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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: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:10PM (#873652)

    And . . . Han Solo claimed that his Millennium Falcon "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs"

    And . . . you might have to wait for ten light years to get to that star!

    In both cases it's a matter of routing. As long as that star is closer than 10 light years away, waiting ten light years(or 5 miles to get to the next rest area) only indicates that you may not be taking the optimal route. Similarly, with the assumption that most pilots take a distance greater than 12 parsecs to go from the beginning to the end of the Kessel Run, and assuming that the Kessel Run is not a specific route, but rather an indication of 2 end points, it may be impressive that he cut the corners faster and finised the 500 mile race while only traveling 498 miles.

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