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  • Neutrino Energy?

    From Gary Harnagel@21:1/5 to All on Fri Dec 25 13:41:14 2020
    Has anyone seen this:

    "Neutrino Power Cubes can transform portions of energy into power"

    https://neutrinovoltaic.com/en/

    https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2016142056A1/en

    Interesting, if true. But is it?

    [[Mod. note -- Think about what we know about neutrinos: they only interact *very* weakly with matter. In particular, most neutrinos incident on a detector go right through the detector... indeed, they go right through
    the entire *Earth* without ever interacting with it. (I'm using "interacting" here in the particle-physics sense, i.e., I'm ignoring the gravitational interaction.) Without an interaction, converting "a portion of their
    kinetic energy" into electricity isn't going to get very far.

    Despite what the technobabble on that website suggests, neutrino
    interactions with matter aren't similar in any useful sense to photon interactions with a solar cell. Notably, most of the solar photons
    incident on a solar cell *do* interact with the solar cell (they're
    absorbed or reflected).

    There have been past claims of stronger neutrino interactions with matter,
    but these claims have proven to be wrong. Nobably, in the 1970s Weber
    [This was the same Joseph Weber who also claimed
    huge-amplitude gravitational-wave detections that
    noone else could confirm.]
    claimed that an N-atom crystal would coherently scatter neutrinos with
    a cross section which scaled as $N^2$), but both experiment and theory
    strongly refuted these claims. (A nice example of a refuting experiment
    is Franson & Jacobs (1992) ["Null result for enhanced neutrino scattering
    in crystals", Physical Review A vol 46, pages 2235-2239].)

    The referenced patent is irrelevant -- it's about a production process
    for metal films, and doesn't present any evidence for neutrino electricity production.

    Overall, the referenced website reminds me a lot of some of the examples described in this classic book:

    Arthur W. J. Ord-Hume
    "Perpetual Motion: The History of an Obsession"
    St. Martins, Press, 1980, paperback ISBN 0-312-60131-X

    -- jt]]

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  • From Jos Bergervoet@21:1/5 to Gary Harnagel on Fri Dec 25 21:38:36 2020
    On 20/12/25 10:41 PM, Gary Harnagel wrote:
    Has anyone seen this:

    "Neutrino Power Cubes can transform portions of energy into power"

    https://neutrinovoltaic.com/en/

    https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2016142056A1/en

    Interesting, if true.

    Still the energy output of the sun is only about 4e24 whereas its total
    energy production is 3.8e26. So even with 100% energy conversion we'd
    only get one tenth of what ordinary solar panels (with 10% conversion efficiency) will give us.

    So I think most Dyson spheres (especially the cheaper ones) will not
    harvest the neutrino energy at all!

    --
    Jos

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  • From Gary Harnagel@21:1/5 to Jos Bergervoet on Sat Dec 26 19:44:01 2020
    On Friday, December 25, 2020 at 10:38:40 PM UTC-7, Jos Bergervoet wrote:
    On 20/12/25 10:41 PM, Gary Harnagel wrote:
    Has anyone seen this:

    "Neutrino Power Cubes can transform portions of energy into power"

    https://neutrinovoltaic.com/en/

    https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2016142056A1/en

    Interesting, if true.

    Still the energy output of the sun is only about 4e24 whereas its total energy production is 3.8e26. So even with 100% energy conversion we'd
    only get one tenth of what ordinary solar panels (with 10% conversion efficiency) will give us.

    I did that calculation and got 16 mW/cm² at earth orbit (flux of about 10^11/cm²/sec/MeV)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_neutrino#Observed_data

    Of course, only capturing an unknown fraction, but it would be available
    at night, too :-)

    But I was thinking that it would be great for DETECTING neutrinos without having 40 tons of cleaning fluid in your pocket.

    So I think most Dyson spheres (especially the cheaper ones) will not
    harvest the neutrino energy at all!

    --
    Jos

    Thanks. The only thing that made me think there MIGHT be something to
    it was a mention of "resonance," meaning they might be structurally tuned
    to a particular energy.

    OTOH, it sounds suspiciously like cold fusion and a few other claims that
    never came to fruition.

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  • From Jos Bergervoet@21:1/5 to Gary Harnagel on Sun Dec 27 11:12:54 2020
    On 20/12/26 8:44 PM, Gary Harnagel wrote:
    On Friday, December 25, 2020 at 10:38:40 PM UTC-7, Jos Bergervoet wrote=
    :
    On 20/12/25 10:41 PM, Gary Harnagel wrote:
    Has anyone seen this:

    "Neutrino Power Cubes can transform portions of energy into power"

    https://neutrinovoltaic.com/en/

    https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2016142056A1/en

    Interesting, if true.

    Still the energy output of the sun is only about 4e24 whereas its tota=
    l
    energy production is 3.8e26. So even with 100% energy conversion we'd
    only get one tenth of what ordinary solar panels (with 10% conversion
    efficiency) will give us.
    =20
    I did that calculation and got 16 mW/cm=C2=B2 at earth orbit (flux of a=
    bout
    10^11/cm=C2=B2/sec/MeV)
    =20
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_neutrino#Observed_data

    By just using a quick lookup I got results saying that this neutrino
    output only carries about 1% of the solar energy, like here: <https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/12/14/8-facts-about-th= e-suns-most-ghostly-particle-the-neutrino/?sh=3D3ce42a9815d0>
    Your calculation looks more like 10% of the solar output.. (so do
    we still have a 'solar neutrino problem' here?

    ... The only thing that made me think there MIGHT be something to
    it was a mention of "resonance," meaning they might be structurally tu=
    ned
    to a particular energy.
    =20
    OTOH, it sounds suspiciously like cold fusion and a few other claims th=
    at
    never came to fruition.

    I think it sounds a lot like the claims about axion capture in a
    Josephson junction. Also there, a small device would then be able
    to capture them, avoiding the use of bulkier and more elaborate
    methods that are in use by e.g. ADMX.
    Christian Beck proposed this resonance mechanism some years ago:=20 <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015PDU.....7....6B/abstract>
    I've seen no indication since then that it was successful, but of
    course tricks like that sometimes do work (a simple ferrite rod
    with tuned winding in an AM receiver is a clear example..)

    --=20
    Jos

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