A system that creates electricity from rain could one day be added to the roofs
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The water droplets falling through a tube have generated sufficiently electricity To supply 12 LED lights. Such an approach could one day be used in roof -based systems to harvest a lot of power specific to rain.
“The rain falls on earth every day. All the energy is wasted due to the absence of a system to harvest the energy of the rain, ”explains Siowling SOH at the National University of Singapore.
Normally, when we generate electricity from water, we use the movement of many to drive a turbine in a river, the sea or even in drinking water pipes. But the water flowing on an electric conductive surface can generate its own electrical load by a process called separation of loads. This is driven by protons positively loaded with water molecules remaining in the liquid and electrons loaded negatively given to the surface, just as you can generate static electricity by rubbing a balloon on your hair.
The phenomenon is generally an ineffective means of producing electricity because the electrical load is created only on the surface the surface water Key, and if you use micro or nanometric channels to increase the surface, you end up requiring more energy to pump the water you do not remove.
Now SOH and his colleagues have created a simple configuration that relies on gravity To move water to a vertical tube 32 centimeters high with an inner diameter of 2 millimeters.
The water flows from the bottom of a container via a horizontal stainless steel needle, then falls towards the tube below. While the rainwater droplets collide at the top of the tube, they capture air pockets, creating what is called a candle flow as they fall. This disjointed flow seems to help the electrical loads of the water molecules to separate when they descend into the tube. The wires at the top and bottom of the tube, then collect the generated electricity.
In an experience, a tube produced 440 microwatts. When the researchers used four tubes at a time, they could feed 12 LEDs for 20 seconds.
“We can, for the first time, collect the energy of the rain or other natural sources such as rivers or waterfalls, by separation of loads at the solid-liquid interface,” explains Soh.
The amount of electricity produced may not seem particularly impressive, but SOH says that the configuration has converted more than 10% of energy Water falling through electricity tubes, which is five orders of size more electricity than obtaining water flowing through the tubes in a continuous stream.
“The rain falls from a few kilometers in the sky to the earth, so there is a lot of room in a three-dimensional space to harvest the energy of the rain,” he said. This suggests that the system could be used to produce electricity from rain, perhaps on the roofs.
“If this could be developed in a way that could be useful on a house base per house, it could be a really useful thing,” says Shannon Ames at the low impact hydroelectric institute in Boston.
