AAWSAP DIRD, Concepts for Extracting Energy from the Quantum Vacuum, April 2010

Text

This text came with the file. It may have mistakes. When the text and the image disagree, the image is right.

UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFI@IAb WSE 9Ptb¥
II. Historical Concepts for Extracting Energy and
Thermodynamic Considerations
The Casimir force is a force associated with the electromagnetic quantum vacuum
(Reference 5). This force is an attraction between parallel uncharged metallic plates
that has now been well measured and can be attributed to a minute imbalance in the
ZPF energy (ZPE) density inside the cavity between the plates versus the region outside
the plates as shown in Figure 1 (Reference 6-8). As shown in the figure, the vacuum is
full of virtual photons (that is, zero-point vacuum fluctuations), but photons with
wavelengths, 'A., more than twice the plate separation, d, are excluded from the space
between them, which causes the imbalance that pushes the plates together.
The primary requirement for space travel is energy. It is sometimes assumed that
attempting to extract energy from the vacuum ZPF would somehow violate the laws of
thermodynamics. Fortunately, it turns out that this is not the case. A thought
experiment published by Forward (Reference 9, 10) demonstrated how the Casimir
force could in principle be used to extract energy from the vacuum ZPF. Forward
showed that any pair of conducting plates at close distance experiences an attractive
Casimir force that is due to the electromagnetic ZPF of the vacuum. A "vacuum­
fluctuation battery" can be constructed by using the Casimir force to do work on a stack
of charged conducting plates as shown in Figure 2. By applying a charge of the same
polarity to each conducting plate, a repulsive electrostatic force will be produced that
opposes the Casimir force. If the applied electrostatic force is adjusted to be always
slightly less than the Casimir force, the plates will move toward each other and the
Casimir force will add energy to the electric field between the plates. The battery can be
recharged by making the electrical force slightly stronger than the Casimir force to re­
expand the foliated conductor.
Figure 1. Illustration of the Casimir Effect
Figure 2. Vacuum-Fluctuation Battery (Reference 9)
Cole and Puthoff (Reference 11) verified that (generic) energy extraction schemes are
not contradictory to the laws of thermodynamics. For thermodynamically reversible
processes, no heat will flow at temperature T = 0. However, for thermodynamically
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICI0L: !Pili QDII.¥
1