Building on the Nantenna idea from my previous post

Building on my previous post about nantennas and nano-emissive displays - and a little background on the way most electricity is produced today.

How electricity is produced: Hydrocarbons are burned (or using a nuclear reaction) to produce heat which boils water, generates steam, the steam is ducted into a turbine, turbine spins, causing a dynamo to rotate and that rotation produces electricity.

This process is pretty efficient, ranging from about 33% (on the low end, usually coal power plants) to almost 60% (high end using a combined cycle gas fired design).

But it is bulky. It has a LOT of moving parts. [diagram] A lot of maintenance. It is not really useful on moving vehicles. Like boats, submarines, space ships, etc.

So here's what I was thinking - if you can tune a nantenna type structure to convert visible light and IR spectrum photons into electricity at around 50% or 60% (theoretical nantenna efficiency limit is over 80%) then might it be possible to take a nantenna and configure it in some kind of heat flow path between burning hydrocarbons (or nuclear reactor) and a heat sink/radiator?

This may not be more efficient than the the most efficient turbine dynamos but it seems like it could be more efficient than coal and competitive to the most efficient means, BUT with the benefit of being much much smaller, much fewer moving parts, and therefore, possibly more advantageous for use in mobile power sources.

Think about how revolutionary something like this could be. Imagine for example, an RTG [diagram] using something like this instead of a thermocouple that might be between 2% to 7% efficient at converting the heat from the radioisotope to electricity. If you could use this nantenna instead of a thermocouple and if you could realize 30% to 60% conversion efficiency, then instead of building an RTG that produces 150W for 30 years, it could produce 3KW for 30 years. Imagine 3KW for 30 years out of a 300lb device with zero carbon emissions. Thats the kind of thing that could power an average household for 30 years with no additional costs and no carbon footprint.

What about the science that could be done on satellites and on other planets using RTG's 15 to 30 times more powerful than they are today.

What about smaller nuclear powered submersibles, nuclear powered air craft, etc. The mind boggles at the possibilities.

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