| Date | 21st, Aug 2023 |
|---|
Researchers have discovered a method to harness energy from ambient heat using graphene, overturning long-established physics theories. This breakthrough holds promising commercial potential, especially for wireless sensors.
The discovery overturns more than a century of physics orthodoxy by identifying a new form of energy that can be extracted from ambient heat using graphene.
Obtaining useful work from random fluctuations in a system at thermal equilibrium has long been considered impossible. In fact, eminent American physicist Richard Feynman effectively shut down further inquiry in the 1960s after he argued in a series of lectures that Brownian motion, or the thermal motion of atoms, cannot perform useful work.
However, Feynman missed something important, as proven in a new study published in the journal Physical Review E titled “Charging capacitors from thermal fluctuations using diodes.”
Three of the paper’s five authors are from the University of Arkansas Department of Physics. According to first author Paul Thibado, their study rigorously proves that thermal fluctuations of freestanding graphene, when connected to a circuit with diodes having nonlinear resistance and storage capacitors, does produce useful work by charging the storage capacitors.
