Diode Array, many small parallel diodes to aggregate rectified Johnson Noise

[Kysmett]

C60 Buckeyballs are hollow and usually used to encapsulate something or at least have that ability if I am not mistaken....  are the ones you use empty?  If so, would it pay to place an atom it it to function as a more  efficient P material?

[Charlie Brown ARN]

 Kysmett,

Undoped C60 is metallic in conductivity. The C60 is is similar to Au in Au / semiconductor diodes notably the Au / GaAs diodes in the satellite transponder diode patch. Metal recombines with injected electrons quicker than a P type semiconductor would. C60 dis more durable than Au, it will not diffuse or electromigrate. Dopped shell or interior C60 can be tried later. Larger C buckyballs like C84 are tempting because the greater diameter gets the embedding insulating layer further from the lower limit of thickness of ~6 angstroms.

Aloha, Charlie 

[Kysmett]

The diode array will produce its open circiut voltage of ~1/10 volts as soon as its made. This voltage may serve to repel the C60s into an even dispertion. An insulative cover slip may be needed.
Applying the metal top conductive layer is one of the last steps in manufacture; the diodes will be separated before the metal is applied.

So then it is assumed that one must be very careful when handling as they are always "live".  What is the energy density at your new dispersion?

[Charlie Brown ARN]

Being live but locally shorted indefinately with a non damaging amount of power involved is acceptable. This property can be used to trim the voltage of a lot of DAs in series. This is simpeler than non shorting methods. Inefficient but smooth and cheap methods of power control are acceptable because heat dissipated in analog power transistors can be cheaply recovered. Good thermal engineering is needed for a reliable device. A pump in a cooling loop can always be running.

At 30nm spacing in a tesselation of equlateral triangles there will be ~10^11 diodes / cm2 this implies ~100 watts / cm2 @ 20C. The first approximation is that the power is proportional to the square of the absolute temperature. The diodes are spaced much wider than the diameter of the C60s so depletion regions can grow to cut off the reverse polarity Johnson Noise excursion. The depletion regions can be crowded somewhat because losses due to leakage can be made up for in diode density. I do not know the exact size of the reverse polarity depletion region.

Aloha,

Charles M. Brown

[andreas_varesi]

Hi Charlie Brown,

I have also tried to built a prototype that uses diodes to convert brownian movement directly into electric energy. My main problem is, that all diodes I did use had a too high threshold voltage, e.g. Germanium with 0.2 - 0.4V. The voltage I recieved per micro element was only some mV, so I wasn't able to rectify and collect the current. Also using a bias voltage to overcome the threshold didn't work, because I always had a leakage current from the battery that was higher, than the current I could get from one micro element (not the thing we call overunity). The only kind of diode I didn't try was a nano tube diode. Do you know, whether they have also a threshold voltage? How do you solve this problem in your system?

Thank you for all your answers

Andreas