On Sep 9, 2007, at 1:24 PM, Jones Beene wrote:
Horace
> Ah yes, it's that sometimes delusional pre-experiment glow I
must be feeling!
Problem is - I don't see this working more robustly than the old
Clarendon dry pile without getting down to "nano" tolerances, and
possibly to exotic materials.
We apparently have very different views on this, and very differing
mental models of how this might work. The ZPE mechanisms I have
suggested occur between the transport molecule and the donor and
acceptor surfaces. That's where the sub nanometer gap lies.
In my model of the process, it is only useful to make the gap roughly
as small as the mean free path. If water vapor is used then pressure
is on the order of 1/10 atmosphere, and the mean free path is on the
order a micron.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_free_path
Even if a 1 atmosphere H2 H2O gas mix is used, the gap need only be
about 100 nm, a tenth of a micron. This is not a big deal with
today's technology. The dry pile used paper separators of, say,
10^-4 m gap. A 100 nm gap is 10^-7 m, which is a factor of 10^5
improvement. Then there is the improvement of not fighting the uphill
potential drop of the metal-metal interface, at least another order
of magnitude improvement. And then there is the idea of using the
pile for pulse amplification, which might provide even more
improvement, depending on the final choice of materials.
Coming up with clean electrode materials might be difficult for me,
but it is not an impossibility to come up with some basic tests of
the concept.
So far I've been in a brainstorming mindset, willing to entertain 20
impossible things before breakfast. Actually getting down to making
real stuff is indeed the hard part.
What things ultimately boil down to is whether the electron affinity
concept can be made to work, i.e. actual charge transfers obtained at
both donor and acceptor surfaces with some useful frequency, and to
some extent wether the concept has any applicability at all to the
dry pile operation.
I think it should be possible for an amateur to test this using a DC
pulse train through a simple lead-transporter-gold cell, and zinc-
transporter-gold cell, using various gasses as electron transporters,
including steam, hydrogen, a steam hydrogen mix, gasoline vapor,
gasoline vapor steam mix, etc.
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
