Hi Fred,
Everything you said is very much in line with the kind of ideas I am exploring as well. I didn't know that there was a capacitive effect in solar panels, it is indeed an interesting track. I came up with the idea of modifying a capacitance by heat, following some experiments with old capacitors from the 70s. When I used them in a high frequency oscillator, they were heating up, and the oscillation frequency was changing, which means that the capacitance was changing with the temperature. Unfortunately, the capacitance would have to decrease with temperature for the stored energy to increase, and the opposite was happening. I tested all kinds of capacitors, but either the capacitance remains stable or it varies in the wrong direction. Even if we had the right type, there would still be the problem that the thermal effects are slow, which makes effective practical applications difficult, as with the variable inductors you mentioned. Using the oscillations of the electric field of the earth is also theoretically possible, but although the fields are high, the impedances under which they occur are also very high so that the recoverable powers are very low. The variations of the earth's magnetic field can also be used theoretically, but since they are very weak and slow, there again no practical application is possible.
The hyperabrupt varactors you mentioned seem to me to be the most interesting way, as well as all systems where very sharp nonlinearities appear. Systems out of their equilibrium state and in phases of rapid change seem to me to have been little studied in physics. Perhaps we could find new phenomena and solutions for our goal.
François
---------------------------
"Open your mind, but not like a trash bin"
|