There is a lot of wind available here on land, and, as we all know, wind is a good source of renewable energy. This wind, however, is too weak to make wind turbine blades move. It appears that we could use this breeze to generate power, not through a wind turbine, but through this nanogenerator.
The method, presented September 23 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, is a low-cost and efficient way of collecting light breezes as a micro-energy source.
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"You can collect all the breeze in your everyday life," says senior author Ya Yang of Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences. "We once placed our nanogenerator on a person's arm, and a swinging arm's airflow was enough to generate power."
A breeze as gentle as 1.6 m/s (3.6 mph) was enough to power the triboelectric nanogenerator designed by Yang and his colleagues. The nanogenerator performs at its best when wind velocity is between 4 to 8 m/s (8.9 to 17.9 mph), a speed that allows the two plastic strips to flutter in sync. The device also has a high wind-to-energy conversion efficiency of 3.23%, a value that exceeds previously reported performances on wind energy scavenging. Currently, the research team's device can power up 100 LED lights and temperature sensors.
Learn more about this nanogenerator over at TechXplore.
This is phenomenal!
(Image Credit: Xin Chen, Xiaojing Mu, and Ya Yang/ TechXplore)