A piezoelectric substrate under a sorbent converts loading-induced strain into a voltage.
| Fractional loading | Voltage (mV) |
|---|---|
| 0.001 | 7e+06 |
| 0.01 | 7e+07 |
| 0.1 | 7e+08 |
Reads well; fails slow. The voltages are easily measurable, but sorbent creep produces a drift of the same order over hours, so the fast signal is real and the slow one is not. First test: load step, then hold; if the voltage relaxes with the same time constant as the mechanical creep, the sensor measures history, not loading.
| ΔT (K) | Seebeck voltage (mV) |
|---|---|
| 1 | 1.5 |
| 5 | 7.5 |
| 10 | 15 |
| 20 | 30 |
Millivolts per kelvin — measurable. The failure is that concentration polarisation produces a voltage with the same sign and similar size. First test: reverse the gradient at fixed mean temperature; polarisation reverses too slowly to follow.
With 50% of incident power absorbed in the sorbent, half the energy is available locally and half must come from the bulk. The advantage exists only when the optical penetration depth is shorter than the bed depth. Testable by measuring regeneration time against bed thickness at fixed power.
| Material removed (µm) | Relative magnetoelastic signal |
|---|---|
| 1 | 0 |
| 10 | 1e-06 |
| 100 | 6e-06 |
The signal grows linearly with mass loss but is tiny — parts in 10⁶ per micron. It saturates once magnetostriction does. Verdict: practical only with a lock-in measurement and a reference strip.
| Radius (µm) | Radiation force (µN) | Weight (µN) |
|---|---|---|
| 50 | 0.0 | 0.005 |
| 200 | 0.0 | 0.329 |
| 500 | 0.0 | 5.137 |
The force exceeds the weight by roughly an order of magnitude at 200 µm, so levitation is feasible — but the droplet evaporates during a crystallisation run, and the force scales with radius cubed while evaporation scales with radius squared. The experiment runs out of droplet before it runs out of force.
| Product concentration (M) | Osmotic pressure (bar) |
|---|---|
| 0.001 | 0 |
| 0.01 | 0.0002 |
| 0.1 | 0.0025 |
Millimolar product gives millibar — far too small to pump against any real load. This vector fails on magnitude, and the calculation says so immediately. Useful as a negative result: it saves an experiment.
| Surface resistivity (Ω/sq) | Decay time (s) |
|---|---|
| 1e+12 | 8.854 |
| 1e+10 | 0.089 |
| 1e+08 | 0.001 |
The decay constant spans four orders of magnitude across plausible surface resistivities, which is why triboelectric humidity sensors drift: the measurement is of the surface, and the surface changes.
| Charge (mC/cm²) | Δε (saturated at 0.5) |
|---|---|
| 1 | 0.02 |
| 5 | 0.1 |
| 20 | 0.4 |
Reaches a useful 0.2–0.5 modulation within a few mC/cm², which is achievable — but the infrared modulation depth is limited by the film thickness relative to the phonon wavelength. Most promising of the eight: it is the only one where the numbers come out comfortably above the noise floor.
| Vector | Magnitude | Failure risk | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electrochromic emissivity | comfortable | medium | pursue |
| Sorption-strain | comfortable | creep drift | pursue with a creep control |
| Acoustic levitation | comfortable | evaporation | pursue at low temperature |
| Thermogalvanic | measurable | polarisation | pursue with a reversal control |
| Photothermal desorption | measurable | medium | pursue by thickness series |
| Triboelectric humidity | large but unstable | surface drift | diagnostic only |
| Magnetoelastic corrosion | parts in 10⁶ | saturation | needs lock-in |
| Enzymatic osmotic pump | 10⁻³ bar | — | fails on magnitude |
Electrochromic emissivity modulation. It has the largest margin over its own noise, the failure mode is geometric rather than chemical, and the first test is a two-thickness comparison — no new apparatus beyond a spectrometer and a potentiostat.
Incoprea Research · fifth project, hybrid vectors · 3 November 2026. Design and computation. No experiment performed.