On Aug 18, 2009, at 4:59 PM, Jones Beene wrote:
This is not exactly in the context of this thread, but I stumbled
across a 25 year old paper by one of our favorite visionaries –
Robert Forward (well named) and it could be updated, based on new
research:
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PRB/v30/i4/p1700_1
“A pair of conducting plates at close distances experience an
attractive Casimir force that is due to the electromagnetic zero-
point fluctuations of the vacuum. A "vacuum-fluctuation battery"
can be constructed by using the Casimir force to do work on a stack
of charged conducting plates. By applying a charge of the same
polarity to each conducting plate, a repulsive electrostatic force
will be produced that opposes the Casimir force. If the applied
electrostatic force is adjusted to be always slightly less than the
Casimir force, the plates will move toward each other and the
Casimir force will add energy to the electric field between the
plates. The battery can be recharged by making the electrical
forces slightly stronger than the Casimir force to reexpand the
foliated conductor.”
Ostensibly this kind of cap-batt would work at very high frequency
– terahertz and up … but course, for there to be a net gain, the
recharging cycle (if it is not deducted from the “added energy”
itself) must be lower in expenditure than the extraction cycle… yet
this experiment is something that probably could be accomplished
today with MEMS techniques, at least in silicon valley and
elsewhere. It would be almost meaningless to opine how it would
turn out without actually doing it.
Jones
I notice the title and contents don't seem to match. I wonder if
Forward proposed a free energy scheme and the referees made him
remove it.
This might be modeled using finite element analysis before proceeding
to experiments. I noted earlier that Mostepanenenko and Sokolov
provide that the van der Waals retarding interaction U(r) at distance
r between two individual atoms with electric and magnetic
polarizabilites a1E, a2E, a1M, and a2M, is:
U(r) = C/r^7
where:
C = (-23/Pi) ( (a1E a2E)(a1M a2M) + a1M a2M) + (7/(4 PI)) ((a1E
a2M) + (a2E a1M))
There are also corrections that have to be made to the above for
surface roughness, temperature, metal conductivity, and surface
charge. Even with all that, these are not precision modeling tools.
Without COP of more than 20% by simulation there is probably not much
to stand on for getting funding for free energy research along those
lines.
A voltage corrected force for two plate Casimir force is given in
formula (5) of
http://www.mit.edu/~kardar/research/seminars/Casimir/PRL-Mohideen98.pdf
http://tinyurl.com/mg4hcs
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
