Richard Feymann was convinced that you cannot get energy from Brownian motion. But he didn’t have graphene available. On the other hand, Paul Thibado does. So let’s see what he achieved with it.
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It sounds like a modern-day fairy-tale. But this fairy-tale is true. A team from the University of Arkansas built an electrical circuit that can mine energy from graphene. It uses the thermal motion of the graphene and transforms it into electricity.
As the research lead – Paul Thibado – describes, their circuit can be built into a chip, and there it can make clean and almost endless electric energy at a very low voltage. But that should still be enough to run small electrical devices or sensors.
Thibado and his team successfully implemented a theory they came up in 2017. Back then they said that you can get electricity from graphene. And it was a bold and controversial statement because it directly refutes Richard Feynman who claimed you cannot get usable energy from the thermal motion of atom – Brownian motion.
But Thibado decided to disrespect this statement and now proved that the thermal movement of graphene can be – in a meticulously designed electric circuit – produce electric current. This was previously considered impossible.
The researchers used a relatively new type of physics, stochastic thermodynamics which uses random variables to better understand unbalanced dynamics. Such processes can be found in many microscopic systems from colloids or bio-polymers to enzymes or molecular engines.
According to the authors of the study, the graphene, and their circuit and in a physical symbiosis. And their temperature is the same which is important according to Thibado. The reasons are fairly simple if there was a temperature difference between the graphene and the rest of the circuit the Second Law of Thermodynamics would step in.
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