Enhancing electron emissions in Power Chips and Cool Chips
Power Chips plc and Cool Chips plc have announced that their licensed Avto Metals technology to enhance the emission of electrons from surfaces has now been successfully replicated in a series of independent tests.
When commercialised for Power Chips, this technology should make possible an array of new products over many industries and applications, including a more efficient way to generate electrical power directly from heat with no moving parts.
When commercialised for Cool Chips, the technology will offer greatly enhanced thermal management capabilities for many consumer and industrial applications, enabling more efficient, smaller, cleaner, lower-cost and non-polluting products.
Power Chips plc and Cool Chips plc plan to both licence and directly develop these applications.
The patented proprietary technology, called Avto Metals, reduces the work function of materials including semiconductors and metals. Work function is a measure of the energy required to remove an electron from a material. By reducing the work function barrier, electrons can escape more readily.
This technology allows, for example, the design and building of more efficient thermionic/thermoelectric converters and better thermal management devices and possibly has use in many other industrial processes.
The new technology results from the discovery that quantum interference, which reduces quantum state density at a material's surface, can be achieved on a macroscopic scale.
Simply by modifying the surface texture of a material in precise ways, using methods commonly applied in the manufacture of semiconductor devices, engineers should be able to exploit this Avto Effect and transform existing materials into materials with precisely-engineered properties for many new applications. The firm says once it fully understands the Avto Effect, it could possibly be able to custom design work functions for multiple different applications.
Tests completed last week, conducted on silicon wafers with a nanoscale line pattern, covering millimetre-scale test pads and forming a surface texture to demonstrate the Avto Effect, showed significant and consistent reductions in work function.
Results were in line with prior tests using surfaces of several metals. This work on the science and the technology has been ongoing for more than 15 years. More than 40 issued patents cover both the basic technology and many applications.
The steps forward to commercialisation are not trivial and obviously high value products will be the first developed. Commercialisation is now possible because of the tremendous advances in semiconductor technology in the last decade which made possible the building of the required Avto Metal structures in a major university laboratory. When the Avto Metals first began, the world simply did not have the required nanoscale technology to either build or confirm the underlying Avto Metals science.
After scaling to larger dimensions, the technology should enable large cost and efficiency improvements in electrical power generation and refrigeration. The power generation technology, called Power Chips, should revolutionize electrical power generation across virtually all applications.
For example, adding Power Chips to extract heat that is now wasted in conventional power plants should be able to increase power generation by up to 20 percent with no change in fuel consumption or emissions. Power Chips should make possible safe, efficient distributed power, enabling buildings or factories to cogenerate their own electricity from waste heat or geothermal sources. In automobiles and other vehicles, for example, Power Chips may replace the alternator, reducing the mechanical load on the engine and thereby increasing the efficiency of internal combustion engines and hybrids.
The cooling technology derived from the Avto Effect, called Cool Chips, should similarly reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of most cooling or refrigeration systems. It requires no moving parts or motors, produces no chemical emissions, and can be miniaturised for use in microelectronic applications.
The Avto Metals technology is being developed by Avto Metals plc, while Power Chips are being developed by Power Chips plc and Cool Chips are being developed by Cool Chips plc. All three companies are majority-owned and two are publicly-traded subsidiaries of Borealis Exploration Limited.
Avto Metals plc is in discussions at present to obtain the necessary funding to bring at least one Power Chip and one Cool Chip product to market. The firm says there can be no assurance that these discussions will be successful or that the ongoing work will produce any marketable products.
