Researchers are exploring more into the fact that the electrical currents that are all around us can be harnessed by using a substance generated from living beings in a fascinating new study recently published.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst recently stated that an electrical engineer named Jun Yao and his colleagues had achieved substantial progress in their research. These findings were detailed in an article that was published in the journal Advanced Materials. They call their discovery the “Air-gen effect,” which refers to growing conductive nanofilms from bacteria that can harvest minute amounts of energy from the water vapor in the air.
In the statement released by the university, Yao emphasized that there is a significant amount of electricity in the air. He compared a cloud to a collection of water droplets, each carrying an electric charge, and said that clouds are like electric storms. Although these charges can produce lightning bolts, they still need to be solved to capture the power they make successfully. The team led by Yao has come up with a way to build a man-made, small cloud capable of producing energy reliably and continuously, making its harvest possible.
The findings of this research open up some intriguing prospects for a method that is both environmentally responsible and reliably able to extract electrical energy from the natural environment. Researchers are progressing toward developing creative strategies to capture and use electricity derived from natural sources by exploiting the electrical potential of the air.
