Engineers at UMass Amherst harvest abundant clean energy from thin air, 24/7
Researchers describe the “generic Air-gen effect”—nearly any material can be engineered with nanopores to harvest, cost effective, scalable, interruption-free electricity
IMAGE: NANOPORES ARE THE SECRET TO MAKING ELECTRICITY FROM THIN AIR. view more
CREDIT: DEREK LOVLEY/ELLA MARU STUDIO
Researchers describe the “generic Air-gen effect”—nearly any material can be engineered with nanopores to harvest, cost effective, scalable, interruption-free electricity
AMHERST, Mass. – A team of engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently shown that nearly any material can be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air. The secret lies in being able to pepper the material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter. The research appeared in the journal Advanced Materials.
“This is very exciting,” says Xiaomeng Liu, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering in UMass Amherst’s College of Engineering and the paper’s lead author. “We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air.”
“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” says Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, and the paper’s senior author. “Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt—but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.”
The heart of the man-made cloud depends on what Yao and his colleagues call the “generic Air-gen effect,” and it builds on work that Yao and co-author Derek Lovley, Distinguished Professor of Microbiology at UMass Amherst, had previously completed in 2020 showing that electricity could be continuously harvested from the air using a specialized material made of protein nanowires grown from the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens.
“What we realized after making the Geobacter discovery,” says Yao, “is that the ability to generate electricity from the air—what we then called the ‘Air-gen effect’—turns out to be generic: literally any kind of material can harvest electricity from air, as long as it has a certain property.”
That property? “It needs to have holes smaller than 100 nanometers (nm), or less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair.”
This is because of a parameter known as the “mean free path,” the distance a single molecule of a substance, in this case water in the air, travels before it bumps into another single molecule of the same substance. When water molecules are suspended in the air, their mean free path is about 100 nm.
Yao and his colleagues realized that they could design an electricity harvester based around this number. This harvester would be made from a thin layer of material filled with nanopores smaller than 100 nm that would let water molecules pass from the upper to the lower part of the material. But because each pore is so small, the water molecules would easily bump into the pore’s edge as they pass through the thin layer. This means that the upper part of the layer would be bombarded with many more charge-carrying water molecules than the lower part, creating a charge imbalance, like that in a cloud, as the upper part increased its charge relative to the lower part. This would effectually create a battery—one that runs as long as there is any humidity in the air.
“The idea is simple,” says Yao, “but it’s never been discovered before, and it opens all kinds of possibilities.” The harvester could be designed from literally all kinds of material, offering broad choices for cost-effective and environment-adaptable fabrications. “You could image harvesters made of one kind of material for rainforest environments, and another for more arid regions.”
And since humidity is ever-present, the harvester would run 24/7, rain or shine, at night and whether or not the wind blows, which solves one of the major problems of technologies like wind or solar, which only work under certain conditions.
Finally, because air humidity diffuses in three-dimensional space and the thickness of the Air-gen device is only a fraction of the width of a human hair, many thousands of them can be stacked on top of each other, efficiently scaling up the amount of energy without increasing the footprint of the device. Such an Air-gen device would be capable of delivering kilowatt-level power for general electrical utility usage.
“Imagine a future world in which clean electricity is available anywhere you go,” says Yao. “The generic Air-gen effect means that this future world can become a reality.”
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Sony Group, Link Foundation, and the Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS) at UMass Amherst, which combines deep and interdisciplinary expertise from 29 departments on the UMass Amherst campus to translate fundamental research into innovations that benefit human health and well-being.
Contacts: Jun Yao, juny@umass.edu
Daegan Miller, drmiller@umass.edu
JOURNAL
Advanced Materials
ARTICLE TITLE
Generic Air-gen Effect in Nanoporous Materials for Sustainable Energy Harvesting from Air Humidity
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
24-May-2023
Small-scale proton exchange membrane fuel cells: A challenging but promising path toward clean energy
Researchers from Tianjin University offer a holistic insight into using proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) for small-scale applications
Peer-Reviewed PublicationIMAGE: A REVIEW BY TIANJIN UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS PROVIDES A HOLISTIC OVERVIEW OF THE APPLICATIONS OF SMALL-SCALE PEMFCS IN TRANSPORTATION, AND STATIONARY AND PORTABLE POWER GENERATION FIELDS, INCLUDING ESSENTIAL STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE THEIR EFFICIENCY AND MARKETABILITY view more
CREDIT: KUI JIAO FROM TIANJIN UNIVERSITY IMAGE SOURCE LINK: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.1016/J.ENREV.2023.100017
Increasing awareness of emerging environmental and climate change effects has expedited the global commercialization of clean energy. Naturally, the demand for powering up several small-scale and low power devices has increased. However, the small-scale storage of electricity has encountered bottlenecks, encouraging the possibility of generating electricity from hydrogen, using fuel cells.
Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are promising electrochemical cells that convert the chemical energy of fuel into electrical energy. PEMFCs are used for a range of applications, but their unique attributes, including high energy densities, low pollution emissions, and low operating temperatures, make them favorable for small-scale applications. In particular, the small-scale PEMFC (<10 kW) is appropriate for applications such as portable power generation, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), light-duty vehicles, and residential power supply. Notably, improvements in the specific power of small-scale PEMFC technology can improve this cell’s market uptake.
To understand the current trends in this field, Professor Kui Jiao and his team from Tianjin University, China, reviewed the advances and challenges in the applications of PEMFCs. Their findings were made available online on 18 April 2023, in Volume 2 of Energy Reviews. In the review article, the team discusses the operation and characteristics of PEMFCs for applications in the transportation, stationary, and portable power generator fields. In addition, they provide their perspectives on future strategies for small-scale high-specific-power PEMFC’ systems.
In transportation, the successful implementation of small-scale PEMFCs in UAVs, underwater vehicles, and light traction vehicles can make them an excellent alternative power source.
The team also added that higher power density, longer endurance, mild hybrid architecture, and PEMFC range extenders are more suitable for small transportation applications.
Small-scale PEMFCs are also used for stationary applications, such as powering up uninterrupted power supply and residential co-generation systems. The pre-requisites of these power systems include reliability, durability, and affordability. In this regard, the research team concluded that the PEMFC could be used as a renewable backup power source due to its high efficiency and low pollution emissions. They also addressed fuel flexibility and reliability issues.
One must note that although lithium (Li)-ion battery systems dominate the market in portable applications, small-scale PEMFCs have additional benefits. Portable (outdoor) power generation is best suited for small-scale PEMFCs due to their longer duration, high energy density, off-grid power generation, and adaptability.
“Although several pioneering studies have been conducted to promote the application of small PEMFCs, further advancements are essential to meet the requirements for practical applications,” adds Professor Jiao. Future challenges in the development of small-scale PEMFCs will primarily be associated with optimizing fuel cell materials and the system design to obtain a high-specific power fuel cell.
Lightweight components play a crucial role in achieving advanced, high-performance PEMFC technologies, by optimizing the structural material design for greater reliability. The response time of PEMFCs can be decreased by using lightweight hybrid power sources for instant power surge.
Furthermore, proper energy management strategies for hybrid power sources help improve their efficiency and dynamics. Professor Jiao further adds, “A hydrogen storage system with a high hydrogen storage density, quick hydrogen release and charge rates, strong reversibility, and improved safety is crucial for increasing the overall device-level energy density of small-scale PEMFC systems.”
Hence, a compressed gas storage tank of large volume would not be beneficial for small-scale PEMFC applications where space and weight are important parameters. “Conversely, a long-term hydrogen storage system for small-scale PEMFC applications may instead be based on materials such as complex hydrides and metal storage systems with high volumetric densities,” Professor Jiao concludes.
***
Reference
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enrev.2023.100017
Authors: Zixuan Wanga,b, Zhi Liuaa,b, Linhao Fana,b, Qing Dua,b, and Kui Jiaoa,b
Affiliations:
aState Key Laboratory of Engines, Tianjin University, 135 Yaguan Road, Tianjin, China
bNational Industry-Education Platform of Energy Storage, Tianjin University, 135 Yaguan Road, Tianjin, China
About Professor Kui Jiao from Tianjin University
Dr. Kui Jiao currently works as a professor in the State Key Laboratory of Engines at the Tianjin University, China. He received his Ph.D. degree in 2011 from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in mechanical engineering. His research interests include low and intermediate temperature fuel cells, hydrogen storage device, lithium-ion battery, thermoelectric generator, and turbocharger compressor. He has published over 200 international journal papers and several book chapters, with more than 11746 citations and an h-index of 62. He also received the National Science Fund for Outstanding Young Scholars in 2016.
About Energy Reviews
Energy Reviews is an international, interdisciplinary, high-quality, open-access academic journal in the field of energy, which is sponsored by Shenzhen University and published by the Elsevier publishing group. Energy Reviews invites high-quality reviews at the forefront of research in a broad range of topics covering not only materials, chemistry, and engineering, but also new energy devices, applications, methods, tools, theories, policy and management. The following areas will be prioritized, but not exclusively:
1, New theories, methods and technologies for energy research
2, Interdisciplinary research of materials, physics, chemistry and biology in energy
3, Low-carbon utilization of fossil fuel and CCUS
4, Advanced hydrogen, renewable energy and energy storage technologies
5, Exploration and applications of novel energy conversion
6, Applications of AI, big data in energy
Website: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/energy-reviews
JOURNAL
Energy Reviews
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Literature review
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
Application Progress of Small-scale Proton exchange Membrane Fuel Cell
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