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posted by chromas on Sunday April 07 2019, @10:04PM   Printer-friendly

Submitted via IRC for takyon

UMD Researchers’ Wood-based Technology Creates Electricity from Heat

A University of Maryland-led team of researchers has created a heat-to-electricity device that runs on ions and which could someday harness the body’s heat to provide energy.

[...] This energy is generated using charged channel walls and other unique properties of the wood’s natural nanostructures. With this new wood-based technology, they can use a small temperature differential to efficiently generate ionic voltage, as demonstrated in a paper[$] published March 25 in the journal Nature Materials.

[...] Trees grow channels that move water between the roots and the leaves. These are made up of fractally-smaller channels, and at the level of a single cell, channels just nanometers or less across. The team has harnessed these channels to regulate ions.

[...] A membrane, made of a thin slice of wood, was bordered by platinum electrodes, with sodium-based electrolyte infiltrated into the cellulose. The[y] regulate the ion flow inside the tiny channels and generate electrical signal. “The charged channel walls can establish an electrical field that appears on the nanofibers and thus help effectively regulate ion movement under a thermal gradient,” said Tian Li, first author of the paper.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by looorg on Sunday April 07 2019, @10:40PM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Sunday April 07 2019, @10:40PM (#825976)

    So when you get a job at the power-plant in the future, you are the power source. All good and green power!

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @11:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 07 2019, @11:05PM (#825986)

    Incorrect, sadly there is no funny/insightful mod that some actual user could mod you up with.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 08 2019, @07:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 08 2019, @07:14AM (#826087)

    The Matrix gives me a woody!