Sounds like the "neutrino" or "rod generator" device. I wondered if it would surface again. The way it's described to operate sounds very much like this device. Neutrinos may be involved but more so in how the Earth converts the suns energy, at least IMO.

Going back in time, Tesla may have had a radiant energy device that was similar, then Thomas Henry Moray in the 50's. A Japanese firm was selling (or marketing) something in the early 1990s but then nothing.

The one's I've seen to operate have rods that look like iron cores (they look like that, not saying that is what they are composed of). They will produce electricity no matter what time of day it is.

I gather that since the sun puts out so much energy along the electromagnetic spectrum and that the Earth converts this energy (i.e. northern lights) - it just seems natural to attempt to collect and convert it to something useful. Technically it would still be called a solar panel, just that it's not typically in a panel configuration and it converts energy from more than just the "visible" area of the EM spectrum.

more info

the original itar-tass article plus more info

A link to some of the ground-work as it seem.

http://www.jinr.dubna.su/publish/Pepan_let...004/02_volk.pdf

"Excitation of physical vacuum"

I'm already to install these solar batteries/panels on my house. For the Russian scientists who might be reading this a great place to market new solar technology is at http://www.altersystems.com/catalog/index.php.

Approach Sanyo and Sharp to integrate your new technology into their current panels or create your own. For Sanyo and Sharp please integrate this new PV technology if it really works.

Looking forward to a time release date for this new technology.

A demnonstration is strongly needed for this story to gain credibility. There is not much energy in star light.

well i can see its a load of rubbish by the fact that no where are there any results of testing . no peer review and no proof.

I find it interesting that they claim its

twice as effective as an ordinary solar panel at converting light into electricity.

but they also claim it works by starlight (I assume they must mean moonlight)

But a Solar cell that is twice as efficient as current cells would still be useless at night.

Sounds like a hoax.

On another forum I post on we have what we call the "three day rule".

We use it to filter technical BS that was reported in the non-technical media.

The rule is based on the fact that it takes ~ 3 BUSINESS days for amazing claims to be independently verified or refuted. An amazing claim in the non-technical press which was not independently verified within this time frame was assumed to be BS.

Saved a lot of time that would otherwise be wasted discussing hoaxes.

Arthur

http://pesn.com/2006/05/31/9500274_Star_Battery/

Star Battery Unveiled at 50th Anniversary of Russian Science Center

Technical data and patent numbers given for new Geteroelectric matter that efficiently collects energy in the visible and infrared regions, along with high-capacity, compact capacitor.

by Sterling D. Allan
Pure Energy Systems News

DUBNA, RUSSIA -- On May 25th, the world-renowned Russian Science Center celebrated its 50th year anniversary of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) by presenting a new "star battery" technology, which they describe as "revolutionary".

Invented by the scientists at the Scientific Center of Applied Research (SCAR) at JINR, the Star battery was produced on the basis of a new substance to be known as Geteroelectric matter ("heteroelectric" is probably a better translation, or "metamaterial"). It consists of a Geteroelectrical photoelement of high efficiency in the visible and infrared range. It has a Geteroelectrical capacitor with huge capacity while being very compact.

A geterogen substance consists of a carrier and an active element, a nanoparticle of matter which is different from the substance of the carrier. The distance between the nanoparticles is less than the wavelength of an incident electromagnetic wave.

The Geteroelectrics patent is of the 'umbrella' type used in the Russian Federation. Patent No. 2249277 covers 24 fields of scientific research, and "allows driving and transforming the electromagnetic fields, providing the production of devices with forecasting optical, electrical and magnetic properties."

The following patents on the methods and apparatuses using the Geteroelectrical peculiar properties are without parallel in the world:

* Nanoamplifier of electromagnetic radiation (№2266596),
* DC and AC capacitors and internally inherent elements of integral schemes (№2266585),
* mirror (№2265870),
* Method of generation of coherent electromagnetic radiation and dipole nanolaser on its base (№2249278),
* Optical glass (№2209785)
* Photocathode (№2216815)
* Geterogen photoelement (№2217845)
* Photoelement (№2222846)

The optical glass made with Geteroelectric is claimed to have ten times the index of refraction -- a record.

Presently, the weak application of solar energy is due to the following insufficiencies:

* Low efficiency of light conversion into the electrical current (not more 20%).
* No possibility to receive electric power at night, on cloudy days, or within a country with a dark season of short days with low-intensity sunlight (or none, as in the Arctic).
* Absence of high effectiveness, and an ecological safe source of energy accumulation (presently acid accumulators [battery] are used).

None of the above-mentioned insufficiencies is present in the STAR Battery.

