From seaweed and jellyfish in the oceans to confiscated alcohol and dance floors in a nightclub, It seems that scientists have really gone to great lengths to find alternative sources of energy, and for good reason. With climate change threatening our very existence, humanity must use all its facilities to find clean energy sources.
And now, a rather resourceful team of scientists has found a way to continuously harvest electricity from moisture in the airand it doesn’t get any cleaner than this.
Power extraction?
While the concept of extracting energy from nothing sounds more like witchcraft than actual science, We assure you that this technique is definitely within the realm of possibility, even if it needs further development before it can be practically applied and widely used.
Building on previous research, which involved extracting energy from moisture in the air using material collected from bacteria, this new study pushes the envelope by stating that almost any material, including silicon or wood, can be used in this new method.
Harvest
The secret to harvesting energy in this unconventional way it lies in being able to sprinkle any material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter, which is about one-thousandth the width of a human hair.
By drilling all these tiny holes in the material, we can harvest the electricity generated by microscopic water droplets in moist air!
Generic Air-gen effect
Dubbed the “generic Air-gen effect,” this discovery involves incredibly small holes that are based on what is known as a “middle free path”: the distance a single molecule can travel before colliding with another molecule made of the same substance.
Water molecules floating in air have a mean free path of about 100 nm. When moist air passes through the tiny holes in the Air-gen materialthe water molecules come into direct contact first with an upper chamber and then with a lower chamber of the film. And this creates a charge imbalance, affectionately known as electricity!
This is the same science that takes place in a thundercloud. But in this caseoperates in a small-scale human-built facility that predictably and continuously produces electricity for us to harvest, Jun Yao explained., assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the UMass College of Engineering. Amherst and the lead author of the article.
Humidity
Since moisture in the air diffuses into three-dimensional space and the thickness of the Air-gen device is only a fraction of the width of a human hair, several thousand of them can be stacked, increasing the amount of power efficiently without increasing the footprint of the device.
Furthermore, given the ever-present humidity, This harvester would run 24/7, rain or shine and wind blowing or not. This also solves one of the big problems with technologies such as wind or solar, which only work under certain conditions, the authors highlighted.