Solid State Wind Energy | Random Thursday

this video is supported by brilliant in november 2018 a really cool story made its way around the interwebs that some geniuses at mit created a plane with no moving parts and it was the first plane ever powered by ion propulsion now i just talked about ion drives in space recently the idea that they ionize xenon atoms and then fire them out the back with strong electromagnets that's not what this is that wouldn't produce nearly enough thrust here on earth to do anything but this works in a similar-ish way in space you have to carry xenon with you because there's no atmosphere to propel out the back but here on earth there's plenty of atmosphere so the plane had an array of aerofoils shaped just like an airplane wing to create lift when air passes over it but just in front of those aerofoils there was a thin wire they ran positive 20 000 volts through the wire which ionized the air around it mostly nitrogen then they ran negative 20 000 volts through the aerofoil behind it this attracted the positive ions around the wire causing them to rush toward the aerofoil in the process they collide with billions of air molecules and create an ionic wind over the blade this creates lift in the plane flu by the way if the term ionic winds sounds familiar you might be thinking of the ionic breeze air purifier from the sharper image back in the 90s only the ionic breeze positively charges incoming air while pulling it toward a negatively charged grid positively charged contaminants attach to the collection grid and cleaned air is accelerated into the room creating a fresh clean smell this is actually kind of on the same principle it only flew for 60 meters but that was the length of the gem they were using to test it so it probably could have gone further and it's worth noting that's almost twice as far as the wright brothers first flight so there's a really long way to go before you would ever actually fly on a silent plane that works like this you know it was a super lightweight plane 40 000 volts is a lot of energy that would drain a battery pretty quickly so it's still here or there whether or not it would actually become an actual viable source of transportation but the principles behind this plane might be the key to a source of a new kind of energy or at least a new spin on an old kind of energy [Music] wind energy has been around for hundreds of years it's actually one of the oldest sources of energy we've ever tapped into in fact there are windmills in naftafan iran that are a thousand years old and still working they also make excellent sparring partners if you're an aging delusional conquistador today wind energy makes up 5.5 of all the energy produced around the world which makes it the second highest renewable energy source in the world outside of hydropower that's 519 gigawatts of energy as of 2018 twice as much of solar although solar is growing faster than wind averaging a year-over-year increase of 23.79 as opposed to wind energy which is 12.14 and there are good reasons for this i mean wind energy is awesome but it does have its issues issues like birds the fact that birds do get killed in the blades of wind turbines is both sad and overblown some anti-wind groups have actually used that as a reason to block the production of wind farms because they claim that you know endangered birds in the area would get wiped out if they were flying through there it's hard to pin down an exact number of how many birds get killed and win turbines every year um anti-win groups have used anywhere between 300 000 and 500 000 as a number but just to put that into perspective uh 600 million birds get killed by flying into buildings in the united states every year and oh yeah house cats kill 2.4 billion birds every year but if you're on a mission to save every single bird possible yes birds do get killed in wind farms other issues with wind energy just include the massive size of these things which makes it very difficult to get to the actual sites where it's being done and building wind farms is a massive construction project that does do a lot of damage to the surrounding landscape although that is usually temporary but there's a reason why these wind generators have to be so big it's to offset the cost of maintenance windmills have a lot of moving parts that's that's kind of their thing they turn kinetic energy into electrical energy and any engineer will tell you the more moving parts a thing has the more opportunity there is for something to break or go wrong solar on the other hand has no moving parts so the maintenance on that is extremely minimal plus there are end-of-life issues around wind turbines they have a lifespan of around 20 to 25 years so over time that becomes a lot of 747 sized pieces of carbon fiber and fiberglass that have to be you know disposed of it's not recyclable and it's already starting to pile up in landfills and last but not least since these things are such massive projects they can only really be installed by utility companies it's not something like solar that can be distributed and you know somebody can just put it up on the roof of their house now none of this is meant to be a strike against wind energy every form of energy production has its strength and weaknesses wind is just more of a utility scale type of production whereas solar could be both and it's for this reason that engineers and scientists have been working on some kind of solid-state wind energy production a way to create energy from wind with no moving parts and the basic idea behind this is sort of the reverse of that ionic plane that i was talking about before instead of creating wind by using ionic particles it uses wind to create a flow of charged particles that you can then tap into to generate electricity this idea was explored in a paper published in august of last year in the journal applied physics letters by richard epstein of the university of new mexico and if it works it could be a game changer now before i get into that one there was a similar idea put forth in 2013 by tu dellis in the