On Sep 8, 2007, at 1:17 PM, Jones Beene wrote:
OK - let's pile-it-on ... with ZPE
Well, Jones, I think you sure came up with a winner idea this time!
The next step beyond the normal pila seca would be the one where zinc (or other donor) is not consumed, and the battery goes from very long-lived to perp-mo.
It sure would be good to be able to do some non-destructive testing on one of the long lasting dry piles. I'll bet the energy is not chemical, at least not any more. They probably came to a chemical balance years ago.
The pile would need to contain no oxidizer,
Well, not necessarily. The cell just has to be able to establish a long term equilibrium which is functional, so the oxygen or chlorine (or for that matter hydrogen) or whatever involved has to be in ground state with respect to other things, with very low reaction constants with the environment. Chlorine ad fluorine have a huge electron affinity, so something like carbon tetrachloride or carbon tetrafluoride may be good transport molecules with regard to oxidation stability, because they are practically inert. They may be too inert for the donor though, or even have too much affinity for the acceptors. I don't know. I still think a polar molecule would probably work best though. It is especially notable water vapor works fine for centuries for transport in the old dry piles.
and it needs to work solely via (e-) affinity,
Well, by electron transfer effects anyway, not necessarily exclusively electron affinity effects. I expect there are various other effects that have to be brought into play in the circuit to be effective. It is also notable that triboelectric effects fall into the category electron affinity and I expect researching triboelectric effects will show some interesting combinations.
possibly employing magnetism and the Casimir force.
I think electron affinity and the Casimir force are intimately tied together.
It would seem that since the pile battery which was drawn by Horace, below, has a charge transport gap, that by making the gap of such a dimension that it becomes Casimir active, then we are almost there.
I think making the gap too narrow defeats the purpose of the gap. It is necessary to avoid having the gap so narrow that electron tunneling can occur through it to the point it simply becomes a conductor. Also, since the critical Casimir effects are involved in the exchanges between the transport molecule and and the electrodes, and possibly in electron exchanges between transport molecules, reducing the gap to the point it restricts the zero point field in the gap where all the meaningful action occurs actually reduces the amount of energy that can be gained form the Casimir force.
IOW one would first need to etch a plethora of few nanometer deep pits into a dielectric; and into each pit is admitted one H2 molecule - the (e-) affinity transport medium. The pit array is the charge transport gap, sandwiched by a donor plate and acceptor plate of maximum difference in (e-)affinity.... and/or speaking of "negative affinity" for the donor - there is boron nitride would possibly be a double-donor, so to speak and would not hydride. Anyway, the H2 molecule/ion can oscillate rapidly by approximately 10-20x its own diameter in the terahertz range, without any power input, and is kept aligned by a magnetic field (to avoid parasitic heat loss); and is, in effect "powered" by ambient heat perhaps using the Casimir with perhaps a kinetic rebound at the end of each excursion.
I don't see anything in the above that defeats the problem of energy symmetry for cyclical events with regard to the ZPF. Net energy exchange with the ZPF around a full cycle appears to me to be zero. Maybe I'm missing something here.
This is actually not far removed from what a former poster to Vortex (Charlie Brown?) wanted to do under the hypothesis of a nanometer sized "thermal diode"...
I think there is way more to getting free type II energy than using a diode as a thermal ratchet, which Feynmann did a good job of discussing in his lectures for Caltech freshmen, though I took a couple shots at it conceptually myself in the 1990's:
http://mtaonline.net/~hheffner/TED.pdf http://mtaonline.net/~hheffner/SLVN.pdf Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
