MIT Develops Polymer Film That Harvests Energy From Water Vapor

ORIGINAL: Inhabitat

by Timon Singh

01/11/13

Add caption

Researchers at MIT just developed a new bio-polymer film that is able to generate electricity from a readily available source: water vapor. The material changes its shape as it absorbs evaporated water. As the bio-polymer film repeatedly curls and unfurls it drives robotic limbs, which in turn generate enough electricity to power micro- and nanoelectronic devices.

Add caption

The research team was headed by Mingming Ma, a postdoc at MIT’s David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Speaking about the new material in Science magazine, Ma said: “With a sensor powered by a battery, you have to replace it periodically. If you have this device, you can harvest energy from the environment so you don’t have to replace it very often.”

“We are very excited about this new material, and we expect as we achieve higher efficiency in converting mechanical energy into electricity, this material will find even broader applications,” added Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and senior author of the paper. The team hopes that the new bio-film will be put to use in large-scale, water-vapor-powered generators, or smaller generators for wearable electronics.

The bio-film is made of an interlocking network of two different separate polymers:

• polypyrrole, which forms a hard but flexible matrix that provides structural support, and 
• polyol-borate - a soft gel which swells when it absorbs water. 

“By incorporating the two different kinds of polymers, you can generate a much bigger displacement, as well as a stronger force,” Guo noted.

The polymer film doesn’t require the manipulation of environmental conditions like other similar technologies. The mechanical energy generated by the material can also be converted into electricity by coupling the polymer film with a piezoelectric material (which converts mechanical stress into an electric charge), generating an average power of 5.6 nanowatts which can also be stored. In theory, the material could also be attached to clothing, where the mere evaporation of sweat could fuel devices such as physiological monitoring sensors – so you could power devices simply by sweating!

+ MIT

Via Science Mag

New Renewable Energy Generator Grabs Electricity from Rain as Well as Sun and Wind

TweetShare on TumblrEmail Researchers at the University of Bolton in the UK have developed a device capable of capturing energy from not only the sun and

Photosensitive Film Turns Light into Kinetic Energy

TweetShare on TumblrEmail Researchers at a Japanese company called RIKEN have discovered a way to turn light into kinetic energy through the use of molecules that

UCLA Develops Electricity-Generating, Transparent Solar Cell Windows

TweetShare on TumblrEmail A team from UCLA has developed a new transparent solar cell that has the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to