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 JoeMerchant on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:41PM (1 child)
Iron isn't the greatest electrical conductor, on something with a span of 10's of feet I'd expect significant losses if they're using thin iron as the wires. I'd expect bigger problems if they're trying to get bonding between iron oxide and something like copper or aluminum.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:34PM
Even a thin iron foil is actually a decent conductor when 10 feet wide - resistance is proportional to the cross-sectional area, and being 10 feet wide really helps with that. It'll need to be almost 6x thicker than a copper foil to get the same conductance, but it's hundreds of times cheaper, so it'd probably still be an obvious choice.