Sure, we all complain about the humidity on a sweltering summer day. But it turns out that same humidity could be a source of clean, pollution-free energy, a new study shows.
"Air humidity is a vast, sustainable reservoir of energy that, unlike solar and wind, is continuously available," said the study, which was published recently in the journal Advanced Materials.
“This is very exciting,” said Xiaomeng Liu, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and the paper’s lead author. “We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air.”
In fact, researchers say, nearly any material can be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air.
Air 'contains an enormous amount of electricity'
“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” said Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the paper’s senior author. READ MORE...
