just by thermal emission of a black-body, you need an incredibly high temperature. Since the sun's center-temperature of the emission spectrum is around 6500 K, you have still a lot of IR emission and visible light but much less UV. [editline]6th February 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=Rents;34563194]America could speed up technological innovation by a shit load if they made MIT and DARPA compete to see who can invent the most mindblowing thing, with a hundred million dollars of funding as the prize every quarter.[/QUOTE] Luckily, science doesn't work in a competitional way. Cooperation is the way to produce good results. Well, and unlimited resources a.k.a money. And that's the problem with the US science funding - Too less money spent to awesome projects (best example is the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider]SSC[/url] which would have beat the shit out of the LHC even years before.) [editline]6th February 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=Nikita;34569622]do they need a temperature gradient to operate, or just being in a hot place is enough? Cause classical thermodynamics would flip out if so. Any word on their efficiency?[/QUOTE] They do not need a gradient since they do not convert heat into mechanical work directly (as for turbines), so thermodynamics is nowhere violated. They convert the emitted IR light into electricity which generally would be lost. [editline]6th February 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=J-Dude;34569832]Photonic crystals eh? Yeesh, did Pixar predict the future? I know Buzz Lightyear mentioned "crystallic fusion", but I never figured that shit would WORK...[/QUOTE] Photonic crystals are quite old and have been studied more than 100 years so far. But just in the past few decades they have gained further attention in especially optics and fundamental science.
No thanks. I dont sant radiation in ny card or house
rated zing for electricity hurr
I wonder if this could generate power from body heat. Stick your phone in your pocket, charge it back up. We should put these on CPU heatsinks
[QUOTE=DrLuke;34561892]No, it doesn't convert radioactivity into electricity. Radioactive material heats up when it decays, thus you only convert the heat radiation to electricity.[/QUOTE] On that note, I've just come up with a good idea to present to my nanotech lecturer when uni starts again. Try to develop a material that will capture alpha or beta radiation (or two complementary materials that will capture both) and store them in a capacitor like manner - build up enough of a potential difference between the two and you've got yourself an operational battery that effectively charges via radioactive decay.
Also that red glowing thing looks like a fungi. [editline]6th February 2012[/editline] Reminds me of this too [img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Goi%C3%A2niaRadiationsource.gif[/img] Goiânia accident
[QUOTE=tomatmann;34571113]No thanks. I dont sant radiation in ny card or house[/QUOTE] better throw out your smoke detector
All i can think of is a mini nuclear explosion going off in my pocket.
Thermoelectric energy through atomic crystalline insolation :D
[QUOTE=Scrimp;34573227]All i can think of is a mini nuclear explosion going off in my pocket.[/QUOTE] [img]http://i.imgur.com/qTJw8.gif[/img]
[QUOTE=aVoN;34570280] Luckily, science doesn't work in a competitional way. Cooperation is the way to produce good results. [/QUOTE] Do you actually work in a scientific environment? I can tell you that science does, in fact, work by competition. It may seem in theory that the best results are through cooperation, but it isn't pure cooperation. The only cooperation is using what others have found previously to find something new, however new ideas are usually from labs which are very secretive until the point that they are ready to publish. They may "collaborate" in a sense that they may get very general ideas about something without ever revealing any information until they find it themselves. Then you have someone working on the same exact project at the same rate and finishes at the same time as the other person. Now you have two people who just did the same exact thing. If science worked by cooperation, those scientist would get together and speed up their progress, however prestige gets the best of each scientist and each individual wants to be the first and only discoverer. In many was, yes, science is cooperative. In the ways that produce the best results, not so much. When scientist compete they work harder to get their research out before their competitor. Thus, speeding up scientific advancement. It would be more productive to have people working collaboratively together on the same project instead of independently on the same project. I say more productive in the sense that the scientists would work together to figure out problems instead of running into the same problems and not sharing how to get around them.
Construct additional pylons.
[QUOTE=Nikita;34575487][img]http://i.imgur.com/qTJw8.gif[/img][/QUOTE] What is this from?
[QUOTE=sltungle;34572306]On that note, I've just come up with a good idea to present to my nanotech lecturer when uni starts again. Try to develop a material that will capture alpha or beta radiation (or two complementary materials that will capture both) and store them in a capacitor like manner - build up enough of a potential difference between the two and you've got yourself an operational battery that effectively charges via radioactive decay.[/QUOTE] Isn't that just a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaics]betavoltaic[/url]? [editline]6th February 2012[/editline] if not, can you please explain the difference that I might learn from you [editline]6th February 2012[/editline] [QUOTE=Squad;34575722]Do you actually work in a scientific environment?[/QUOTE] lmao he has a PhD in physics, you do a bad job of picking your targets
[QUOTE=Turnips5;34576058] lmao he has a PhD in physics, you do a bad job of picking your targets[/QUOTE] I wasn't saying it in a demeaning way. Sorry that you took it that way.
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