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‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Zirconium costs around 30 dollars per kg. That "washing machine" gonna cost around 60k on materials alone. I'm guessing it might be great for watches and other low power devices, but it likely won't power homes as is.
Nah... The "disc" isn't 100% zirconium. I don't know what it's made out of but the zirconium part is just the nanowires which would likely be some teeny tiny percentage of the overall weight. If it's like silicon ICs (e.g. the CPU inside your computer) zirconium would probably account for less than 1% (probably 0.1 or even 0.001%) of the overall weight.
99% of it likely to be "packaging" which is tiny copper wires carefully connected to the zirconium (probably via an intermediary material) to transmit and combine the power along with loads of insulating materials and lots and lots of high temperature plastic (so it can survive short bursts of soldering).
It's a prototype and may not like getting very hot so maybe they didn't use normal soldering methods and might have used conductive adhesives or similar crimping or vacuum welding or other fancy ways of connecting things that labs have access to for such things.