Scientists Turned the Earth's Rotation Into 17 Microvolts of Electricity. That Could Be Revolutionary.
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The world is hungry for renewable sources of energy, which has led some scientists to ask the question: what about the rotation of the Earth?
A new study reports that researchers have successfully used a meticulously designed cylinder to harness electricity as it passed through Earth's magnetic field.
However, some experts are suspicious due to the incredibly small voltages that were reported, and it's uncertain if such an energy source could be scaled up to produce a useful amount of energy.
As climate change continues to impact countries and communities around the world, humanity is hungry for alternative sources of green energy. Luckily, the natural world provides them in abundance. Turbines harvest wind energy, solar panels collect the Sun's light, generators capture the power in a wave's motion, and even geothermal heat transforms into usable electrons. Now, some scientists are considering a completely new renewable energy source: the Earth's rotation.
Ok, maybe not completely new. Back in 2016, Christopher Chyba from Princeton published a paper exploring the possibility of generating electricity by rotating through the Earth's magnetic field. This drew some criticism, as most experts figured that any net voltage would be cancelled by the rearrangement of electrons during said generation process, according to Phys.org.
To prove that the idea had merit, Chyba decided to construct a foot-long device made from manganese-zinc ferrite and conduct experiments in a dark, windowless laboratory. While the laboratory remained stationary, the rotation of the Earth carried the cylinder through the magnetic field. True to Chyba's original predictions, the device produced 17 microvolts of electricity when held perpendicular to the magnetic field. The results of the study were published in the journal Physical Review Research.
'The device appeared to violate the conclusion that any conductor at rest with respect to Earth's surface cannot generate power from its magnetic field,' Chyba said in a press statement.
As Nature notes, 17 microvolts is a fantastically minuscule amount—a fraction of what a single neuron produces when firing. Because of this incredibly small voltage, some experts remain skeptical of the idea's practicality, saying that many sources can cause small voltage discrepancies. Chyba, for his part, did conduct the experiment with a solid chunk of conductor (and found zero voltage). He also re-ran the experiment in a non-laboratory setting—a residential building a few miles from the lab—and came up with the same results.
'This was a largely unregulated environment, in contrast to that of our primary laboratory,' the researchers reported. 'The resulting data are noisy with correspondingly large error bars in comparison with the results obtained in our primary laboratory. Nevertheless, the data once again show the voltage magnitude and behavior under rotation predicted by our effect, demonstrating that the observed effect is not due to an unidentified local influence in our primary laboratory.'
So how does this manganese-zinc ferrite cylinder work? Well, put simply, certain complex configurations of materials can channel Earth's magnetic field in such a way that they push past the ability of the electrostatic force to cancel out generated electricity. Of course, microvolts aren't exactly utility scale power, but Chyba—while sharing those scalability concerns—remains optimistic. Before we start leveraging the Earth's rotation as a source of energy, however, another lab will need to reproduce these results.
'Both papers talk about how it might be scaled up, but none of that has been demonstrated, and it might well prove not to be possible,' Chyba said in a press statement. 'And in any case, the first thing that needs to happen is that some independent group needs to reproduce—or rebut—our results, with a system closely similar to our own.'
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