Physicists build Graphene Thermodynamic Battery

[Redmagic]

I read an article in Science Daily 'Physicists build circuit that generates clean, limitless power from graphene'. Can someone explain how to take this from the physics science experiment to the engineering prototype and implementation stage? Is this technology going to revolutionize the mobile energy field or will the physical limits of atomic thermodynamic energy not produce enough power for simple electronics?

Now if these batteries were hypothetically created and released into the wild, I see a entropy issue here. The claim in the article is that this is limitless energy. The laws of thermodynamics have to be preserved, so the energy is being absorbed from the environment.
If enough energy is absorbed from the environment over a long period of time, will this lead to a heatless world and potential ice age? On the other side of this, will it be potentially beneficial for society to absorb excess energy out of the environment and store it to reduce climate change effects? Are the current amounts discussed in this new technology too small to make any impact on a large scale?

Link is here for the article: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201002091029.htm

 

[Vanadium 50]

The article just repeats a press release which has been described elsewhere as "a train wreck". It bears almost no relation to what was actually done. They got " A team of University of Arkansas physicists " right - at least I think so - but it all goes downhill from there.

 

[PeterDonis]

Link is here for the article

The article is not a valid reference. In addition to the fact that one should always look for the actual peer-reviewed paper, not some journalist's article about the paper, this particular article, as @Vanadium 50 has already noted, completely misdescribes what the paper actually says. Unfortunately, that's pretty much par for the course for most of these "get the latest breaking news in science" websites.

The preprint of the actual paper is here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.09947

 

[PeterDonis]

For comparison, here is a 2014 paper in Nature Communications describing a similar phenomenon in graphene:

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4720