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I am wondering if there is a way to extract the kinetic energy of fast moving particles.

If I shoot a stream of particles at a rotating black hole, then I can theoretically steal the black hole's rotational kinetic energy through the Penrose process.

However, I am not sure about how to turn the kinetic energy of particles into usable energy. Should I make a giant turbine and let the particles hit the turbine and rotate it to generate electricity?

I did a quick search and was not able to find ways to utilizing the kinetic energy of particles. Does anyone know whether research has been done on this?

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  • $\begingroup$ see MTW, Fig. 33.2 $\endgroup$
    – Yukterez
    Commented May 10 at 17:47
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks! That is helpful! @Yukterez $\endgroup$
    – Gene
    Commented May 11 at 6:10

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I mean, your question already gives an example (the giant turbine idea). If the particles are charged, you'll have an electric current (but there is the difficulty that there is no superradiance for fermions). Once you have the energy, transforming it is essentially an engineering issue.

It is worth noticing that essentially all methods we have for generating electric energy (at least within my knowledge) end up with transforming kinetic energy into electric energy by means of a turbine.

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