True or Scam ?

There's a lot of money to be made, or at least raised, violating Conservation of Energy.

Why don't people just use lithium batteries, instead of crazy nanowatt energy harvesting schemes? Most cmos low-power gadgets will be obsolete before a battery runs down.

The legally required smoke detectors in California have built-in CO detectors and 10 year lithium batteries, which are not replacable. That makes sense because the CO detectors don't last forever.

Remember solar powered calculators?

The Tadiran lithium thionyl chloride primary cells are very good and specify 40 year life.

Looks like IF it works it is a molecular version of a Stirling cycle engine . Not really sure about it.

They had self powered ICs before, and there are those generators that just run for about 5-7 years, apparently on nothing, but they DO run on somethin g.

Even if it works, how practical is it ? How economical is it ?

Even if Tesla's plan would have worked, (and it might conceivably) it would not be practical and then you would have people questioning it with electr icity pumped through the ground. What about the soil and nutrients, the wat er (table) ? And if something goes wrong how do you shut it off ?

There is always something about new technologies, there are problems to wor k out. Some can, some can't. I can't say this is not good, or anything. And their demonstrations mean noting to me. Send me one and I will conduct my own tests.

Will they do that ?

What are the odds ?

ss of the presence of demons or not."

Well now they got those "Lifealert" things for old people if they fall that claim to never need battery replacement. Now if it has that kind of shelf life, i.e. not being used, that is good. But when they push that button it is going to draw a hell of alot more current. Microwatts won't cut it.

I wonder if maybe just a huge block of lithiums wouldn't do just as well.

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I figure it has to be a battery or thermo-electric gizmo. There is this mumbo jumbo about tunneling, tunneling is fairly common. Low voltage Zeners, some metal semi-conudctor junctions. A diode could be described as a 'Maxwellian' demon, in that it selects just the high energy electrons to cross the barrier.

George H.

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ergy density is high enough, it can replace batteries in the applications t hey describe. There are very few low power applications where you need or can expect a device to continue to operate for more than ten years without attention. So if this cell can pump out 5 uW for 20 years, it may be usefu l regardless of the presence of demons or not.

ct

So the leakage is less than 1uA then. How do they get the 40 year life? The batteries haven't been around for that long. (OK it's just the self discharge rate.)

George H.

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not satisfactorily. Energy from nowhere scams are ten a penny. If they want their claims to be credible they need to do a whole lot more than they hav e, at which point they'll discover they failed to understand what was happe ning. If they avoid that, which they always do, they run into 'issues of sc aling' or some such.

Their discussion of replacing batteries is highly misleading. Their largest module claims to output a massive 5 microwatts, leaving it entirely predic tably a very expensive & lousy substitute for a cheap coin cell. So even if everything they say is 100% true, it's still a scam.

NT

I bet there is a zinc/air battery hidden somewhere.

You can fool people easily at such low power levels.(see google).

The implication that you can harvest energy from Johnson noise is thermodynamic nonsense.

You can harvest small - but none-the-less useful - amounts of energy from vibrational noise and acoustic noise, and Linear Technology had an application note a few years ago on how to use some of their chips in systems that did this.

You do have to accumulate the energy harvested in some kind of battery for quite while before you can use it up quickly doing something useful, an the application notes listed a few of the potential applications (as you'd expect in an application note).

which isn't the application note, makes much the same points.

If you could really do it then it would shatter modern physics.

I think their website is a cunning concoction of true statements about modern photonics research in physics and unmitigated marketing hype.

Here is a genuine scientific paper on quantum optics implementation of Maxwells demon - note that it involves cunning manipulation of laser light (not just background thermal radiation).

I still have two working ones. They are faintly useful. They will work OK under an anglepoise lamp too.

The nicest one which is like a thicker and wider than average credit card dates back to my time in Japan where it was invaluable to me.

I tend to use an SR59 emulator on my mobile phone these days.

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(no link was provided to the paper mentioned just above)

Indeed a scam that any magician worth his/her salt could readily disprove. How about wrapping the 'device' in a double Faraday Cage and see what happens then. First FC has the device and wires coming out leading to a measurement device that is inside a second all-enclosing FC

to record the output of said device in the innermost FC.

This would be a monumental discovery - Maxwell's Demon indeed! Not even as good as Cold Fusion though, as CF at least had some theory behind it.. .

Where are the scientific papers and the patents?

John :-#(#

Oops! Here it is:

Several other groups have done similar tricks recently. This one has the nicest diagrams and a decent explanation without too much maths.