A group of engineers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst recently demonstrated that almost anything can be made into a device that continuously generates electricity (Generate Clean Energy Through Thin Air, 24/7) from water in the ‘air. The secret lies in the ability to spray materials with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter.
The research has been published in the journal Advanced Materials.
“It’s exciting,” said Xiaomeng Liu, a graduate student in electrical and computer science at UMass Amherst’s College of Engineering and co-author of the paper. “We’re opening a great way to get clean electricity from anything.”
“Air has a lot of electricity,” says Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer science at UMass Amherst’s College of Engineering and co-author of the paper. “Think of a cloud, which is nothing but a mass of raindrops. Each of these water droplets has a charge, and when the conditions are right, the clouds can produce lightning, but we don’t know how to catch electricity and lightning. What we have done is create a small man-made cloud that produces electricity for us in a visible and continuous way so that we can bring it.
The man-made cloud heart is based on what Yao and his colleagues call the “generic Air-gen effect,” and it builds on work by Yao and co-author Derek Lovley, Emeritus Professor of Microbiology at UMass Amherst, finished first. . In 2020, it was shown that electricity can be generated from the air using a special material of protein nanowires from the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens.
“What we realized when we discovered Geobacter,” Yao explains, “is that the ability to generate electricity from air – what we call ‘The Air-gen effect’ – turns into traps: literally Any type of material can generate electricity from air, as long as it has certain properties.
This property? “It must have a gap of less than 100 nanometers (nm), or less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair.”
This is due to the limit known as “free path”, the distance one molecule of a substance, in this case, water in the air, goes before hitting another molecule of the same substance. When water droplets are suspended in air, their mean free path is about 100 nm.
Yao and his colleagues realized that they could create an electric receiver based on this number. This recovery will have a soft material filled with nanopores smaller than 100 nm that will allow water molecules to pass from the surface to the bottom of the material. But because each hole is small, water droplets easily enter the edge of the pore as they pass through the layer. This means that the upper part of the layer will be filled with many other things that carry more water than the lower part, making it less efficient, like that of clouds, because the part the top increases its charge compared to the bottom part. This will create a good battery, the battery will work as long as there is water in the air.
“The idea is simple,” says Yao, “but it’s never been discovered before, and it opens up all kinds of possibilities.” A harvester can be made from any type of material, providing a cost-effective option that is environmentally friendly. “You can imagine harvesters doing one kind of thing for a forest environment and another for a dry land environment.”
Since humidity is everywhere, the harvester must work 24 hours a day, rain or shine, at night and windy. is not, which solves one of the main problems of technology such as wind or solar energy, which only works under certain conditions.
Finally, because the moisture in the air spreads in a three-dimensional space and the thickness of the Air-gen device is only a fraction of the width of a human hair, thousands of them can be prepared in ‘up each other, well. is increasing. power without increasing the device. Such an Air-gen device will be able to provide kilowatt-level power for general energy use.
“Imagine a future world where clean electricity is available everywhere you go,” says Yao. “The effect of generic Air-gen means that this future world can become a reality.”
The research, which combines deep, collaborative expertise from 29 departments across the UMass Amherst campus, was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Sony Group, Link Foundation, and the Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS) at UMass Amherst. something new. which benefits human health and well-being.
Source: University of Massachusetts Amherst
