Thanks to Thor Leach for posting the following here yesterday:
Oh, hey, look at that! Garret Moddel was granted a patent for his asymmetrical Casimir cavity power generation device back in February! And the device should be able to achieve Lithium Ion power densities. And it’s solid state. And he thinks it could eventually be manufactured at scale using a process similar to the printing of thin film solar cells.
The link to the patent, which was granted by the US Patent Office on February 22nd 2022, is here:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US11258379B2/en
Some excerpts from the patent:
FIELD
This invention is in the field of electronic devices. This invention relates generally to quantum devices for harvesting and generating electrical energy.BACKGROUND
According to quantum theory the quantum vacuum is filled with electromagnetic radiation in the form of quantum vacuum fluctuations, and devices exhibiting associated quantum noise. There has been substantial discussion about whether this energy can be harvested, and if so, how. A chief problem in harvesting this energy is that it forms the energy ground state, and so it does not flow from one region to another. However, the quantum vacuum energy is geometry-dependent, and its density is lower in a Casimir cavity than outside of the Casimir cavity. The use of Casimir cavities therefore opens the possibility of making use of the quantum vacuum fluctuations to drive energy from one location to another.SUMMARY
Devices for generation of electrical energy are described herein. In embodiments, devices described herein use two different regions in which the zero-point fluctuations are different to allow a portion of noise power arising from the zero-point fluctuations to be harvested.
