All just hot air? Harvesting electricity from humidity
As our governments edge towards green infrastructure, they have called upon engineers, researchers and scientists to consider unlikely new energy sources. Well, how about thin air? The Northern Hemisphere is entering the warmer months, causing many to find ways to cool down – air conditioning and electric fans are effective (and energy-sapping) ways to beat the heat… but what if that same electric power could be sucked out of the air itself? Harvesting electricity from air? Now there’s an idea.
As reported by Renewable Energy World, scientists and engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst say they have proven something remarkable: that nearly any available material can be successfully transformed into a device that effectively, and continuously, harvest electricity from humidity in the air. It relies on tiny tech known as nanopores, and each is just 100 nanometres in diameter.
Harvesting Electricity From Air
Similar in concept to direct air capture technology, which uses chemical reactions to siphon carbon dioxide, this new stance peppers existing materials with nanopores, with the potential to transform anything into an electricity-sucking surface.
The air around us contains a tremendous amount of electricity – every water droplet in a cloud holds a charge, thereby holding the potential to dispel it. Just like a lightning bolt forms when the conditions are right, Massachusetts Amherst researchers have successfully created a manmade, small-scale cloud system that is able to produce electricity predictably and continuously – energy that can be harvested for future use!
The spark of a good idea
The laboratory cloud correctly depends on the “generic Air-gen effect” (as per Renewable Energy World’s article) and evolves a previous concept the team developed back in 2020, that protein nanowires grown from a bacterium known as Geobacter sulfurreducens could soak up humid electricity, a little like static. It’s this earlier research that leads to an epiphany: the ability to generate electricity from the air is generic, so any kind of material can harvest it, just as long as it has a certain property… holes with a circumference smaller than 100 nanometres.
Just how small is 100 nanometres? Well, according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick, whilst a strand of human DNA is just 2.5 nanometers in diameter.
Nanopores need to be so small because of the “mean free path”, the distance a water molecule (or any molecule) travels before it reacts to another molecule. The harvesting technology collects water molecules through the nanopores and sends them down to crash into the many charge-carrying molecules in lower layers. Just like a cloud, it creates a charge imbalance, effectively creating a battery that generates electricity!
The brilliance of this system is it relies on a readily available resource, humidity in the air, and is capable of running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, unlike intermittent green technologies such as solar or wind. It may sound too good to be true, but when researchers harness the power of the world around them to solve its complex crises, sometimes, it really is a breeze.
Source: Harvest electricity from humid air? This team says they can do it.
Heard of any other amazing Earth-saving ideas or innovations recently? Keep the conversation going in the comments.
It’s never all doom and gloom! Want more good news? Click here: Wind Energy Grows Worldwide, East Asia Leads.
