MSGID: 1:317/3 646ee486   
   PID: hpt/lnx 1.9.0-cur 2019-01-08   
   TID: hpt/lnx 1.9.0-cur 2019-01-08   
    Engineers harvest abundant clean energy from thin air, 24/7    
      
     Date:   
         May 24, 2023   
     Source:   
         University of Massachusetts Amherst   
     Summary:   
         A team of engineers has recently shown that nearly any material can   
         be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity   
         from humidity in the air. Researchers describe the 'generic   
         Air-gen effect'-- nearly any material can be engineered with   
         nanopores to harvest, cost effective, scalable, interruption-free   
         electricity. The secret lies in being able to pepper the material   
         with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter.   
      
      
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   FULL STORY   
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   A team of engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has   
   recently shown that nearly any material can be turned into a device   
   that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air. The   
   secret lies in being able to pepper the material with nanopores less   
   than 100 nanometers in diameter. The research appeared in the journal   
   Advanced Materials.   
      
   "This is very exciting," says Xiaomeng Liu, a graduate student in   
   electrical and computer engineering in UMass Amherst's College of   
   Engineering and the paper's lead author. "We are opening up a wide door   
   for harvesting clean electricity from thin air."  "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. 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."  The heart of the human-made cloud depends   
   on what Yao and his colleagues call the "generic Air-gen effect," and   
   it builds on work that Yao and co-author Derek Lovley, Distinguished   
   Professor of Microbiology at UMass Amherst, had previously completed in   
   2020 showing that electricity could be continuously harvested from the   
   air using a specialized material made of protein nanowires grown from   
   the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens.   
      
   "What we realized after making the Geobacter discovery," says Yao, "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."  That property? "It needs to have holes smaller   
   than 100 nanometers (nm), or less than a thousandth of the width of a   
   human hair."  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.   
      
   Yao and his colleagues realized that they could design an electricity   
   harvester based around this number. This harvester would be made from   
   a thin layer of material filled with nanopores smaller than 100 nm that   
   would let water molecules pass from the upper to the lower part of the   
   material. But because each pore is so small, the water molecules would   
   easily bump into the pore's edge as they pass through the thin layer. This   
   means that the upper part of the layer would be bombarded with many more   
   charge-carrying water molecules than the lower part, creating a charge   
   imbalance, like that in a cloud, as the upper part increased its charge   
   relative to the lower part. This would effectually create a battery --   
   one that runs as long as there is any humidity in the air.   
      
   "The idea is simple," says Yao, "but it's never been discovered before,   
   and it opens all kinds of possibilities." The harvester could be   
   designed from literally all kinds of material, offering broad choices for   
   cost-effective and environment-adaptable fabrications. "You could image   
   harvesters made of one kind of material for rainforest environments,   
   and another for more arid regions."  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.   
      
   Finally, because air humidity diffuses in three-dimensional space and   
   the thickness of the Air-gen device is only a fraction of the width   
   of a human hair, many thousands of them can be stacked on top of each   
   other, efficiently scaling up the amount of energy without increasing   
   the footprint of the device.   
      
   Such an Air-gen device would be capable of delivering kilowatt-level   
   power for general electrical utility usage.   
      
   "Imagine a future world in which clean electricity is available anywhere   
   you go," says Yao. "The generic Air-gen effect means that this future   
   world can become a reality."  This research was supported by the National   
   Science Foundation, Sony Group, Link Foundation, and the Institute for   
   Applied Life Sciences (IALS) at UMass Amherst, which combines deep and   
   interdisciplinary expertise from 29 departments on the UMass Amherst   
   campus to translate fundamental research into innovations that benefit   
   human health and well-being.   
      
       * RELATED_TOPICS   
             o Matter_&_Energy   
                   # Electricity # Energy_Technology # Aerospace #   
                   Nature_of_Water   
             o Earth_&_Climate   
                   # Environmental_Science # Pollution # Environmental_Issues   
                   # Air_Quality   
       * RELATED_TERMS   
             o Electricity_generation o Solar_cell o Humidity o   
             Speed_of_sound o Solar_power o Soil o Triboelectric_effect   
             o Surface_weather_analysis   
      
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   Story Source: Materials provided by   
   University_of_Massachusetts_Amherst. Note: Content may be edited for   
   style and length.   
      
      
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   Related Multimedia:   
       * The_secret_to_making_electricity_from_thin_air?_Nanopores.   
      
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   Journal Reference:   
      1. Xiaomeng Liu, Hongyan Gao, Lu Sun, Jun Yao. Generic Air‐Gen   
      Effect   
         in Nanoporous Materials for Sustainable Energy Harvesting from   
         Air Humidity. Advanced Materials, 2023; DOI: 10.1002/adma.202300748   
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   Link to news story:   
   https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/05/230524181948.htm   
      
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