"Graphene in new ‘battery’ breakthrough? " - fact or fiction?

From that it sounds like they've summoned Maxwell's Demon, if they had done that it would be big news like "cold fusion" was. so it's probably not as described.

The explanation given is certainly deficient: "Since electrons move through graphene at extremely high speeds (thanks to the fact that they behave like relativistic particles with no rest mass), they travel much faster in the carbon-based material than in the ionic solution. The released electron therefore naturally prefers to travel through the graphene circuit rather than through the solution. This is how the voltage is produced by the device, explains Xu."

The electrons "travel through the graphene circuit" - in which direction? What is the significance of one Ag electrode and one Au?

Well that's funny! Give it some thought--to capture electricity from heat, the device would have to get 'cold.' Very cold at that. This might make a great heat exchanger (AC unit) for example (if it were real) but the bottom line is that there's no way in blue hell they've done something real.

The comments following the article are amusing. If you read them to the end you learn that the inventor of this wonderful device is going for his M.Phil. My advice is ... don't hold your breath.

Not necessarily. They could just be stealing an electron off copper(II) ions into the graphene lattice during the collision reducing it to copper(I) and then it rapidly gets oxidised again from the air. T

Be interesting to know whether it also works for iron(II/III) or cerium (II/III) for instance. Their controls with NaCl and DI water were inadequate. Other transition metal and rare earth salts with comparable oxidation states to copper need trying (iron would be the most obvious).

Sounds to me rather like a novel implementation of a new air battery which converts oxygen from the air into electricity - the only difference here is that nothing in the cell is consumed in the process.

There was also a review article in Science News this week.

The take-away quote "'Quoting power and energy density from small lab cells is not realistic,' says M. Stanley Whittingham, a chemist at Binghamton University in New York. 'Real cells typically have capacities of only 20 percent of the numbers calculated in the lab.'"

Still, something in that direction seems likely to be the next step in cell evolution, with an efficient microscale structural organization.

Nonsense. Sounds like a pretty bad chemistry-powered primary cell that dies quickly.

That's what he's going to use as an argument for getting more sponsorship money.?

=20

Fact. Before anybody talks about promoting his Phd with nonsense... Zihan q= uited from that university and give up the diploma because the freedom of a= cademic research have been seriously violated.=20 He has set up a independent research company.=20

This is a follow up ...=20

And this paper exclude the possibility of chemical reaction completely. As = that was the point of doubt. Because there is no electrods contact with the= solution in the new experiments. A very interesting phenomenon is that the= pencil leads, which are made of graphite, have the same effect as graphene= , but the effect was only 5% of the graphene samples.=20

Kind regards, Kenny=20

Founder grafeen.be

Do a global search-and-replace for "Graphene" and use "Snake oil" for the replacement. I doubt the total amount of real knowledge lost would be very significant.

OK, If I'm reading it right, ~1 microamp at ~350mV. Less than a micro watt of power.

So what?

George H.

OK, if it will do that, and continue for a long time, a stack of them will make a fantastic memory backup battery. That has definite uses, as there are many systems that have to have some volatile memory preserved.

But, it sure won't power the next generation of electric cars.

Jon

to be useful it needs to be distinguishable fron Johnson noise.

breakthrough?:

Early lab versions of anything tend to be pretty puny. If they have found a new way of making a battery then it is a real novelty and potentially will get better once some real R&D is applied.

The paper above is poor and fails to address fairly obvious chemical and physical tests but it still reports something interesting. After thinking about it a bit more manganese chloride would be another transition metal electrolyte to try instead of copper. And also copper sulphate and nitrate soluble salts to prove it is copper and not chloride that is the important part (it may be both).

Same applies to the Mott transistor recently reported in the physics press - the prototype achieves a mere 100:1 dynamic range which is puny compared to a million for a modern FET, but in some ways the surprise is that they have managed to make it work at all. It is now down to the process engineers to turn a physics discovery into useful parts. This may be tricky if it truly requires an ionic liquid gate to work.

Martin Brown schrieb:

Hello,

but it is not possible to convert oxygen into eltrical energy if there is nothing which is reacting with the oxygen. The nitrogen of the air will not deliver energy when reacting with the oxygen and the reaction products should not released into the air.

Bye

If it is DC, then I think that distinguishes it. If it was AC

Jon

It's JonElson noise.

Just ASS-u-ME that it was true, then the result is a rather miniscule power source;those beta batteries would do better..

The gold and silver is for the "inventor's" pockets..