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October 21, 2003
A New Way to Generate Electricity
Here's something Ben Franklin missed, while he was flying his kite in the rain.
At the University of Alberta in Canada, engineers have discovered a new way to generate electricity.
Researchers Larry Kostiuk, Daniel Kwok and their team pumped water through tiny microchannels in a glass disk, and found that they could directly generate an electrical current. The research, published recently in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, is revolutionary.
A liquid in contact with a non-conducting solid surface creates a thin layer of charge. If the liquid is forced through a microchannel of about the same dimension, ions charged similarly to the surface are collected, while ions oppositely charged pass through the channel. The result: the channel becomes positive at one end and negative at the other - a battery.
The Canadian researchers used a 2-cm glass disk with 450,000 microchannels, each 10-16 microns across. Hydrostatic pressure was used to provide water flow, and generated a current of 1.5 microamps. The researchers used this electrokinetic effect to power blinking LED lights.
"This is the first new way to produce sustainable electricity in 160 years," says Kostiuk. "It allows for the direct conversion of energy of moving liquid to electricity with no moving parts and no pollution."
The microchannel work is the first new electricity-generation method since William Robert Grove - the father of the fuel cell - developed two electrochemical batteries in 1839.
Work continues to characterize the electrokinetic batteries, but already researchers are talking about applications including power sources for cellphones, calculators and other electronic devices.
In addition, Kostiuk notes: "This discovery could be a new alternative energy source to rival wind and solar power, although this would need huge bodies of water to work on a commercial scale."
Posted by Sam in Industry
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