Weird Science: How researchers generated electricity out of thin air

Making electricity from thin air sounds like science fiction – or something Nikola Tesla dreamed up. But researchers have in fact now figured out how to generate electricity out of air. Let’s take a closer look: What is it? According to Newsweek, the work was carried out by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The paper, published in the journal Advanced Materials, shows that electricity can be generated by harvesting moisture in the air. This can be done using a device that can be built of any material – as long as the material is speckled with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter.

According to Science Alert, that’s about a thousandth of the width of a single human hair.

How does it work? As per Newsweek, the nanopores can harvest the inherent electrical charge of the molecules of water in the air. These pores are the same size as the length of the “mean free path” between molecule of water. That’s the distance travelled by the molecules in the air before they bump into each other. The water molecules then bump into the pore’s edge while passing through the thin layer of material. The upper part of the air-gen would be bombarded with far more charge-carrying water molecules than the lower part. This creates a charge imbalance like in a cloud – the fundamental principle of generating a flow of electrical charge.

The discovery has been dubbed the “generic Air-gen effect”.

“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, and the paper’s senior author, explained to Newsweek. “Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt-but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.” As per India Today, the discovery builds on the team’s previous work which showed that electricity could be continuously harvested from the air using a specialised material comprising protein nanowires grown from the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens. “What we realized after making the Geobacter discovery is that the ability to generate electricity from the air – what we then called the ‘Air-gen effect’ – turns out to be generic: literally any kind of material can harvest electricity from air, as long as it has a certain property,” Yao told Science Alert. “The idea is simple, but it’s never been discovered before, and it opens all kinds of possibilities,” Yao added. “You could imagine harvesters made of one kind of material for rainforest environments, and another for more arid regions.” Newsweek quoted lead author of the paper Xiaomeng Liu as saying this is “very exciting.” Liu, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst’s College of Engineering, added, “We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air.” With inputs from agencies Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.