AC power generation relies on energizing electromagnets in giant generator sets to create an alternating electrical current in metal conductor wires that distribute this push pull through the black hot wire into homes & businesses of all kinds. The net number of electrons lost from that chain are measured by the utility meter in kWh kilowatt hours, which is multiplied by the cost & that's what your utility company uses to charge you an electrical utility bill monthly.
What makes the AC a scam is that all the electrons are either converted to heat or returned to the earth through the neutral wire & ground connection. There are more telluric currents available in the surfaces of the Earth because of broad electrification worldwide. We have millions of signals from FM AM & satellites & wife & LTE & radar & other microwaves & very long wave & all sorts of frequencies surging through us constantly. Cosmic rays & energetic alpha, beta & gamma & neurons from naturally occurring radioactive elements.
If you eat a banana, radioactivity from a potassium isotope will bombard your bones & other cells with ionizing radiation at very low levels from the inside out. Chest or Dental X-Ray, living over granite rocks, taking a long flight, getting a CT scan or MRI, we are exposed to ionizing radiation all of the time & too much not good & can cause cancer or other cell mutations. Thus, there is energy happening all around you, continually. We have energy going through us, on the surface of our body from head to toe a differential voltage at very low amperage. I have played with a sensitive volt meter all over my body & found nanowatt of energy available, enough to run a very efficient quartz clock movement.
It gets weird when you first think about the white neutral & green ground wire bonded back at the utility panel. In AC there is only a hot wire & a neutral return to "Earth" & there in lies the scam. All the electrons entering back into the earth are never lost, they do change voltage & amperage & a lot of them are converted into thermal phonons, like heat photons similar to light in the visible spectrum, but longer infrared waves that have less energy. Conversely higher energy photons become like ionizing radiation, such that deep UV can cause skin cancer by penetrating the skin & damaging DNA by ionizing chemical bonds & causing DNA breakages that underpin the mechanism of action of photo-aging or why skin exposed to high energy UVA develops mutations & losses of elasticity associated with advanced aging.
The power generation facility bumps up the voltage to millions of volts or many hundreds of thousands of volts because that enables smaller distribution wires to carry billions of watts. At lower voltages much higher amperage would be required, so the distribution wires would need to be enormously large & heavy & expensive or similarly expensive & compact super conductors cooled with liquid nitrogen in insulated vacuum pressure pumping pipe networks that would be hugely expensive to actually commercialize on a large scale. There is a system being built in the USA to link the 3 major utility grids with an HVDC system operating on super cooled superconductor wires (brittle ceramic, very hard to build & keep cold & safe from damage & prevent leaking from the network of coolant or allowing heat energy in from the environment.
So at a macro-scale for your smartphone battery charging. If the charging circuit in the phone could handle 120vac instead of 5vdc, charging would be 99.999% efficient & 500x faster, though with the kind of lithium ion batteries they are using, lithium cobalt oxide carbon with a flammable electrolyte, that would give rise to venting with flame accidents. Such a device would need to use super & ultra capacitors capable of taking higher voltages & storing it as electrostatic energy, a much better designed higher voltage power circuit in the charging controller of the phone & a completely new time of charging port like USB Type C that can handle up to 100 watts :P
Sending AC waveforms into DC batteries can improve their power output through radiative pumping, like a buckybooster. Effectively you can invert the DC to AC then back-propagate the AC into the DC battery to energize the chemical reactions & improve power flow efficiency or power output. The applied technology & science to do this so much more complicated & poorly studied, that most companies stick to tried & true simple safer low voltage DC battery designs with good energy density based on common Lithium Ion batteries.
There is energy all around us, mostly from the Sun, but also pressure gradients in the wind & thermal gradients of all kinds. There are radio waves & microwaves & wifi & all kinds of energies surging through all of us all the time. Inside the human body every cell shuffles h+ hydrogen ions across the outer cell membrane to generate electrons to use in the citric acid cycle to convert ADP to ATP to fuel the mitochondria etc thus, all human cells are self assembling hydrogen fuel cells made of biomolecules derived from foods previously eaten that were broken down by microbes in the human gut into small parts to make new cells & repair existing cells, cells systems, organs, blood, sweat & tears. Drinking water itself acts as an antioxidant to combat the deleterious effects of O3- radical formation that comes from using Oxygen in the air to produce chemical energy where humans breath in O2 laced nitrogen gas & exhale CO2 laced nitrogen gas. There is still energy left in the CO2 as carbonic acid or CO2 in water can produce additional energy reactions via acidity transfer of hydrogen H+ ions or protons as they are known.
I am about to start into a deep dive on Electricity to uncover how we can use higher voltage to do more work with less energy, to improve life on Earth by enabling more people to have a 6KW lifestyle on a 2KW budget for 10 billion people simultaneously all around the world. The existing electrical systems can be upgraded to enable this kind of advanced higher power, staring with higher voltage 1000v charging of Electric Vehicles, not just 240vac or 480vac. We need power scaling to higher voltage to make the charging cables smaller, to use less metal if we are going to make billions more charging stations & tens of billions more electric vehicles that have to be recharged all the time! Higher voltage & voltage multiplication the key.
In aircraft & spacecraft they use 400vdc at sever hundred hertz to enable much higher power levels with smaller wires for electrical servos airfoil surface control that replaced heaver hydraulic units with lower mass technology & similar, which is generated from a turbo-genet turbo-alternator or APU, spinning at rotational speeds of 100+ thousand RPM using oil pressurized oil cooled foil & sleeve bearings. Compared to your car or motorcycle alternator, these turbo-APU are low mass, compact & very high power output, way more efficient, but also an example of Premium Efficiency as that kind of APU costs a lot more than a car alternator *generator* / in a conventional vehicle, the engine alternator generator the coolest part, as it energizes recharging the 12v SLA battery & powering all the lights & drive assist functions, stereo & dash computers & ECU & ESC etc
Thermal wrist watches were developed where the temperature difference between the wearers wrist & the ambient environment were converted by a special low temp low temperature differential thermocouple style heat to power generating device with a band-gap of the correct type that was setup in many series cells to generate just over 1.5v via a voltage boosting circuit combining a capacitor & coil etc that would send this energy to the quartz drive stepper motor to enable the wrist watch to keep time using differential heat energy capture technology originally developed in larger formats for radioactive RTG power supplies that use heat from a decaying rod of concentrate radioactive metal like Strontium 90 & the cold of space to create a temperature differential whereby which the hot core was on one side of the thermocouples & the cold of space was connected via a heatsink fin array to the cold vacuum of space. With very long operating lives on the decades of continual use range, RTG waste heat also keeps the deep space craft or space prob from freezing over, just like the Curiosity Rover on Mars that has little pucks of radioactive elements that keep the motors & instruments from freezing.
On Earth, lots of gradients can be used to make energy. Consider hydro power & pumped hydro energy storage. Solar power towers like those with thousands of computer controlled mirrors that focus the sun's thermal energy onto a dark black thermal absorbing material at the top of the tower at the Ivanpah Solar Thermal Plants & other concentrated solar energy facilities. The Sun releases more energy in 1 second that mankind produces burning carbon in an entire year, amazingly. By the time the sunlight reaches Earth, much of that energy lost to space, but Solar power on Earth has amazing untapped potential, especially if we can figure out how to make non-toxic solar panels that are easier or cheaper to recycle EOL vs those energetic good performing mono-crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules of today.
No comments:
Post a Comment