I Built an Atmosphere Powered Battery..

To clearify how i got to the result as seen in the video: To charge: ~12.08V x ~1.62A x 43.709 seconds = 860,64 watt-second (or joules) After a discharge: ~9.42V x ~1.15A x 57.993 seconds = 628,24 watt-second (or joules) All value's are measured by the Arduino Nano in combination with the INA3221 Power monitor module. As many of you have pointed out in the comments below, I did indeed make a mistake regarding the mention of the Watt to energy aspect. My sincere apologies for that! The core of this project was to explore, show and see what was possible with this experimental project, even with some limitations. Sometimes it's not just about the final outcome, but also about the journey and what we learn along the way. And I hope that despite any shortcomings, you still found the video interesting and/or inspiring!🤓

If only friction of the seal did not completely kill his maths.

This is basically the inside-out version of compressed air energy storage, except the maximum pressure difference is 1bar compared to the 80bar used in commercial compressed air energy storage solutions.

What sets this apart from compressed air energy storage is that the pressure differential remains basically unchanged while charging/discharging and never exceeds 1 bar, since the limiting factor is the atmosphere itself. That can be an advantage, because the power output remains constant, but also a disadvantage because you need significantly bigger tanks to store the same amount of energy. Fun fact: since you can't do weightlifting exercices on the ISS for obvious reasons, NASA had to come up with a special apparatus to allow for a similar type of exercice so astronauts can keep their bones healthy (living in microgravity for months at a time can lead to dangerous loss in bone density because you're not straining your skeleton as much, since you don't weigh anything). You might think "well just have them push against a piston or a spring instead of lifting a weight" but the issue is that in both cases, the amount of force required increases as you compress the spring/volume of gas (as described by hooke's law), whereas the force needed to lift a known weight remains constant. So, instead, they make astronaut pull a vacuum inside a reservoir, the same way you did here, because then you're pushing against the air pressure inside the ISS instead of trying to compress a comparatively smaller volume of air at an ever increasing pressure. This way, the pressure exerted on the piston remains basically the same, meaning the amount of force astronauts need to exert during their workout remains the same all throughout!

Watt is a unit of power, not energy. You didn't achieve an efficiency of 73%, those motors aren't efficient enough to turn electric power into mechanical work and back to electric power at anywhere near 73% round trip efficiency, even without all that additional friction you have in that system. The biggest fundamental and unavoidable issue with vacuum energy storage is the extreme cost per unit of capacity. Compressed air energy storage is difficult to make meaningful in comparison to other alternatives, but many times better than vacuum energy storage, in multiple ways. For the same volume, a vacuum chamber can only store as much energy as a pressure tank with one atmosphere "gauge pressure", or two atmospheres absolute pressure, and it's easier to make a pressure tank that holds 10 atmospheres gauge pressure than it is to make a vacuum chamber of the same volume. With all that work put into it, and it looked really nice, I wish you'd gotten the technical parts about the capacity and efficiency right.

Pretty sure this whole Rube-Goldberg can be replaced with a garage door spring.

73% is pretty damn good for not having a team of engineers perfect and tweak it over decades. Definitely some potential there for improvement.

i really did not expect your losses to be at 27% i though it would be much more! i didnt expect you to beat hydro with basic tools and to be honest this could be scaled up pretty easily and fit into a home, i would be interested in its weight or volume / energy capacity but this video is very inspiring by itself. Thank you <3

I clicked on the video because I was intrigued by the idea. I didn't expect a great outcome, but I found the idea interesting. The approach was very entertaining, and adding a bit of science always enhances it! You deserve more encouragement than just open opinion or criticism. Great explanation and a nice idea; keep making this kind of content!

I was glad to see some more experimenting done with this concept. I started buying screen door closers for my experiments, unfortunately I never made it to any prototyping

very nice seeing someone execute the project very well i have thought of this, but in reverse storing the energy as air under pressure but slowly releasing it, this is awesome

This was actually pretty brilliant. A great example of lateral thinking the gravity based system. Regardless of the efficiency and others critiques, I really enjoyed this project and look forward to more.

This is very neat but the Achilles heel is the fact that it has an upper limit on extractable force. No matter what materials or innovations you have, you can only ever get to one atmosphere of pressure. But you've kind of engineered the opposite of pneumatic storage. There's different flavours of it (cryo vs standing air) but it all works on the same principal of exploiting a pressure differential. Very cool project!

I like it, and I think that cost and size are more important than efficiency, because these are intended as solar powered batteries. This idea doesn't require an artificial lake in mountains (die we niet hebben in Nederland) or holes in the earth. If the batteries don't get you through the night, you just need more of them. So great job!

Very good video, amazing work and creation! No bs no useless face camera talking, straight to the point & the build, with stunning ingeniosity! So good man!!!

I clicked on this video to see what other technical vids would be suggested because i knew this wasn't going to be efficient enough to be practical lol. I watched it all though so you get the algorithm credit. Keep at it man!

I work with equipment that is very sensitive to atmospheric pressure changes and I will say that this energy storage is extremely interesting. Especially, in climates that have massive ambient pressure spikes.

Where I live, the area has been powered by pump storage supported by various power plants since the 1980s. About 15-20 years ago though, they started putting in wind turbines. Many people were critical and still are. I think it's really cool though. In the time since they started installing the turbines, they've put enough in that the pump storage is entirely powered by wind energy and it's really cool to live 20 miles away from something like that. I feel fortunate to have such clean energy generation in my area and if I go past that, it's just a giant lake all the way to Wisconsin so the air here is pretty clean

This is brilliant, the reverse method causes you to store pressure vs. remove pressure. If this fails it implodes vs. explodes. Much easier to handle from a safety perspective.

You can improve efficiency by making the tubes larger in diameter, and less tubes. This will reduce contact area of the plunger to the walls massively and therefore losses due to friction.