Nanopores are the secret to making electricity from thin air.
Scientists are working on a variety of natural resource-based energy sources, including solar power, wind power, and bioenergy, in their pursuit of clean energy.
Now, University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers have created a device that can harness atmospheric humidity to generate renewable electricity.
As per a release from the university, 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.
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 man-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.