Have you got any chunks germanium crystals lying around pomodoro

The guys at hong-kong polytechnic got current from ambient with silicon touching aluminum foil: http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.4622

--- Quote ---We report experimentally that the electricity is generated from ambient thermal fluctuations across a non-ideal diode consisted of a silicon tip and an aluminum surface. The output is tuned by the contact force which modulates Schottky barrier heights as well as rectifying ratios of the diodes. The interaction regime between the silicon and the aluminum locates at the quantum-classical boundary where thermal fluctuations are appreciable, and the rectification of thermal fluctuations leads to the electricity generation. This finding offers an innovative approach to environmental energy harvesting.'

I got similar results with germanium crystals(same periodic table family as silicon) but my crystals are very small(less than o.5mm each)was wondering what larger crystals will do.

Gyula:

Very interesting info.  Thanks.

Bill

http://makearadio.com/crystal/54.php

This is the radio I am building.  Almost completed today.  What I don't get is the 22k resistor across the antenna and ground parts of the circuit.  Why is this there?

Bill

Hi Bill, the 22k (sometimes 100k ) is to make the crystal earphones work properly. Because they have infinite resistance and some capacitance, the voltage would build up to a dc level -  without the resistor bleeding some power away.

Guyla, thank you for the radium info. I had run into that article before, but in the scientific american instead. I did try waving uranuim salts around a ferrite rod antenna inside a proper radio, but it had no effect. Now that I have a crystal set I will try it on a wire antenna instead. Unfortunately uranium is a million times weaker than radium. I think another way to reproduce the experiment is to use a negative ion generator instead of radium. I'm not sure how it works but perhaps the effective antenna area is increased by the conducting ionized air?

Profitis, my friend gave me a few small chunks of germanium 99.9999% pure. The picture shows my stock of germanium.  I can try replicating you experiment, tell me how how did it exactly.

Regarding  the uranium doped galena, I'm getting the feeling that the Moreland patent application is a fairy tale. Why are there so many people in this field spinning yarns, turning their ideas into supposedly factual events?  I get the feeling this Moreland chap may have given conferences on his device and needed this patent application to boost his status.

Like this pomodoro.wave a book over it with your other hand to see if blocking light out makes a dif to the current.you can dope germanium with a trace antimony or silver and a blowtorch.(This is pyrites in the pic)

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Gyula,  thank you for the radium info. I had run into that article before, but in the scientific american instead. I did try waving uranuim salts around a ferrite rod antenna inside a proper radio, but it had no effect. Now that I have a crystal set I will try it on a wire antenna instead. Unfortunately uranium is a million times weaker than radium. I think another way to reproduce the experiment is to use a negative ion generator instead of radium. I'm not sure how it works but perhaps the effective antenna area is increased by the conducting ionized air?

Profitis, my friend gave me a few small chunks of germanium 99.9999% pure. The picture shows my stock of germanium.  I can try replicating you experiment, tell me how how did it exactly.

Regarding  the uranium doped galena, I'm getting the feeling that the Moreland patent application is a fairy tale. Why are there so many people in this field spinning yarns, turning their ideas into supposedly factual events?  I get the feeling this Moreland chap may have given conferences on his device and needed this patent application to boost his status.

Well,  I am a lurker on this topic (or on nuclear chemics and physics) and I think that alpha particles coming from materials like radium does ionizes air in its vicinity, and this makes air more conductive locally than normally it is,  this turns out from Page 34 of this file here: http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/04/054/4054050.pdf    In Page 35, the radioactive lightning rods are mentioned too.

IT is very possible that your uranium salt is too weak to casue detectable effects. In the test described in The Electrician, the strength of the radium bromide used was defined as very weak, of 50000 units. Somehow it should be figured out how it compares to your uranium salt strength, how weak is the weak which is still good, lol

Re on the ion generator: perhaps Tesla's ozon patent could be taken as a start.  What you wrote that the effective antenna area increases due to the ionized air: well I am guessing a yes here but I could think of the followings too: the effective quality factor, Q, of an antenna (and possibly the LC circuits coupled to it)  is increased by the effect of the particles, reducing Ohmic losses both in the antenna and in the LC circuits coupled to it, as it were 'inducing' negative resistance in those wires pf the antenna and the coils, so the selectivity of the system increases hence the received signal is enhanced. 

Gyula

EDIT:  This video may also be of interest here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8GlzUjYazs

Good video Gyula!   

Well, I made the doped galena, knowing that it went against current science. Unlike magnetic and electronic devices, there have not been many replications of these experiments, so I though that there might be a very slight chance of some anomaly showing up, especially when similar devices were supposed to have worked in T. H. Moray's earlier work.  I assumed that Moray's early work (lighting a single light globe with what appears to be a crystal radio set and  in another device, being able to power a 2000 ohm horn speaker directly) was authentic (a big assumption to say the least ) and figured that he either received lots of power from the station, used feedback to the antenna to improve its performance ( description of inch long sparks from his antenna in later versions) or the radioactive sources produced the power.
I decided to focus on the last aspect for now.  Although the nuclear magnetic battery  experiments I did a while ago with uranium salts did not show any increase in the Q of the coil (Brown) , having read Moreland's good description of Morays work and Moreland's own patent application i decided to try these galena experiments. The quantity of Uranium trioxide used was 0.25g in 3g of galena. I only used a lump of about 1/3 of this total mass.  Now even if we assume that all of the energy from the uranium can be utilized, we still come up with a very small value. I'd need to work it out , but it is puny.  You mention increasing the conductivity of the coil to increase the Q. But would we also get this effect by irradiating the bare coil with a negative ion generator, like the ones popularized in the 1980's.  Pointy needles are made to have a high electrostatic voltage and millions of ions per second stream out of the points.  The ions would contact the coil and leave electrons on its surface, also giving it a high negative electrostatic charge, but would it really  increase its conductivity? I'm not so sure.