Casimir Battery

[JohnnyYesterday]

I was reading on the Atomic Rockets website and came across one of Robert Forward's ideas, how to tap the Casimir effect for useable, though highly anemic, electrical power.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/78621583/rober...conductors

There may be no free lunches, but it seems there is a free breath mint.

Maybe it would be useful to power interstellar probes' onboard systems at a very low level while on multi-millennia-long journeys.

[stevebowers]

I have thought of something along these lines, although I imagined it as a kind of capacitor with numerous parallel flat plates, separated mechanically. Dr Forward's idea of a spiral is elegant, although it sounds as if it would take a lot of tweaking to make it work. Would the amount of energy that could be stored in this fashion exceed other methods that operate on a similiar scale and energy density? The fine tweaking (which Forward calls 'careful control') might be an energy drain that reduces the efficiency of the battery.

[Drashner1]

I suspect that this would be something that would be used to provide a very small amount of power to a device with very low requirements. IIRC from reading about this in a book by Forward, the 'battery' could only work once and then the leaves would collapse together and the battery would be exhausted.

Todd