In a controversial experiment, a team of physicists investigated whether we could harness the Earth's rotational energy to generate electricity.
It's a deceptively simple idea that researchers have only started to grapple with over the last decade. But whether the concept will ever turn into a feasible source of renewable energy remains to be seen, with the team's peers noting their skepticism of the results.
As detailed in their paper published in the journal Physical Review Research, the team led by Princeton University physicist Christoper Chyba, aligned a special device made up of a weak manganese-zinc ferrite conductor and electrodes at each end, at a 57 angle, making it perpendicular to our planet's rotational motion and its magnetic field.
They observed that the device generated 17 microvolts of electricity, which as Nature points out is a fraction of the voltage released by a single neuron firing.
It's a "controversial but intriguing" result, as researchers told the science journal, especially considering the minuscule voltage is extremely difficult to isolate from other physical influences.
"The idea is somewhat counter-intuitive and has been argued since Faraday," University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire emeritus physicist Paul Thomas, who wasn't involved in the research, told Nature.
Retired physicist Rinke Wijngaarden, who found the effect didn't work in his own 2018 experiments added that he's "still convinced that the theory of Chyba et al. cannot be correct."
The device could theoretically work by having the generator pass through the Earth's magnetic field, parts of which remain static, producing a current. However, as the journal points out, electrons could end up rearranging themselves as a result to create an opposing force, negating the effect.
Chyba and his team claim to have corrected for this by coming up with a special material that isn't prone to rearranging itself in this way by maintaining the same electrostatic force inside the device.
In short, plenty of research has yet to be done before we can definitively say that we could harness the Earth's rotational energy to generate power.
But the team of physicists is planning to do just that, attempting to scale up their experiment to generate an actually useful amount of energy.
Intriguingly, assuming that the system would work and would be scaled up to meet the demands of the entire planet, the Earth's rotational spin would only slow by seven milliseconds over the next 100 years, the researchers found — which is in the same ballpark as the amount the Moon's pull slows the Earth's rotation over the same period.
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