netherlands that they called iwakan iwakan stands for electrostatic wind energy converter and this design used charged water droplets that are blown by the wind and the movement of the droplets generate an electrical current that can be put into the grid there's a prototype on the campus that i don't think is actually operational anymore but it looks cool so why not now this is an awesome idea for sure but it's reliance on water to create the aerosols that carry the charge is a little bit problematic for one thing you have to have access to you know water line somewhere around where you should put this thing up and also it doesn't work in freezing temperatures plus the water would have to be super purified to prevent mineral buildup on the nozzles and let's face it if you're in drought conditions probably the last thing you should be doing is spraying more water into the air so you know it's it's a cool idea but the water thing is problematic this new idea though takes a similar approach but gets rid of all that pesky water described as a solid state wind energy transformer or sweat sweat baby sweat baby this design generates electricity through ionic currents through a process called electro hydrodynamics here's how it works the prototype they built for this study consisted of 55 parallel 17 gauge aluminum wires strung between two 8.5 meter tall wooden masks separated by about eight meters there are two types of wires attractor wires which are bare and emitter wires which contain small tufts of 7 micrometer carbon fiber spread out every 15 centimeters kind of like barbed wire when small negative currents run through the emitter wires the tufts create a coronal discharge releasing negatively charged ions into the air these negative ions want to drift toward the attractor wires but when the wind passes through it it carries the negative ions away with it giving the array a slight positive charge this positive charge causes electrons to rush in from the ground to balance things out and that rush of electrons can be captured as electricity now granted you are using electricity to create the coronal discharge in the first place but this system creates a loop where ions blow off the array and then fall back to the ground and get sucked back up into it again creating a loop effect that does produce in that gain of electricity it's not much electricity at least with this prototype thing it's only about 1 20th of a watt but this is just a prototype it's just a you know proof of concept and i actually spoke on the phone with dr epstein himself and he said that they are working on a new prototype design of this and they did secure a grant from the national science foundation to create a 100 watt version now that's still not a whole lot of energy either but that's a 20 000 increase so there's still a long way to go on this idea he did emphasize that it's still not guaranteed to work but it is a cool idea you know adjusting for size adjusting for layers you could stack grids on top of each other to create a net effect to get even more out of each one of these arrays there's a lot of different ways that you can tweak this that they could be working on over the following years to actually get some useful energy out of it the main benefit is just the insanely cheap price of creating and maintaining these arrays i mean it's literally just a bunch of aluminum wire when it all comes down to it now considering how long wind turbines have been around and how much they've scaled up over the years there's still a long way to go before the sweat concept sweat baby sweat baby reaches any kind of parody but every new innovation starts somewhere so we'll see what happens and what i would love to see happen is for these kinds of grids to become modular and decentralized so that just anybody could put one up on their house and just generate energy from their home i mean just like a just be like a solar panel that works at night works 24 hours a day although i should say that when i brought that up to dr epstein he did say that it probably would never quite get to that point but you know a guy can dream you know i got a lot of requests to talk about this after another youtuber covered it um i'll put a link to the video down in the description it's a good video but now that i've talked to dr epstein i think he may have oversold it a little bit and i think people may have gotten a little bit too excited about it at this point it's just not quite there yet here i am throwing cold water on something people are excited about again i'm the worst why do people follow me but you know what it's still cool just like that ion propulsion plane it might become a thing it might not you don't know but you know what you never know where these ideas might lead human innovation is always something to cheer for and talk about this amongst yourselves down below in the comments do you think this is a good idea do you think that this actually has any legs that do you think it could ever become you know at parity with regular wind energy discuss so yeah big thanks to dr epstein for talking to me the other day and setting me straight on this it was really helpful i'll put a link to his paper down the description you guys can go check it out i will tell you it's it's very technical a lot of it was over my head which is why i got in touch with them in the first place but many of you guys are much smarter than i am so you'll you'll probably get it and if you don't get it and you want to get a little bit smarter on that topic i can recommend the electricity and magnetism course on brilliant that's a smooth transition right there check me out through nine interact with quizzes and 95 exercises this course will get you up to speed on the phenomenon that makes our way of life possible including whatever it is you're 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 726,296

Rating: 4.8996053 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: ds_I1hEycNc

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020

Reddit Comments

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