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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: 1) by knarf on Sunday April 07 2019, @10:51PM

    by knarf (2042) on Sunday April 07 2019, @10:51PM (#825982)

    OK, the next step is hereby clear, when talking about power plants in the future people will refer to those oddly metallic-looking trees they've got in their gardens.