![]() ![]() “How do these devices get manufactured?” asks Anna Korre, professor of environmental engineering at Imperial College London. Visionary ambition: Nikola Tesla at work in his laboratory, c1900. He goes on to suggest that preventing microbial contamination is more an “exciting engineering challenge” than a terminal flaw, but there are far greater problems to overcome before this technology is powering our homes. “If you can engineer and scale it, and avoid the thing getting contaminated by atmospheric microbes, it should work.” ![]() “When I first heard about it, I thought: ‘Oh yes, another one of those.’ But no, it’s got legs, this one has,” says Dobson. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024.Ī device that can generate usable electricity from thin (or somewhat muggy) air may sound too good to be true, but Peter Dobson, emeritus professor of engineering science at Oxford University, has been following both the UMass Amherst and Catcher teams’ research, and he’s optimistic. However, 20,000 of them stacked into a washing machine-sized cube, they say, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day – roughly the consumption of an average UK household. According to the Lyubchyks, one of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm (1.5in) across. They’ve come a long way since then, with Catcher and related projects receiving nearly €5.5m (£4.7m) in funding from the European Innovation Council. We were able to generate 300 milliwatts, but you had to put all your effort into your lungs in order to breathe enough humidity into the samples.” He says: “The signal was not stable and it was low. In fact, trying to prove the worth of an early proof-of-concept at conferences had them literally red in the face. “The guys who were saying something completely impossible.” “We were considered the freaks,” says Andriy. They first began working on the idea in 2015, some time before Yao’s team at the UMass Amherst. Svitlana Lyubchyk and Andriy are part of the Lisbon-based Catcher project, whose aim is “changing atmospheric humidity into renewable power”, and along with Sergiy they have founded CascataChuva, a startup intended to commercialise the research. ![]() That’s exactly what another team, Prof Svitlana Lyubchyk and her twin sons, Profs Andriy and Sergiy Lyubchyk, are trying to do. “Even though a thin sheet of the device gives out a very tiny amount of electricity or power, in principle, we can stack multiple layers in vertical space to increase the power.” So what would it take to power the rest of the screen, or indeed a whole house? “The beauty is that the air is everywhere,” says Yao. We were considered the freaks – the guys who were saying something completely impossible Prof Andriy Lyubchyk, Catcher project The device they have come up with is the size of a thumbnail, one-fifth the width of a human hair, and capable of generating roughly one microwatt – enough to light a single pixel on a large LED screen. “You have a positive pull and a negative pull, and when you connect them the charge is going to flow.”įor their recent study, Yao’s team have moved on from nanowires, and instead are punching materials with millions of tiny holes, or nanopores. “So it’s really like a battery,” says Yao. Each bump, the team realised, lent the material a small charge, and as the frequency of bumps increased, one end of the tube became differently charged from the other. The UMass Amherst team were surprised to find that the device, which comprised an array of microscopic tubes, or nanowires, was producing an electrical signal regardless.Įach nanowire was less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, wide enough that an airborne water molecule could enter, but so narrow it would bump around inside the tube. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.” “We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. “To be frank, it was an accident,” says the study’s lead author, Prof Jun Yao. ![]()
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