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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
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:42PM (2 children)
As an EE I use numbers and formulas, not words. If you hire technical people based on pedantry, you're a hated boss, and likely constantly complaining that you can't find good people.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:03PM (1 child)
If I was hiring an E.E. I doubt that I would consider one who did not know the difference between power and energy to be a "good people". Using numbers and formulas is fine when you use the right ones, but if you don't understand what they represent then at some point you are going to use the wrong one and whatever you built is going to burst into flames.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:43PM
More platitudes. You're good at something afterall.