Michel Jullian wrote:
Hi Charlie,
It certainly will if you cool it, otherwise it should radiate
exactly as much energy (blackbody radiation) as it receives, or
do I misunderstand the concept of thermal equilibrium?
As an exercise in seeing whether I understand what Charlie's
getting at, I'll try to answer your question, and we'll see if I'm
all wet.
The key here is the reason Charlie's using LEDs, not ordinary
diodes.
If you look at the current/voltage curve of an ordinary diode, it's
essentially linear at 0 volts (it's an exponential, but close to
zero we can ignore all but the linear term). This is what the
model says; checking it with an actual diode is a little tricky
since the currents involved are tiny.
The point is there's no sharp cutoff down there -- at ~ 0 volts a
diode conducts about equally well forward or backwards. The
"cutoff" comes at ~ 0.6 volts forward bias (for a silicon P/N
diode) where dV/dI plunges rapidly to something close to zero.
A consequence of this is that if you hook a diode, a noisy
resistor, and a capacitor in a loop, the capacitor isn't going to
charge -- the voltage on the diode is going to be very close to
zero, and in that range, the diode just acts like a resistor. In
other words, it leaks like a sieve. No joy there if you want
practical free energy.
Charlie's idea is that, if he uses an LED, even though noise on the
resistor may be able to sneak through the diode either way (due to
the low voltage), once in a while a noise pulse will be high enough
to kick a few electrons over the forward barrier voltage, and a
light pulse will come out. The light then leaves the circuit, and
its energy can't be recaptured by the "leaky" diode.
A photocell nearby will catch the light, and turn it back into
electricity. The photocell will be putting out (noisy) DC, not AC,
and can be used to charge a capacitor directly.
So, overall, the idea seems to be to use the LED in order to do an
end-run around the fact that diodes aren't ideal.
I started a series of measurements on diodes at low voltage a long,
long time ago, in a lab course in school (dropped the course, never
finished the measurements). I've been meaning to do that
experiment over again a little differently from the way we were
doing it then (use JFETs instead of a VTVM), and also check one
other thing: Can an LED "run backwards" and operate as a solar
cell? I don't know but I suspect the answer is "yes", which could
throw an additional monkey wrench into the works when trying to use
LEDs to cohere noise.
Aloha, Michel
----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles M. Brown"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent:
Tuesday, November 13, 2007 9:52 PM Subject: [Vo]:diode array in
photodiode array
Vortexians,
Looking at the array of hexagonal concentrators and spherical
photo diodes in:
photodiodeshttp://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19696/?nlid=662
I see a lot of small diodes in parallel so I will try to get
one and see if it aggregates rectified Johnson noise in the
dark.
Aloha, Charlie
