Engineers Literally Make Electricity Out of Thin Air
Researchers have used a unique conductive and water-gathering microorganism to generate electricity.
The principle is the same as hydroelectric dams—it's just extremely tiny and uses naturally occurring nanowires.
Scaling the technology will require an alteration to the microorganism or genetically tuning a different organism altogether.
First there was imitation meat generated from thin air—now there’s neverending clean electricity, researchers say. The key ingredient is a “sediment organism” that researchers first found at the bottom of the Potomac River. This organism, Geobacter sulfurreducens, spins micro-fine nanowires that form a conductive mesh when combined with water.
Here’s how it works: A layer of the conductive nanowires is sandwiched between two electrodes, but with room for air to circulate. The Geobacter material both conducts electricity and gathers atmospheric water vapor to itself, and the water vapor’s movement across the conductor and electrodes is likely what generates the tiny but steady current.
The phenomenon that creates this current, if researchers are correct about its cause, is called hydrovoltaism. Water passing over surfaces like hydroelectric dams, or even fields of graphene nanotubes, generates a current as differently charged ions pass over or through the surface. The research team on the “thin air” study says its technology is different because it’s a sustained current rather than one that works in very short bursts.
And hooking up a series of these tiny contraptions, which researchers say could be ambiently applied in wall paint, could be enough to power smartphones and other household devices. “Connecting several devices linearly scales up the voltage and current to power electronics,” they explain in the paper. “Our results demonstrate the feasibility of a continuous energy-harvesting strategy that is less restricted by location or environmental conditions than other sustainable approaches.”
In other words, this material doesn’t require a generator, let alone an electrical wall plug—the researchers say it will even scavenge electricity from an environment as dry as the Sahara Desert. But to describe this as a major breakthrough ignores the critical bottleneck in any production line: This is a microorganism that makes an extremely small (literally and relatively) amount of these protein-based nanowires.
There are solutions that could scale production up, and micro-bottlenecks aren’t anything new to the cutting-edge world of nano-scale energy solutions. The researchers say their next step could be to identify the specific mechanism at work in this microorganism and then cross it with other, more prevalent microorganisms.
Researcher Derek Lovley, the microbiologist who found the Geobacter family over 30 years ago, says one solution is to introduce this quality to E. coli. I don’t know how well it will go to pitch “literally cover your walls with E. coli” to consumers, even if it will power their smartphones. There are inoffensive kinds both inside and outside the human body, but name brand recognition of E. coli is as a pathogen.
But Lovley is right that boosting a different organism, or finding a way to “dope” (in the loose chemical sense) the original Geobacter sulfurreducens, is going to be essential before these nanowires can scale up to wall-paint quantities.
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