Scientists Find Way to Make Energy from Air Using Nearly Any Material - Slashdot

Posted by EditorDavid

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  effectively creating a battery that runs continuously

  In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

  • Re:

    It might obey the laws of physics but there's no way they can wire up a billion individual components for a reasonable price. I'd also worry about how long the tiny holes take to get clogged up and/or filled with algae.

    Solar panels are much smaller/cheaper.

    • Re:

      "It might obey the laws of physics but there's no way they can wire up a billion individual components for a reasonable price."

      We can wire up billions of individual transistors to make a computer chip. Computer chips are relatively cheap compared to their value. If this technology makes it into mass production in a competitive environment, then wiring up billions of them for a reasonable price will happen.

      Every modern society wants more energy, and clean energy is even better. There is plenty of demand to f

      • 1 hidden comment

      • • More specifically, they are proposing the size of a fridge for 1 kilowatt. That is almost the average [eia.gov] power consumption for a US household (1.25 kW). That power consumption is bursty and unevenly spread across the year -- spring and autumn are Miller and need less heating and cooling than winter and summer -- but figure two would probably work if it scales as promised.

          However, as an earlier comment pointed out, this smells of perpetual motion (or cold fusion). Humidity by itself isn't a good energy source. TFA compares it to a cloud, but a cloud generates lightning by static electricity from the movement of particles and vapor against each other: it's effectively puking energy from wind, not from humidity. So where does this power actually come from?

          • Re:

            If "spring and autumn are Miller" it's no wonder wind is "puking energy".

        • Re:

          Is that an American fridge or a European fridge?

    • Re:

      The screen you are looking at has quite a few individual liquid crystals all connected, there is probably over 2 billion in the one you are reading this on. Maybe the costs of making these air source electric panels could be brought down to about the cost of a monitor for equivalent size.
      
      The problem after that will be dust and pollution clogging the pores.

      • Re:

        Yep, but they aren't the size of a fingernail each, can be laid down by chemical deposition, and don't need to be "stacked".

        Building this imaginary device would be more like wiring up a billion individual surface-mount components.

        • Re:

          Building this imaginary device would be more like wiring up a billion individual surface-mount components.

          Which would be a great way to do it. Installing surface mount components is easy to automate and efficient.

          Realistically, manufacturing gajillions of these things as individual bits would be the impractically expensive part. They're basically capacitors where the dielectric is a porous membrane, so you could probably make them with a reel-to-reel technique or, if you had to, in decent sized slabs. You'r

    • Re:

      They arguably couldn't literally wire them affordably, but they might be able to use some other bonding method, like conductive epoxy.

      I am super-duper pro-solar, but if this can be done sustainably then it's another tool in the box. It might be a nice thing to mix with solar in an off grid system, and it may also be viable in those places where solar doesn't really work out. If it functions best when humidity is high, that's also likely a time when solar isn't producing well.

      Anywho I want to know what mater

  • Re:

    Yes we do.

    So once the wonder material is saturated they will have to dry it out so it will work again.

    • Re:

      To me it sounds as if it works on a difference in air pressures, so you'll need to do something to cause the air to flow through those pores. Sort of like an osmotic membrane. I suppose it could be an absorb water/dry out cycle, but that itsn't what it sounds like.

  • Re:

    I just read this article on WaPo. I basically left the same comment there. Does anyone ever double check anything in the news these days? I guess there's no one in the news room that knows enough science to properly call BS on something like this.

    • Re:

      I suspect that it's not BS, but that there are energy expenditures exogenous to the system. My though was that it probably worked on air pressure, another guy (above) though that it absorbed water (which could be useful if true and reversible). But SOME exogenous factor.

      Note that it might turn out to be useful. Lots of energy phenomena can be used in a cyclic manner. But the story as being told is leaving something out.

      • Re:

        My first thought was that it might work based on differentials in the dewpoint - unless the vapour pressure in the device is precisely identical to the vapour pressure outside (which it will only be transitively, the vapour pressure outside is constantly changing), then it will always be at least theoretically possible to extract work from the system by either evaporation or condensation.

        But that's just speculation. Terrible article, such that nobody can tell what on Earth they're talking about.

      • Re:

        The orignal paper is available free:
        https://krichlab.physics.uotta... [uottawa.ca]

        It does seem to operate continuously. They monitored one for a couple months. Their proposed mechanism is that the nanopores are a very good mechanism for collecting charge from humid air in contact with the film (a phenomenon that has been observed before). Presumably you need some air circulation to keep delivering charge; they mention the large reservoir provided by the ambient environment, and the current drops when they cover the surf

• ...stupid prices for access to the paper.

  Guessing from the abstract: In a nutshell: water in gaseous form has more energy than water in liquid form. Water molecules can be absorbed into the material, effectively releasing some energy that can be harvested.

