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Ambient Energy LED lighting contest!

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LAN_403

Tue Feb 13 2007, 04:01PM

Banned on April 7, 2007
Registered Member #277 Joined: Fri Mar 03 2006, 10:15AM
Location: Florida
Posts: 157

My guess is that Steve's contest is a method to showcase how LEDS can be lit for pennies, compared to the US$100,000 (+/-) that I've invested into developing a method of harvesting energy from purely environmental ionic sources. If so, its comparing apples to oranges. The picture of the jumbo LED was shared on this site (powered by 100% ionic energy) because it is easier to see in a picture compared to showing my system powering a fuel cell or electric motor. The tate ambient module, or variations thereof, that have been shown on this site are admittedly by the inventor himself Joe Tate, a method of measuring (or harvesting) manmade energy, he intentionally invented the technique to monitor energy from radio stations as a method of early earth quake detection (read his patent 4,628,299 for details). You can also light an LED from AC power ripple in and around your home, but none of these techniques is "free" energy, it is 'stolen' energy, or said more gently, energy that is borrowed from manmade sources. No self respecting physicists would regard this type of energy as free energy, and some physicists such as the late Lloyd Bell, a personal friend of mine, wouldn't even consider it wasted energy. There are some who believe there is no such thing as wasted energy, but there is only inefficient useage and/or inefficient transmission of energy, but that would launch us into pages of disortation to explain their concept. It would be an error to believe that lighting an LED from RF signals or AC ripple is cost free, it isn't, there are generators turning somewhere (or other energy production) producing the energy that you can tap into and costing the power company $ to produce it. None-the-less, illuminating LEDs from distant manmade power sources can be fun to play with, I've operated electric motors by "borrowing" energy from AC ripple transmitted through the ground from a distant power plant, it's easy to do, but only for a short experiment, no doubt if you operate your home from it, if/when the power company found out, their lawyers would be all over you for "stealing" their energy, from their viewpoint. If the contest is simply to light some LEDs, great, but don't allow anyone to led you to believe that lighting an LED from manmade power sources is even remotely related in technique or environmental impact to my lighting LEDS, operating motors and producing hydrogren from 100% perpetually renewable ionic sources... not even close. CM

Dr. Shark

Tue Feb 13 2007, 05:10PM

Registered Member #75 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 09:30AM
Location: Montana, USA
Posts: 711

CM, I think you still did not take the time to read steves requirements fully:

Steve CÃ¸nner wrote ...

So, your mission should you choose to accept it, is to light an LED using "Free" energy. By that I mean renewable energy, or energy that would otherwise have gone to waste such as ambient RF or EMI from your electronic toys.

Ambient RF energy will either be dissipated by resistances in the ground or atmosphere, or it will travel to outer space forever, but it is not somehow going back to the electricity companys. Since RF losses cannot be avoided even with the best technology, it is definitely a good idea to try and reclaim some of that energy - am I the only one who thinks it would be great to keep the iPod battery topped up by a wireless charger, e.g. RF emissions from a PC?

Firkragg, you imply in your post (very cool demo by the way, very 1337, OMGz0r!) that you consider the mains ground to be full of RF noise, but your body to be a rather good ground. I claim that it is the other way round, i.e. your body is a bag of noise picking up all sorts of EMI, and the ground is a comparatively good ground ( that's why it is called ground, follow me?

)
An easy demonstration of this requires nothing more than an electric guitar. Turn up the Amp until it starts humming, then touch a grounded wire - the humming stops. The logical explanation is that after you ground your body, you stop pumping noise into the amp.

Tue Feb 13 2007, 05:32PM

Banned on April 7, 2007
Registered Member #277 Joined: Fri Mar 03 2006, 10:15AM
Location: Florida
Posts: 157

Joe:

You touched on the very topic that many physicists have sat around the table discussing over late night beers. It's the old "if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound" issue. This could take 30+ pages to explain properly, but I'll try a nutshell approach, which'll probably get me into trouble, or censored again. There are some intelligent people who believe that RF signals travel into space because there is something out there to receive their energy. They believe a signal, ANY signal including power, propigates only if there is something at the other end to receive or obsorb the energy. The inverse, if there's nothing to recieve the signal, propogation does not occur. I realize this is counter-intuitive, but lots of things discovered recently are too, especially in quantum mechanics. I've heard it said that the 'real' world of quantum mechanics is stranger than we can imagine. I know that this concept may be new to some, or old to others, but it never fails to generate a lively debate. The belief furthers by saying that RF energy (or any energy) only progates to your device beginning at the moment you complete the progation circuit. An extension of it says therefore there is no such thing as "wasted" energy... energy only propogates to targets capable of recieving or "obsorbing" it. Okay, I'm bracing for the flood of posts to tell me and others who subscribe to this philosophy how f**king crazy we are. Lemme have it.

ShawnLG

Tue Feb 13 2007, 05:38PM

Registered Member #286 Joined: Mon Mar 06 2006, 04:52AM
Location:
Posts: 399

Just to make CM happy, I did the old solar cell on the window sill trick. It is a completly renewable energy LED power source. It only has a 2 1/4" by 2 1/2" footprint compared to CM's football field size setup.

Joe Tate does not get any credit. Nicola Tesla gets the credit. He is the first to utilize the energy recieved from radiated radio waves.

