Bipolar Membrane Energy Harvester Demo - Hackaday Contest Entry

This was a test run for our Hackaday Prize submission here: https://hackaday.io/project/191101-bipolar-membrane-energy-harvester

My bad with the units during the run: I meant to say the multimeter seems to have a bias of .002 millivolts, or 2 microvolts. That still suggests another 2 microvolts generated by real power though.

This amounts to a couple of picowatts, which is consistent with results from Daniel Sheehan's lab at U.C. San Diego. It is a small amount of power, but the signal is clean and repeatable.

The point of building this device is to design something anyone with some basic lab equipment can test to verify for themselves that the second law of thermodynamics has been circumvented. Systems using the same underlying concepts could have many orders of magnitude more power output however - very little optimization has been done to this device so far. We encourage people to try building the device for themselves. It may be the first device of its kind to be fully available to the public.