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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 31 2019, @04:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the seawater-is-more-than-just-salty-water dept.

There are many ways to generate electricity—batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and hydroelectric dams, to name a few examples... and now, there's rust.

New research conducted by scientists at Caltech and Northwestern University shows that thin films of rust—iron oxide—can generate electricity when saltwater flows over them. These films represent an entirely new way of generating electricity and could be used to develop new forms of sustainable power production.

Interactions between metal compounds and saltwater often generate electricity, but this is usually the result of a chemical reaction in which one or more compounds are converted to new compounds. Reactions like these are what is at work inside batteries.

In contrast, the phenomenon discovered by Tom Miller, Caltech professor of chemistry, and Franz Geiger, Dow Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern, does not involve chemical reactions, but rather converts the kinetic energy of flowing saltwater into electricity.

https://phys.org/news/2019-07-ultra-thin-layers-rust-electricity.html

More information: Mavis D. Boamah et al. Energy conversion via metal nanolayers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1906601116


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 31 2019, @05:26PM (2 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 31 2019, @05:26PM (#873626) Journal

    They were sitting in some dive, in some harbor, close to the waterfront, listening to a couple bos'ns bitching about repainting the hull, time and time again. Their ears really perked up when they mentioned degaussing, right?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:22AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:22AM (#873795)
    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday August 02 2019, @12:02PM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 02 2019, @12:02PM (#874576) Homepage Journal

      So a salt-water battery holds

      460 watt-hours per kilogram

      with almost 100% Coulombic efficiency.
      Looks useful.