4-5 years ago there was a lot of activity on the alternative energy forums concerning the “CapTret” which combines features of electret and capacitor to extend the life of a battery. It does work.
http://jnaudin.free.fr/captret/index.htm http://open-source-energy.org/?topic=1637.0 The best that can be said for the idea is that you can run an LED for a very long time, while at the same time, increasing the voltage on the cap. Eventually it will fail completely, but it has fooled a lot of people into thinking it is OU - and it does seem to provide far more charge than the cap is rated for. It is possible that Steorn took this technology to a higher level using an ultracap combined with the best lithium battery, but the device is not gainful. In the end, if you buy one for $1,200 dollars, you will probably be able to keep you mobile phone charged without grid electricity for a year, slightly longer than the warranty - when it will fail, having provided a few dollar’s worth of electrical energy… The trick is to make it last past the warranty date. … but heck, you could have lost more betting on the “sure thing” Patriots. From: Eric Walker Bob Higgins wrote: Electrets have been made for hundreds of years. These electrets, if shorted, and then opened will have the charge return and a high electric field will once again be present. In the shorting, charge was conducted from one plate to another, so work was done. Thank you for the clarification about the existence of electrets. What I don't understand is how you'd get a replenished potential out of one without doing additional work. If we consider the shorting to be doing work analogous to allowing a ball to roll down a hill, converting potential energy into kinetic energy (of the electrons in the current), what then moves the ball back up the hill after removing the short? Note that there was a claim that the Orbo works in a Faraday cage; if true, it seems like some kind of ambient potential in the environment isn't being tapped. There was a suggestion that the Orbo made use of a thermoelectric effect. That sounds like three things -- a lithium battery, a stack of electrets and some kind of thermoelectric device or effect. Could such a thing be made to do useful work? Eric
