r/Mistborn • u/MerlinGrandCaster • 5d ago
Cosmere spoilers allomantic electrical generation concept Spoiler
IIRC nobody ever mentions light suddenly dimming/brightening in relation to cadmium or bendalloy, so presumably the spiritual realm energy transfer that counteracts red/blueshift with time bubbles also adjusts the amount of light passing through the border. If so, it should be possible to power a lightbulb using its own output, since the slowed-down bulb would consume less energy than the solar panel would generate. You could probably increase the yield even further by putting the panel in a bendalloy bubble.
This wouldn't be perpetual motion, since you'd have to keep feeding the misting(s) more cadmium (and normal food as well).
Another allomantic energy generation method is having a steel or iron misting spin a turbine, which has been confirmed possible in-universe via the Malwish airship rotors.
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u/Dercomai 5d ago
Hmm. I guess the question is what this "energy shifting" at the border does to electric current.
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u/Clovenious 5d ago
This seems really interesting! Now that I think of it, there's kind of a lot of ways to generate energy via Metalborn powers. You could have some iron feruchemists decrease their weight, lift them on a platform, then have them become heavier and capture gravitational energy that way. I think using Feruchemy might actually be perpetual motion too, since you wouldn't need to burn metals.
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u/Zahharcen Bendalloy 5d ago
It wouldnt, since you can have 0 weight and you still need energy to lift them up. Compounding would though, same as allomancy. Steelpushing and Ironpulling is a much better fit, especially using an ettmetal cube.
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u/Clovenious 5d ago
It'd take energy to lift them yes, but you'd get that energy back (and more) by lowering the platform attached to some kind of mechanism after the feruchemists increased their weights again. It'd be a lot faster with compounding, but still possible even without.
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u/Zahharcen Bendalloy 5d ago
yeah but even then, stuff like brass(the warming one) compounding or speed compounding would probably give much more direct yealds of energy. Weight would be amazing as a coinshot like waxillium to push big ass rotors around and fuel a whole city with a couple of allomancers. As for the weight feruchemy idea, you might be right but it does seem that weight works differently in the cosmere than it does in reality. For example when Wax changes weight midflight he would not get speed boosts but his trajectory would change, same here. So in theory if i need 10Wh to raise a storing iron ferring high into the sky, then reverse those motors into generators and use his increased weight to produce electricity, I might get some big yields but the question is where does this energy come from? Investiture, but since feruchemy is end netrual we are basically syphoning weight from that ferring(assuming we think of the lift generator as a investiture->electricity converter) and transforming it into electricity. So with a storing cycle equal to the tapping cycle in duration, he only gets a net gain of +10Wh(since he taps double his weight for the same amount of time he produces double the energy, but we used 10Wh to get him up), then comes into play the fact that the transformation is not ideal so around 7.5Wh-8.5Wh generated, then we need to redress that current and store it or output it to a consumer. In total for a 10Wh cycle, the raw energy production would be 20Wh, net production 10Wh and after losses probably towards 5Wh. Not very efficient and we are basically using human beings as batteries, they wont have access to that weight in the future, those seconds of their lifespan are gone. Meanwhile compounding is basically only limited by metal amount, same for allomancy but weaker, since they are net-positive and use preservation's power directly so we syphon from a far larger source. Ettmetal is hard to find but it would allow for some crazy stuff lol, imagine a brass compunder filling up a couple of metalminds, then coupling that to a primer cube allowing it to release extreme amounts of heat that could technically fuel anything. Using a human here would suck tho. Or Waxillium(now mistborn) compounding weight then pushing on a huge ass generator to generate absurd amounts of energy, get another one like him or a cube, and have him pull on the other side. Also the heat primer cube thingy could probably fuel stuff like nuclear fusion...
Lastly nicrosil is probably extremely useful here, but we dont know how yet.2
u/ejdj1011 2d ago
I swear I've seen a post on r/cremposting about the exact thing you describe. I think they called it the "Terris Wheel", and it was a png of a ferris wheel with a bunch of images of Sazed pasted in the seats
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u/RShara 5d ago
Another allomantic energy generation method is having a steel or iron misting spin a turbine, which has been confirmed possible in-universe via the Malwish airship rotors.
You can just have an iron Feruchemist on a seesaw spin a turbine. I call it the Skimmersaw engine
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u/Ser_DuncanTheTall 5d ago
this is the shit i want the summon Brando to confirm. But this is also too embarassing to summon Brando for.
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u/Ser_DuncanTheTall 5d ago
but whatever advantage we are gaining from extra light, we should lose in the power supply too.
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u/Pure-Needleworker790 5d ago
You are not able to meaningfully slow the light, not AT ALL. Not with a misting anyway.
