[ScientificSorcerer (OP)]

                           Batteries that last for ever?
                                                                        Is it possible?

It sounds too good to be true, but apparently it has been done by a man named John Hutchinson an insane Canadian scientist of the 80's who explored free energy, anti-gravity and strange nuclear effects. Recently he has all but lost his mind which makes his claims of free energy hard to believe.



But time and time again professional scientists and garage scientists have backed up his free energy battery.
A device he calls a "Crystal power cell" It really works, I myself have made 100 small crystal batteries out of spent 30. cal carbine bullet shells, some Epsom salt, Rochelle salt and magnesium  and a few other ingredients.

I have melted the ingredients inside the bullet shells, inside the case the bullets came in, rows of ten are stacked in series and each row is stacked in parallel the whole thing gets around 8.5 volts at around 720 milliamps But here's the thing that baffles me, the batteries have been under load for 6 whole months without stopping and it hasn't even faltered at all. It just keeps going, I did the project to see if the crystal power cells lived up to there promise the whole project cost me about $30 because I had the bullet shells laying around and so far they have lived up to the claim, these batteries might really last forever. Before I did the project I looked online to see if they really do work here are some videos I found.

Amazingly the first video's live feed is still going after more then 2 years! check out the live feed
http://laserhacker.com/?page_id=20

The way it get's it's power is through the piezo electric effect that generates electricity through the vibrations of ambient heat all around us. Though each power cell generates less then a volt at around 60 miliamps they continuously provide power for who knows how long.

But you have to remember history, not to long ago the basic Idea of a battery was just some coins stacked on-top of each-other with some saltwater in-between. It was called a voltaic power cell
the only way you can get enough power for anything is to stack them both in series and in parallel just like the crystal cells.

They had to have a whole room full of voltaic piles to demonstrate that these "batteries" were useful for anything.



You could power 6 houses or more with a room full of crystal power cells the only difference is that they never go out, they



the longest recorded test took 10 years and they only stopped working because the salt crystals grew too much and cracked open the shell it was made in. so think about this do I want 10 years of power for free or ten years of electric bills hmmm... hard to choose

[RD]

           But time and time again professional scientists and garage scientists have backed up his free energy battery.
A device he calls a "Crystal power cell" It really works, I myself have made 100 small crystal batteries out of spent 30. cal carbine bullet shells, some Epsom salt, Rochelle salt and magnesium  and a few other ingredients ...

That sounds like a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochemical_cell , which is just like everyday batteries , (which is not piezoelectricity), the electricity in the battery is generated by chemical relations in the battery, when the reactants are all consumed the battery dies, ( i.e. not a source of perpetual energy).

[CliffordK]

I watched one of the videos.  Kind of cute.  It is a dry cell, not unlike other commercial dry cells on the market.  Lithium cells, etc.

In the video, they showed quite a large chunk of copper and a large chunk of magnesium.  I'm not surprised that it that it lasted quite a while.  However, the surface area would be minimal. 

It may last for quite some time, but only under a low load.  You can increase the power rating by making layers of cathode, anode, and electrolyte.  But then you could use it up quicker.  Apparently people run motors for a long time with them, but just spinning under no-load.

the longest recorded test took 10 years and they only stopped working because the salt crystals grew too much and cracked open the shell it was made in. so think about this do I want 10 years of power for free or ten years of electric bills hmmm... hard to choose

So you have an electrochemical reaction going on, thus forming more salt crystals.  It certainly wouldn't last forever.  Is it eating up your copper shell, or depositing onto it?  Nonetheless, you're not getting more salt crystals from nowhere.

The refining of many metals such as aluminum is a highly electric intensive process.  In a sense what you're doing is storing electricity when you refine the metals, then releasing that stored electricity as you let the metal corrode.

As far as filling a room with dry cell batteries to supply the power for your house.  Sure, you can do it.  Buying a couple of tons of copper, magnesium, and the other required salts won't be cheap.

[Aemilius]

As far as developing a battery that (practically) doesn't wear out goes, a better candidate for research might be the Oxford Bell, which has been verifiably working more or less continuously not for just ten years.... but for almost 175 years!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Electric_Bell

[WilliamI]

"It may last for quite some time, but only under a low load.  You can increase the power rating by making layers of cathode, anode, and electrolyte.  But then you could use it up quicker.  Apparently people run motors for a long time with them, but just spinning under no-load."

What if somebody made a battery with the layers described, and see if it would actually use up the battery. If it doesn't, then the battery might really last forever, and all that person would have done is proven a method to substantially increase the power rating of this type of battery. If not, if the battery does run out, then it would have proven that these batteries can run down, and with the proper math, find the average life that these batteries have when compared to mass.

Either way, he/she would have proven something that is way off the radar, both proving something, and disproving something else.
...
Hey, its actually an idea!

[PmbPhy]

Thanks for this information. Another good example of ignorance in physics leading amateurs to claim they've created a free energy machine.