As revealed in an academic paper, Scientists have developed a revolutionary cloud device called Air-gen that can harvest clean electricity from the humidity in the air. The device, about the size of a fingernail, is constructed using a material filled with nanopores, each less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair.
According to Dr. Jun Yao, the senior author from Massachusetts University in the US, the nanopores in Air-gen generate clean power by capturing the energy from electrically charged water in the air as it passes through them.
Dr. Yao explains,
This ground-breaking technique has the potential to be implemented in various environments, from the Amazon rainforest to the Sahara Desert, as Dr. Yao highlights,
The recent study, published in Advanced Materials, demonstrates how the device can continuously extract electricity from the air, building upon the team’s previous discovery of harvesting electricity using specialized protein nanowires grown from the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens. Lead author Xiaomeng Liu, a graduate student, states,
Dr. Yao emphasizes the versatility of the Air-gen effect, stating,
By utilizing the parameter known as the “mean free path,” which represents the distance a water molecule travels in air before encountering another, the researchers designed a thin layer of material with nanopores smaller than 100nm. This design allows water molecules to pass through the material, with the upper part experiencing numerous charge-carrying water molecules due to frequent collisions with the nanopore edges. Consequently, an electrical charge imbalance is created between the upper and lower parts of the material, resembling the charge distribution in a cloud and effectively generating a battery.
Dr. Yao remarks,
The breakthrough has tremendous potential to address the climate emergency and significantly contribute to the commercialization of electric vehicles by harvesting electricity directly from the air.