Scientists Could Soon Pull Clean Energy Out of Thin Air! | Weather.com - The Weather Channel

Scientists Could Soon Pull Clean Energy Out of Thin Air! | Weather.com

From algae and jellyfish in the oceans to confiscated alcohol and dancefloors in a nightclub, it appears scientists have truly gone all out to find alternative sources of energy — and for good reason. With climate change threatening our very existence, humanity must use all its facilities to find clean energy sources.

And now, a rather resourceful team of scientists has found a way to continuously harvest electricity from humidity in the air, and it doesn't get any cleaner than this.

While the concept of pulling energy out of thin air sounds more like witchcraft than actual science, we assure you that this technique is definitely within the realm of possibility, even if it needs more development before it can be practically applied and used widely.

Building on previous research, which involved pulling energy from the moisture in the air using material harvested from bacteria, this new study pushes boundaries by claiming that nearly any material, including silicon or wood, can be used in this new method.

The secret to harvesting energy in this unconventional way lies in being able to pepper any material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter — that's approximately a thousandth of the width of a human hair.

By poking all these minuscule holes in the material, we can harvest the electricity generated by microscopic water droplets in humid air!

Dubbing the "generic Air-gen effect", this discovery involves incredibly small holes that rely on what's known as a "mean free path" — the distance a single molecule can travel before it collides with another molecule made of the same substance.

The water molecules floating in the air possess a mean free path of about 100 nm. When humid air passes through Air-gen material's teeny-tiny holes, the water molecules come into direct contact with first an upper, then lower chamber of the film. And this creates a charge imbalance, fondly known as electricity!

This is the same science that takes place in a storm cloud. But in this case, it operates in a human-built, small-scale set-up that produces electricity predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it, explained Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst and the paper's senior author.

Since air humidity diffuses in three-dimensional space and the thickness of the Air-gen device is just a fraction of the width of a human hair, several thousand of them can be stacked atop one another, scaling up the amount of energy efficiently without increasing the footprint of the device.

Furthermore, given the ever-present humidity, this harvester would run 24/7, rain or shine and whether or not the wind blows. This also solves one of the major problems of technologies like wind or solar, which only work under certain conditions, the authors highlighted.

The study's findings are detailed in the journal Advanced Materials and can be accessed here.

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