Last May, researchers at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst revealed they had managed to successfully generate a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air. Now, a report by The Guardian is revealing the breakthrough came by surprise.
“To be frank, it was an accident,” told the news outlet the study’s lead author, Prof Jun Yao. “We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.”
The device, which was made from an array of microscopic tubes, or nanowires, was producing an electrical signal regardless.
The nanowires were bumping around inside the tube resulting in a small charge, and as the frequency of bumps rose, one end of the tube became differently charged from the other.
“So it’s really like a battery,” explained Yao. “You have a positive pull and a negative pull, and when you connect them the charge is going to flow.”
Yao’s team conducted a new study that saw their experiments move on from nanowires, and instead use materials with millions of tiny holes, or nanopores. The result is a device the size of a thumbnail that can generate roughly one microwatt.
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