Horace,
Excellent ideas. As you mentioned in your first post, the engineering
problems for pulling this off would be daunting.
Now that you mention steam/CO2 as the transfer medium - and oil-based
material as a donor - that brings up the steam-electricity effect:
http://www.esdjournal.com/techpapr/prevens/steam.pdf
...which has been assumed, prior to now, to be an electrostatic effect,
but the dividing line is blurry here. The paper mentions a huge
electrical explosion from steam cleaning an oil tanker. I have spent
perhaps 100 hours over the years trying to find a robust
"steam-electricity" effect, but to no avail - never seem more than a
fractional volt of charge.
The main problem with the more general concept is - it is so simple that
there should be more fundamental R&D out there, but I haven't found it
yet...
Jones
On Sep 6, 2007, at 7:23 PM, Jones Beene wrote:
Wiki has a pretty good article on electron affinity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_affinity
Here is the thought (I have not checked to see if this
is a "re-invention" of someone else's idea) - take two
electrodes and a working medium, and hydrogen is the
only working medium that fits into this concept very
well (73 kj/mol)...
- such that one electrode has a much lower electron
affinity than does the H2 (zinc works well ~0) and the
other has a much higher (gold plated copper works here
~223).
The donor electrode might be a slightly conductive plastic, or other
triboelectric donor material, which would thus also directly provide the
capacitive linkage. The trickle current though it would have to be
enough to recover for the next pulse. The electron donor - transporter
combination is still important if tribolelectric effects are used to
achieve the donation because that is in fact an electron affinity effect.
http://www.purgit.com/static.html
Candidate electron transporter molecules might come substances from the
list of "accumulator oils" provided in the above article:
Accumulator oils
=============================
Natural gasolines
Kerosenes
White spirits
Motor and aviation gasolines
Jet fuels
Naphthas
Heating oils
Clean diesel oils
Lubricating oils
CO2 might be a candidate transporter molecule, and a CO2-Steam mix might
be effective, with one being more effective acceptor, the other a more
effective donor, with gas born electron exchanges involved in addition.
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
