Researchers create self charging "ambient" battery w/ graphene (Maxwell's demon)

[broli]

Researchers at Hong Kong Polytechnic University claim to have invented a new kind of graphene-based "battery" that runs solely on ambient heat. The device is said to capture the thermal energy of ions in a solution and convert it into electricity. The results are in the process of being peer reviewed, but if confirmed, such a device might find use in a range of applications, including powering artificial organs from body heat, generating renewable energy and powering electronics.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/48889

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1203/1203.0161.pdf

Sometimes it takes really simple experiments to discover interesting new things.
The paper is very clear and very understandable unlike your typical research paper. Basically one such battery produces around 0.33V. This is not bad considering the effective surface area of the sample was a mere 3 mm × 5 mm. Dissimilar electrodes were used so the current would have a preferred direction. Finally all electrodes and edges were sealed to avoid contact with the solution leaving only the graphene.

I can't wait for them to try this out on much larger sheets like these.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2010/June/20061001.asp

I find it strange that such a promising material has been in the labs for so long. Over the years I keep reading breakthrough after breakthrough using graphene but nothing commercial uses it. Does anyone else smell an anti-technology conspiracy.

[mscoffman]

I find it strange that such a promising material has been in the labs for so long. Over the years I keep reading breakthrough after breakthrough using graphene but nothing commercial uses it. Does anyone else smell an anti-technology conspiracy.

Like electrets?  Apperantly they work only for audio.

:S:MarkSCoffman

[broli]

There actually is a newer paper out by the same researcher with an improvement on the previous battery. This one uses graphite instead of gold, and glass as the substrate instead of silicon/SiO2.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.6688

[wings]

interesting

http://phys.org/news/2012-03-graphene-battery-power.html

[broli]

Yet another new article of the same researchers:

Electricity generated from Ambient Heat by Pencils 
Zihan Xu, Guo'an Tai (Submitted on 17 Jun 2012)

The idea of generating electricity from ambient heat has significant meanings for both science and engineering. Here, we present an interesting idea of using pencil leads, which are made of graphite and clay, to generate electricity from the thermal motion of ions in aqueous electrolyte solution at room temperature. When two pencil leads were placed in parallel in the solutions, output power of 0.655, 1.023, 1.023 and 1.828 nW were generated in 3 M KCl, NaCl, NiCl2 and CuCl2 solutions, respectively. Besides, we also demonstrate that two pieces of reduced graphene oxide films and /or few-layer graphene films can generate much more electricity when dipped into the solutions, while there was no electrodes contact with the solution. This finding further verified that the electricity was not resulted from the chemical reaction between the electrodes and the solutions. The results also demonstrate that ambient thermal energy can be harvested with low dimensional materials, such as graphene, or with the surface of solid material without the presence of temperature gradient. However, the mechanism is still unclear.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.3748