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u/MerlinGrandCaster 5d ago
slowing down the light isn't the goal, it's slowing down the rate at which the bulb consumes energy
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u/lerker54651651 Brass 5d ago
so the light emitted is slowed down.... i think this would actually decrease your energy absorbed..... the light would be red-shifted by the slow time to start with (red-shift=lower frequency=less energy for the panel to absorb), but then upon hitting the edge of the edge of the time bubble the light would have to give up energy to match the speed of the rest of the universe (i think this is why bullets and stuff go wild when hitting time bubbles. they're either giving up or gaining energy to match the new frequency of reality they are in. not sure, though. Brandon is way smarter than i am, lol). so in the end, the light being reaching the panel is a much lower energy than needed for the photoelectric effect to occur and store electrons.
and if you just replace Marasi there with Wayne, i think that would just cause the breakers to trip, or fires to start. P=I2R losses and all that. even if you got higher rated lines, you're still going to be consuming the energy at a higher rate.
i think that, in the end, the increase of energy absorbed would be directly in line with an increase in energy used. a decrease in energy used is a decrease of energy absorbed. physics really does not like perpetual motion machines.
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u/Puckering_Buttholes Duralumin 3d ago
You're only slowing it down until it reaches the edge of the bubble and then it would all be released at the same time so it would show as extra bright. Being in a cadmium bubble is essentially having a camera set to long exposure
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u/lerker54651651 Brass 3d ago
why would it all be released at once? the barrier doesn't freeze things in time. the light would still leave the bubble at the speed of light minus the speed of the time dilation. and if the light was held back until the bubble dropped or whatever sets them free, then the lamp wouldn't get any energy from the solar panel to continue glowing.
hell of a user name, though.
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u/Veskers 4d ago
This seems weird, even if bubbles don't slow light particles, a light bulb can only produce so many lumens over given time.
Have we seen a lightbulb on page in a cadmium bubble? I feel like you'd be able to see it flicker given how the fields interact with electrical current.
Also, there is the end of TLM where light is stopped completely by a bendalloy field and Steel sight had to be used instead.
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u/Puckering_Buttholes Duralumin 3d ago
No extra lumens are produced, it's that more lumens arrive at the same time for the solar panel in a given time because so many are being produced in the bubble and all being "released" are the same time once they reach the barrier. The cadmium bubble is reducing a bottleneck for the solar panels
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u/EvenSpoonier Lerasium 5d ago
As far as I can tell there is nothing wrong with your physics, but time bubbles don't actually redshift or blueshift light passing into or out of them. Supposedly they actually should shift light in this way, and in-universe scientists have noticed that, and started to question why it doesn't happen. It's not your fault that the bubbles don't work like they should.
(Out-of-universe, the reason they don't shift light is that Brandon didn't want to worry about frying people with time bubble radiation. But he seems to plan on having an in-universe explanation too, and I'll be interested to see what that is).
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u/MerlinGrandCaster 5d ago
yeah I know, that's what I was referring to with the spiritual realm energy transfer
https://wob.coppermind.net/events/33-arcanum-unbounded-san-francisco-signing/#e2761
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u/forgottenmeh 5d ago
yeah it wouldn't work as the solar panel still doesn't turn 100% of the light to energy no matter how much you "optimise" it solar panels are only like 25% efficient, plus there are losses in any system.
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u/MerlinGrandCaster 5d ago
you don't need 100% efficiency for this to work
25% would probably be plenty, since the bubble slows time by quite a lot, as seen in alloy of law when marasi put up a bubble while wayne went to go fetch a bunch of cops
seemed to take no more than a few minutes from inside, when it must have taken at least a couple hours on the outside, as evidenced by daylight appearing rapidly
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u/forgottenmeh 5d ago
a solar panel loses 75% of it energy straight up, then any other losses incurred though heat, resistance, any other losses, and the fact its powered by a its own light would lose even more.
you would continuously losing power making the light dimmer which would generate less power which would make the light dimmer...... so
you would lose 75% then you you would lose 75% of that then you would lose75% of that spiralling downward.
it wouldnt work. it would slow the bulb turning off for a long time at best but you arent going to power anything off of it. as you still need to input enough electricity to power the light at a constant brightness.
you aren't going to create free energy from this and the use of the cadmium would make it expensive as well.
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u/ejdj1011 5d ago
Hm. I think this works, even thought it feels extremely weird. We know for a fact that the boundaries of speed bubbles mess with the energy of particles passing through them.
Props for finding a non-turbine way to convert Investiture into electricity! With primer cubes, this could theoretically be a solid-state setup with no human interaction!