Mark Megahan
One of Professor Jun Yao’s students forgot to plug in the power but energy was coming from somewhere. They weren’t trying to solve the holy grail mystery of modern physics but somehow, they did. The team was supposed to be designing an air humidity sensor which ended up unintentionally producing “a small, continuous electrical current.” They would never have noticed it without the student’s mistake.
Energy from thin air
The revered Nikola Tesla was rumored to be on the edge of a big breakthrough, producing energy from the air. Ever since then, physicists, mathematicians and engineers have been banging their heads on the wall to figure out what he might have been chasing.
In May, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst announced in a research paper that they unexpectedly solved a major part of the mystery. Tesla’s dream has indeed become a reality, though only on a micro-scale.
Professor Yao admits, “to be frank, it was an accident. We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air.” Everything was going as expected but “for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.” If it wasn’t plugged in, where were the readings coming from?
“After the research team realized the student’s mistake, they could see that the array of microscopic tubes, one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, produced an electrical signal without power.” That meant energy from nothing but the ambient environment.
Since then, the team of researchers has shifted their focus to “a methodology to test nanopores, which are just materials with many small holes instead of nanowires.” The humidity sensor they were working on is “only the size of a thumbnail with one-fifth the width of a human hair.” They weren’t trying to generate energy with it.
What they do get out of it for free is “a single microwatt of power, which is just enough to light a single pixel on an LED screen.” That might not be much but it’s a revolutionary step in the right direction. Creating any power from thin air at all has never been possible before.
More power possible
As Dr. Yao relates, one microwatt of electricity might not seem impressive but it does “lay the groundwork for pivotal research that would allow scientists to essentially make energy from the air.” Virtually free electricity could change the world.
“Even though a thin sheet of the device gives out a very tiny amount of electricity or power, in principle, we can stack multiple layers in vertical space to increase the power.”
The team calls their breakthrough discovery “hygroelectric power,” and can’t even begin to list all the possible applications. It’s a lot more promising than solar or wind energy options. Once they get the production bugs worked out, “these systems can be placed inside or outside and may someday be used to create construction materials.”
Your house could soon power itself. So can your car or even your clothes.
While the technology is just around the corner, it’s going to be a while before products start hitting the market. The physics and engineering worlds are still getting over the shock of having a new toy to play with.
“Sourcing the materials, performing the research and development, and building the project to scale takes immense amounts of time, resources, and funding.” You can bet that the big oil companies won’t be writing any of the hygroelectric energy research grants, unless they get the patents that come out of it.