The Geteroelectrical photoelement developed by S.C.A.R. at J.I.N.R. is the main component of the STAR BATTERY which possesses the following technical and commercial advantages:

* The efficiency of light transformation in visible range is 54% (A world record today).
* As for infra-red light, the efficiency of reformation, it is 31% higher than the efficiency of a modern solar battery in the visible domain.
* The photocurrent of Geteroelectrical photoelement (GEP) operates at a factor of 4x higher than the modern solar battery.
* The GEP provides a very high efficiency in the dark and during the cloudy periods of a day.
* It is practically on a factor of 4x higher than the modern solar battery in the visible range.
* In the infra-red domain, it is on a factor of 2x higher than the efficiency of the modern solar battery in the visible range.
* The mass of GEP semiconductor material needed to produce one Watt of energy is 1,000 times less than the mass needed in the existing solar photoelements.

The above information indicates that the manufacturing cost of the Geteroelectrical photoelement of the STAR BATTERY will be less than the manufacturing cost of the photoelement of a modern solar battery.

# # #

SOURCE

* Press release received by email on May 31 from Prof. Valentin Samoilov, Director of Scientific Center of Applied Research (SCAR) at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research

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O'Bedlam's 2 cents...

Posted May 31, 2006, pm


My technical Russian is pretty rusty. I've been over some of the documents, and here is my 10,000 foot overview, prone to me going back with a grammar in hand and trying to re-verify what I'm reading.

This is pretty cool, if they've pulled it off. They're calling the class of materials "heterogenous materials", with the specific class in question "heteroelectric material". It got translated as "geteroelectric". Anyway, in the US we would normally call this a metamaterial instead of a "heterogenous material". You'll get a lot more action in Google et al if you look for "metamaterial". A note, this isn't your usual bogus Russian Pravda-online pseudo-science. This is real stuff, although there is a lot of material design work that I am betting they haven't completed. So these things are probably on the way, but I bet you they don't have them all in hand quite yet.

A metamaterial is a material that is custom designed for unnatural electromagnetic field effects. By that I mean you can choose the geometry and characteristics of the carrier material and the inclusions in order to achieve a pre-determined (this got mistranslated as "forecasting") electromagnetic characteristic, and in this case the characteristic you design for is typically the dielectric constant. Explaining that is tough; basically,a non-metallic material's electrons have a tendency to shift around the nucleus in a cloud. They don't "orbit" in the sense that you see sometimes in bad science fiction movies or really old chemistry books. They sort of hover around in a cloud. This electron cloud has a sort of elasticity and stiffness to it, if you want to visualize it that way. Some materials' electron clouds are looser, and can shift more easily, these materials are said to have a higher dielectric constant.

One of their claims is that they have invented a metamaterial capacitor with an unnaturally high dielectric constant. In a capacitor, the higher the dielectric constant of the capacitor's dielectric, the higher the capacitance will be for a given plate size and spacing. So, by using a metamaterial engineered for extremely high dielectric constants in a capacitor, you can achieve capacitors with values 100 to perhaps 1000 times the capacitance achievable with a "normal" dielectric. This is what they're calling a "stellar battery", it's a marketing sort of name for a really spectacular supercapacitor. If you thought 10F at 5V of capacitance in the palm of your hand was great, wait until you see a 100KF cap with a 50V working voltage. This will be worth it even if the other stuff falls through, and to me seems to be a "duh" sort of invention. The sort that you slap your head and say "duh" because you didn't think of it. O'Bedlam's reality rating: 9.5 out of 10.

Their other claims are for metamaterials that are not so much for altering dielectric constants as they are for engineering the behavior of the inclusions. For example, one of the claims is for constructing nanoinclusions consisting of P material while the carrier is N type material. It's like grinding up a photocell to make a zillion tiny ones. The metamaterial trick here is to amplify the sensitivity of the nanocells to a particular wavelength of light, the higher the dielectric constant of the metamaterial, the slower light travels in the material. So in effect, you're making longer IR wavelengths look shorter to the little particulate cells so that they will tend to absorb them. A neat trick, if you can pull it off, and this is one I'm more dubious about. I don't know if the "stellar cell" is hype or a demonstrable reality. O'Bedlam's reality rating: 7 out of 10...show me. I'd love it to be true, and it sounds ok in passing, but my "there's probably issues with this" alarms are going off.

Less spectacular and only mentioned in glancing was that you can make some really sweet mirrors out of this for laser use. They do bring up a metamaterial whose inclusions can be population inverted to form little lasers, with dielectric mirrors sort of "cast in" to the material. I see it as a possibility, but I think they're grasping: reality rating 4 out of 10.

The Russian materials are different in that they are engineered to increase the dielectric constant. We would typically go the other way, and when you look at what little you'll be able to find in the way of real data on US metamaterials, you'll find that we engineer for zero or negative dielectric constants. That's a really bizarre, unnatural state of affairs. If you're not into field physics you won't understand just how unnatural a zero or negative epsilon-r is. It has military implications. What I don't know is how much of Samoilov's work has already been done here and isn't in the searchable patent file. The US has spent a LOT of money on this stuff over the past 15 years. It's a hot field for the military and aerospace guys.

You may have seen some popularized stuff lately about "invisibility cloaks" and so on, this Russian material relates to that in a sort of odd way.