When two materials come into contact, charged entities on their surfaces get a little nudge.
When two materials come into contact, charged entities on their surfaces get a little nudge. This is how rubbing a balloon on the skin creates static electricity. Likewise, water flowing over some surfaces can gain or lose charge. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have harnessed the phenomenon to generate electricity from rain-like droplets moving through a tube. They demonstrate a new kind of flow that makes enough power to light 12 LEDs.
“Water that falls through a vertical tube generates a substantial amount of electricity by using a specific pattern of water flow: plug flow,” says Siowling Soh, the study’s corresponding author. “This plug flow pattern could allow rain energy to be harvested for generating clean and renewable electricity.”
When running water moves a turbine, it generates electricity. However, hydroelectricity is constrained to locations with large volumes of water, like rivers. For smaller and slower volumes of water, an alternative is to harness charge separation, a phenomenon that produces electrical charges as water moves through a channel with an electrically conductive inner surface. But charge separation is extremely inefficient because it is restricted to the surface that the water moves over. Previously, scientists have tried to improve its efficiency by making more surface area available through micro- or nanoscale channels for a continuous stream of water. However, water doesn’t naturally pass through such tiny channels, and if pumped, it requires more energy than gets generated. So, Soh, Chi Kit Ao and colleagues wanted to produce electricity using larger channels that rainwater could pass through.
Read more at American Chemical Society
Photo Credit: Photorama via Pixabay
