Engineers describe the “generic Air-gen effect”—nearly any material can be engineered with nanopores to harvest, cost-effective, scalable, interruption-free electricity. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered a method to harvest continuous electricity from air humi
Engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a technique for harvesting electricity from air humidity, dubbed the “generic Air-gen effect.” According to research published in Advanced Materials, any material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter can be utilized to continuously generate electricity.
“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” says Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, and the paper’s senior author. “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.
This is because of a parameter known as the “mean free path,” the distance a single molecule of a substance, in this case, water in the air, travels before it bumps into another single molecule of the same substance. When water molecules are suspended in the air, their mean free path is about 100 nm.
And since humidity is ever-present, the harvester would run 24/7, rain or shine, at night and whether or not the wind blows, which solves one of the major problems of technologies like wind or solar, which only work under certain conditions.
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