It seems nanotechnology is finally pulling it’s weight.

Gone are the days of theoretical structures, nanotubes that had great theoretical uses, and promises of tiny robots making us perfect. Now, nanotech is making real progress, and the findings are incredible.

We recently saw the nanowire, which could deliver free energy in theory, but now a company is claiming their “nano-paint” will generate free electricity.

Industrial Nanotech is the company behind this nano-paint, dubbed “Nansulate” is intended to be a form of thermal insulation. They claim their product will generate electricity when it is properly applied inside a structure’s walls
Obviously these claims are quite interesting, however we’ve got to be quite skeptical when it comes to claims about free energy. Energy from nothing? They better have something concrete to back it up.

As it turns out, Nansulate doesn’t exactly produce free energy; it harvests energy from the surrounding environment, similar to the nanowire. It’s placed inside a structure’s walls, and uses the temperature differential between the interior and exterior of the building to generate electricity.

there is almost always, day or night and anywhere in the world, a difference between the temperature inside a building and outside a building gives us an almost constant source of energy generation to tap into.  - Company CEO Stuart Burchill

Now of course, there has to be some source of energy to generate this temperature differential, and it remains to be seen just how much the differential has to be to generate usable electricity, but these claims certainly are exciting.

Could the days of perpetual motion machines and fraudulent free energy “science” be over, replaced by environment nano-harvesting? Well we’ve seen two plausible methods already,who knows what we’ll see in the near future.

via Treehugger

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 There’s no doubt nanotechnology is the future. Nano-sized machines assembled at the cellular level have the potential to increase efficiency, accomplish tasks previously thought impossible, and maybe even generate energy.

One of the problems with nanotechnology is a power source. Batteries do no work at that scale. Nano scientists have developed what’s called a “nanowire” to solve this problem. Made of a piezoelectric material, the nanowire is able to harvest mechanical energy. When deformed, voltage is produced. This can used to power nano machines.

Now I’m not an expert in nanotechnology, so forgive me if my interpretation is a bit naive. It seems to me that if this nanowire is capable of generating electricity, however small the voltage, it should be able to be multiplied enough to create something of use.

These nanowires create 0.3 attojoules (”less than one quintillionth of a joule”). Obviously we would need an incredible amount of these to create anything useful, but it seems to me that there is a potential that these nanowires, working in unison, could create usable electricity.

We just might be able to power your iPod by harvesting tiny amounts of mechanical energy.

Obviously this technology would be a long way off as nanowires are still a very young technology, but every day nanotech seems to change our views of how technology can work.

Could this be a future green power source? I invite anyone with nanotech experience to chime in on the subject, is it possible?

via ENN

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