  No info on how much humidity is needed or how much energy can be harvested. However, any engineer can put some upper limits on it. Might be good for low power devices in otherwise difficult locations, but you aren't going to be powering cities this way.

  • Re:

    It says right in the summary that they calculated a billion of them could produce a kilowatt. Of course it needs a lot of engineering to actually make something with a billion of them in a fridge sized unit, but it's worth at least investigating if mass production is possible.

    My main concern would be that if everyone has one how much does it affect the humidity of the local atmosphere? Or if someone builds a massive array of them...

    • Re:

      If that would work, there are lots of places plagued by high humidity that would like them. But I don't believe they're telling the whole story. My suspicion is that it requires a difference in air pressure to force air to flow through the membrane, and that the energy required to force that flow would more than equal the energy generated.

      • Re:

        I wonder how quickly these nano-scale channels will get colonized by bacteria and/or algae or simply clog up with dust an pollen. Will you have to flush it with ethanol or something every few weeks to keep it working?

        • Re:

          Flush it with ethanol: one beer a week.

• 1 billion of these could make a KW.

  So if they cost a tenth of a cent each, thats a million bucks per KW...

  • Re:

    "The device consists of a thin (roughly 7-m) film of protein nanowires deposited on a gold electrode (with an area of around 25 mm2) patterned on glass"...

    0.1c? Mebbe not.

• This seems suspicious. I can't see how a device just sitting passively in air can generate electricity forever. Unless you can get the air flowing, it will eventually reach equilibrium and stop. And getting air to flow requres (surprise!) energy.

  I guess wind could sustain air flow, but then you've just invented a really inefficient from of wind power.

  • Re: Nothing is free

    Air is never really that still in the places we inhabit. Thatâ(TM)s why cat hair ends up in corners and there isnâ(TM)t an even layer of dust on your kitchen counter. Especially true outside. The question is absolutely about how much movement we need, but unless you live somewhere with no temperature or humidity gradients at all, I donâ(TM)t think it will be an issue.

    And for once it sounds like the more volatile the air conditions the better. Though this would probably be pretty useless outsi

    • Re:

      You can't get more energy out than you put in. So a gentle breeze can give you at most as much energy as a gentle breeze... which is not much.

      • Re:

        The energy is not coming from the breeze, it's coming from a charge that's already on the water droplets. Air does need to pass through it, but the force of the air is not the energy source.

        That said, I'm not clear how that works, but it's clear it's not taking energy from the wind; it's taking it from the electrons that have been accumulated on the water.

  • Re:

    The real question is "can it generate more power than the fan and possibly water atomizer needed to keep it running constantly?"

  • And what happen when

    air pollution clogs the pores?

    • Re:

      I wonder if these could be used in a closed system where a heat imbalance from top to bottom would cause convective flow within the sealed system - or does this need a constant source of 'new' water vapor (and dust)?

      • Re:

        In this universe, we obey the laws of thermodynamics...

        If you ever find yourself thinking, "Can I extract energy from this closed system without decreasing the amount of energy in this closed system"... the answer is an absolute, "NO".

        You can get a fluid to flow in a constant loop with a heat source and a radiator (which is not a closed system). In this case, you're extracting humidity to (somehow) generate energy. That would indicate that you're going to need freshly humid air to replace the air you're

  • Re:

    Ever hear of convection? Install these in the hot attic of your house with proper vent placement and the air will flow on it's own!

    • Re:

      How much energy does such convective air flow provide? Answer is not much. And you can't get more energy out than you put in. Otherwise, we'd just install tiny little wind turbines to intercept the convective flow and $profit....

      • Re:

        It's *not* the pressure of the air flow that's providing the energy, it's reportedly the electric charge on the moisture droplets.

  • ...and neither is this

    You mean like solar panels? Passive devices can generate energy if they can extract it from their environment. Solar panels use light, it's not clear from the description quite what this device uses - either the motion of humid air or the latent heat of evaporation. If it uses the motion then I suspect it will not scale well since there are no significant air currents in a house. If it extracts the latent heat energy by causing the water to condense then it may well scale since this is 2,256 kJ/kg water so

  • Re:

    If a stack of these can produce a kilowatt, as the summary suggests, then there's more than enough energy to run a fan.

    Lots of energy sources need power to start up. Anything that uses a dynamo, i.e. everything from small petrol generators to nuclear power plants, needs excitation current to begin producing electricity and become self sustaining. It's one of the reasons why bringing the grid back up after an outage is difficult - power plants that were either not affected or which can start by themselves ar

• Good luck manufacturing, stacking, and interconnecting a billion separate components for a reasonable price.

  (...especially in a world where 1 square meter of cheap solar panel can do the same thing).

  • Re:

    > Good luck manufacturing, stacking, and interconnecting a billion separate components for a reasonable price.

    I just checked memory prices. I can get 4GB of ram for 15 quid, and that is about 20 billion things that are interconnected.

    • Re:

      Your mom's fat cells are all interconnected, and there's trillions of those.

