In the group’s initial experiments, Strano says, when they wired up the carbon nanotubes with their fuel coating in order to study the reaction, “lo and behold, we were really surprised by the size of the resulting voltage peak” that propagated along the wire.
After further development, the system now puts out energy, in proportion to its weight, about 100 times greater than an equivalent weight of lithium-ion battery.
The amount of power released, he says, is much greater than that predicted by thermoelectric calculations. While many semiconductor materials can produce an electric potential when heated, through something called the Seebeck effect, that effect is very weak in carbon. “There’s something else happening here,” he says. “We call it electron entrainment, since part of the current appears to scale with wave velocity.”
MIT Harnesses Molecule Power
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/ ... ule-power/
A key characteristic is their impossibly small diameter: they measure only five or so billionths of a meter wide. It's such a small space that electrons traveling down nanotubes are conducted ballistically. The electrons are never scattered or lost, a property that makes nanotubes zero-dimensional objects. Densely packed nanotubes could also lead to ultracapacitors capable of storing far more power than today's capacitors. (Blowing gases onto the outside surface of nanotubes can also generate current.)
The MIT researchers coated the nanotubes with a fuel and then ignited it. The heat penetrated to the inside of the nanotube and began to travel 10,000 times faster than the normal spread of the reaction. The traveling thermal wave in turn pushed electrons along the tube, creating a current.