Tue Feb 13 2007, 05:47PM

Banned on April 7, 2007
Registered Member #277 Joined: Fri Mar 03 2006, 10:15AM
Location: Florida
Posts: 157

Shawn:

Thanks, I do feel better, and I bet Joe Tate will too if he ever reads these posts (and Tesla if he can read from where ever he's currently at). Credit where credit is due. Unfortunately, in a few hours when the sun revolves below the horizon, your LED will go dark. Besides, Steve already said that solar loses on geek points due to being too easy. Solar PV is neat, I like it, but can't help suspect there's gotta be something better in our future. CM

Dr. Shark

Tue Feb 13 2007, 05:58PM

Registered Member #75 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 09:30AM
Location: Montana, USA
Posts: 711

CM: Yo man, you the f**king crazy nut. You are in fact touching on an intersting topic that quickly becomes mind-boggling. If I remember correctly what I learned in electromagnetics classes, an oscillating dipole generates both a retarded and an advanced wave, the latter of which travels backwards in time. There is some stuff about this in the second volume of the Feynman lectures if anyone cares to look it up. Apparently interactions of charges (which is what sending and receiving RF is about) always require some "previous knowledge" of where the energy is going to go.
But I am happy to be able to tell you that this does not matter at all in this case since we can safely assume that 99% of the RF energy will be absorbed, converted to heat, and therefore lost in the process of traveling through the atmosphere.

This is terribly OT now, so before I get my post deleted let me add this: Will I win the price if I build this

get it to run off the waste heat of my computer and power a tiny 1mW alternator to light an LED? 'course I would use ferro-fluid bearings, now that would be hard to beat on 1337ness, huh?

Avalanche

Tue Feb 13 2007, 06:03PM

Registered Member #103 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:16PM
Location: Derby, UK
Posts: 845

I had a play around with some thermocouple wire at work this afternoon, just to find out its 'potential' as a power supply

A single junction generated a maximum of .4mV at 3uA, when I held it between my fingers. I calculated that I'd need about 41 million junctions total to light an LED like this, which I announced to my work colleagues (they weren't all that impressed).

I decided then to use the soldering iron to heat the junction, this generated 22mV at 40uA before the solder blob melted and the thing fell apart. I thought this was pretty impressive, considering the size of the junction is approximately a quarter of a millimeter square. It would have gone further if the solder hadn't melted, I suppose it proves that you can 'homebrew' thermopiles to generate electricity without using any exotic semiconductors.

Dr. Shark

Tue Feb 13 2007, 06:10PM

Registered Member #75 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 09:30AM
Location: Montana, USA
Posts: 711

Peltier coolers are completely reversible, only that the Peltier effect is called Seebeck effect when run backwards. Thus any of the cheap CPU cooler Peltier elements give a reasonalbe power output when run at a sufficient temperature difference. Unfortunately the process is very inefficient compared to convential heat engines, since the required good electrical conductivity of the element usually comes with a good thermal conductivity, which effectivly "short circuits" your heat baths.

Tue Feb 13 2007, 06:19PM

Banned on April 7, 2007
Registered Member #277 Joined: Fri Mar 03 2006, 10:15AM
Location: Florida
Posts: 157

Joe:

Wow, you are braver than I for bringing up the information time-travel aspect of propogating waves. Associated reference: Bell's Theorm

and the ERP experiement

You are correct, some very bright people do infact believe that a wave will propogate only if it 'knows' (maybe a poor choice of words) that the reciever is out there somewhere to receive it. This implies to some people that a forward or backward (depending on where you are observing it from) temporal exchange of "information" or "status" between the transmitter and the receiver occurs. Any complaints, harrassments, please see Joe... I did not bring up the time-travel aspect of propogation

There are also some neat photon experiments I readup on years ago that tend to imply similar f**king nuts scenarios of the crazy quantum world in which we live.

Joe, careful, we may collectively get this thread closed down by being accused of dabbling in the dark art of pseudoscience! Notwithstanding that Bell's Therom mathematically proves that reality is non-local.

On the topic of Steve's contest:

""But I am happy to be able to tell you that this does not matter at all in this case since we can safely assume that 99% of the RF energy will be absorbed, converted to heat, and therefore lost in the process of traveling through the atmosphere.""

Maybe, but how can we know for sure? IF one subscribes to somewhat popular quantum interpretation, absorbson can only happen by a compatible receiver (if its not compatible, it won't absorb..??) The moment we measure something as esoteric as "are RF waves absorbed by my collection of Mark Twain books on the shelf?" ... we introduce some manner of tangible 'measurement' pertaining to the books, which thereby at that moment completes the propogation circuit... the quantum conundrum is how do we know the Mark Twain books were, or were not, a compatible receiver before we completed the propogation circuit?
Somebody please tell us if anyone has ever found any bonefide error in Mr. Bell's calculations. After years of employing EE's and having some phyicists friends, one which toured China with me, my mind has been filled with all manner of quantum topics that keeps the wheels turning night and day (example: what type of quantum characteristic in a compound would be attractive to both positive and negative ions in the macro-world?).

In the interest of staying on topic, not sure if your question was directed to me or to Steve, but Steve's contest mentions "waste" energy, mine doesn't. CM

Dr. Shark

Tue Feb 13 2007, 06:45PM

Registered Member #75 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 09:30AM
Location: Montana, USA
Posts: 711

I think "time travel" is too strong an expression for this, after all it only applies to single quanta and not macroscopic bodies, and as it is always the case with subatomic particles, there are a lot of different ways to look at the same phenomenon. I will look it up tonight and post clarification, so this does not end up as pseudo-science.

To get back to topic once more, let me throw another idea into the room: Possibly the miniscule amount of reactive gases like NO2 and CH4 in the air could be used to generate a tiny amount of power. A fuel cell running on plain air? Nah, maybe not.

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