{"id":44463,"date":"2010-08-28T12:10:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-28T12:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/2010\/08\/28\/scientists-proposal-to-gather-electricity-from-air-garners-debate\/"},"modified":"2010-08-28T12:10:00","modified_gmt":"2010-08-28T12:10:00","slug":"scientists-proposal-to-gather-electricity-from-air-garners-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2010\/08\/28\/scientists-proposal-to-gather-electricity-from-air-garners-debate.html","title":{"rendered":"Scientist’s Proposal to Gather Electricity from Air Garners Debate"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Tiny charges gathered directly from humid air could be harnessed to generate electricity, researchers say.<\/p>\n

Dr. Fernando Galembeck told the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston that the technique exploited a little-known atmospheric effect, reports BBC News.<\/p>\n

Tests had shown that metals could be used to gather the charges, he said, opening up a potential energy source in humid climates.<\/p>\n

However, experts disagree about the mechanism and the scale of the effect.<\/p>\n

“The basic idea is that when you have any solid or liquid in a humid environment, you have absorption of water at the surface,” Dr. Galembeck, from the University of Campinas in Brazil, told BBC News.<\/p>\n

“The work I’m presenting here shows that metals placed under a wet environment actually become charged.”<\/p>\n

Dr. Galembeck and his colleagues isolated various metals and pairs of metals separated by a non-conducting separator – a capacitor, in effect \u2014 and allowed nitrogen gas with varying amounts of water vapour to pass over them.<\/p>\n

What the team found was that charge built up on the metals \u2014 in varying amounts, and either positive or negative. Such charge could be connected to a circuit periodically to create useful electricity.<\/p>\n

The effect is incredibly small – gathering an amount of charge 100 million times smaller over a given area than a solar cell produces \u2014 but seems to represent a means of charge accumulation that has been overlooked until now.<\/p>\n

Dr. Galembeck suggests that with further development, the principle could be extended to become a renewable energy resource in humid parts of the world, such as the tropics.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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