      They don't generate much electricity though.

      • Re:

        If mom didn't generate electricity in dad, she wouldn't be a mom...

  • Re:

    Not at night which, coincidentally, is when humidity is generally highest.

  • Re:

    The device you used to post your message had several billions of tiny components all precisely connected. Obviously not everything can be made as small as a transistor or for as inexpensively, but it's funny to point out that it's not necessarily impossible, just an engineering problem and one that could be solved if there were enough money in doing so.

    • Re:

      Who said anything about "impossible"?

  • Re:

    It's a film. It's very similar to that solar panel you menion except that in place of purified silicon it uses fibrous organic material.

• I have a lot of questions but the paper is behind a paywall.

  How much of this material the "size of a fingernail and thinner than a single hair" have they been able to make? There are loads of articles about awesome batteries and power sources that exist solely as a lab experiment the size of a quarter. Their "one prototype only produces a small amount of energy — almost enough to power a dot of light on a big screen".

  A billion of them "roughly the size of a refrigerator, could produce a kilowatt". I'm

• It's just amazing how many silver bullets are all over the place. How has the price of silver stayed so high with all these silver bullets just waiting to be harvested? The Lord has truly blessed us with an infinite supply of silver bullets to keep us fully nourished. No, wait, to keep idiot journalists fully nourished.

  • Re:

    I would say that we keep finding new "silver bullets" so that we can justify doing nothing about climate change that would impact our way of life. Just look at the patting on the back about renewables in 2022, when 2022 was a year where an all-time high of fossil fuels were burned. Or how Germany is happy to spend 500 billions deploying renewables, while at the same time closing down nuclear plants (instead of doing both).

    This is collective stupidity at its paroxysm.

• I chose as 'any material' a potato.

  • Re:

    Now just slice it super thin and add nanopores. Unfortunately, they did not offer specifications in Metric units, you'll have to make sure the slices are "the size of a fingernail, thinner than a single hair, and dotted with tiny holes known as nanopores".

  • Re:

    If it ran on republican logic it would require your soul.

• When first developed, Gore-Tex was simply a filter with pores, of a size that allowed water vapor to cross, but not liquid water. However, soon the filter clogged, because water vapor had impurities in it, specially lipids that clung to the micropores and obstructed them. They had to add a second layer of what was essentially an sponge to filter the lipids. At it was intended for garments, body movement would pump the water in the sponge and expel it when you are wearing it. I don't know how they would plan

  • Re:

    I live not too far from the ocean, and not too far from farming, and not too far from a major freeway. The air around my house is full of dust, salt, and traffic pollution. We get a near constant onshore breeze, air pollutants do not tend to build up but are always there is some amount. The humidity there for sure but I don't see how this kind of device would last.

• "The holes have a diameter smaller than 100 nanometers, or less than a thousandth of the width of a strand of human hair." - Is this a standard of measurement by Vidal Sassoon? Apparently, the width of human hair varies from 0.017 to 0.18 mm, so is that 0.000017 mm or 0.00018 mm in diameter?

  • Re:

    It depends on the size of a Library of Congress.

  • Re:

    I do have to wonder now, how many Libraries of Congress might fit into 0.000017mm-0.00018mm.
• They missed this news on April fool's day and they published in in late May?
• A compact device that generates a small amount of power form ambient sources can be valuable for various sensing devices. But I don't see any hope of this scaling to KW power levels. Even if you could assemble a billion devices, the energy density represented by the humidity in the air would require an enormous airflow.
  
  Separately, since the article is paywalled, its not clear how it works. If it is removing water from air, where does that water go? Unless it is saturating some material (implying this
• It takes some amount of energy to produce these "dot sheets," and they would degrade over time. If the sheets are consumed quickly and need replacing on a regular basis, they function economically as a fuel rather than a harvesting material. If you need an additional fuel or storage medium on top of that to store the output, then the value proposition is murkier.
  
  These kinds of "discoveries" happen pretty much on a weekly basis.
• Humidity is a measure of water vapor concentration in a gas; it is not an object itself. My kneejerk reaction: Any "scientist" who refers to "humidity" as if it is something that exists probably doesn't know enough about thermodynamics to successfully boil water on a stove.

  • Re:

    So, humidity is a nonphysical phenomenon?

    • Re:

      ElimGarak must think humidity is supernatural.

• I found that all sorts of items will burn in a bonfire. Just need to harness the energy released.
• ...government will tax air we breath!

• Say it's 1.5 metres tall, so you need to manufacture 1000 layers into 1.5mm. 1.5 micron layers, and a billion of them, all competing with each other for the same ambient humidity source. And then even if it works, the theoretical best case is it generates a measely kiloWatt

  Fuck off Yao and Xiaomeng Liu, you might have the sense not to enter the healthcare market and rip off billionaries unlike Elizabeth Holmes, but you're both just as full of shit as she is!