Posted on 06/07/2021 10:55:57 AM PDT by Red Badger
MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them.
The liquid, an organic solvent, draws electrons out of the particles, generating a current that could be used to drive chemical reactions or to power micro- or nanoscale robots, the researchers say.
"This mechanism is new, and this way of generating energy is completely new," says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. "This technology is intriguing because all you have to do is flow a solvent through a bed of these particles. This allows you to do electrochemistry, but with no wires."
In a new study describing this phenomenon, the researchers showed that they could use this electric current to drive a reaction known as alcohol oxidation—an organic chemical reaction that is important in the chemical industry.
Strano is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications. The lead authors of the study are MIT graduate student Albert Tianxiang Liu and former MIT researcher Yuichiro Kunai. Other authors include former graduate student Anton Cottrill, postdocs Amir Kaplan and Hyunah Kim, graduate student Ge Zhang, and recent MIT graduates Rafid Mollah and Yannick Eatmon.
Unique properties
The new discovery grew out of Strano's research on carbon nanotubes—hollow tubes made of a lattice of carbon atoms, which have unique electrical properties. In 2010, Strano demonstrated, for the first time, that carbon nanotubes can generate "thermopower waves." When a carbon nanotube is coated with layer of fuel, moving pulses of heat, or thermopower waves, travel along the tube, creating an electrical current.
That work led Strano and his students to uncover a related feature of carbon nanotubes. They found that when part of a nanotube is coated with a Teflon-like polymer, it creates an asymmetry that makes it possible for electrons to flow from the coated to the uncoated part of the tube, generating an electrical current. Those electrons can be drawn out by submerging the particles in a solvent that is hungry for electrons.
To harness this special capability, the researchers created electricity-generating particles by grinding up carbon nanotubes and forming them into a sheet of paper-like material. One side of each sheet was coated with a Teflon-like polymer, and the researchers then cut out small particles, which can be any shape or size. For this study, they made particles that were 250 microns by 250 microns.
When these particles are submerged in an organic solvent such as acetonitrile, the solvent adheres to the uncoated surface of the particles and begins pulling electrons out of them.
"The solvent takes electrons away, and the system tries to equilibrate by moving electrons," Strano says. "There's no sophisticated battery chemistry inside. It's just a particle and you put it into solvent and it starts generating an electric field."
Particle power
The current version of the particles can generate about 0.7 volts of electricity per particle. In this study, the researchers also showed that they can form arrays of hundreds of particles in a small test tube. This "packed bed" reactor generates enough energy to power a chemical reaction called an alcohol oxidation, in which an alcohol is converted to an aldehyde or a ketone. Usually, this reaction is not performed using electrochemistry because it would require too much external current.
"Because the packed bed reactor is compact, it has more flexibility in terms of applications than a large electrochemical reactor," Zhang says. "The particles can be made very small, and they don't require any external wires in order to drive the electrochemical reaction."
In future work, Strano hopes to use this kind of energy generation to build polymers using only carbon dioxide as a starting material. In a related project, he has already created polymers that can regenerate themselves using carbon dioxide as a building material, in a process powered by solar energy. This work is inspired by carbon fixation, the set of chemical reactions that plants use to build sugars from carbon dioxide, using energy from the sun.
In the longer term, this approach could also be used to power micro- or nanoscale robots. Strano's lab has already begun building robots at that scale, which could one day be used as diagnostic or environmental sensors. The idea of being able to scavenge energy from the environment to power these kinds of robots is appealing, he says.
"It means you don't have to put the energy storage on board," he says. "What we like about this mechanism is that you can take the energy, at least in part, from the environment."
Explore further:
Battery substitutes produce current by burning fuel-coated carbon nanotubes like a fuse
More information: Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23038-7
Journal information: Nature Communications
Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tech Ping
Many years ago I read a book, the name I can’t remember unfortunately, that postulated this very thing, that nanomachines could be built and programmed like virus3s and injected into people.
At that point, they could mess with your DNA and the only ones “immune “ to it were the ones controlling it and you.
I didn’t think I’d live to see this starting to become a reality.
VP Harris and AOC thinks it’s a great idea we don’t have to burn coal for electricity for our cars all we have to do is drag it behind the car.
The universe collapses.......................
The article says the source of energy is pulses of heat. This implies you must have both hot and cold water or air around. For this invention to perform best one would want a large temperature difference. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
That's the trouble with triboelectricity...
Or as Hamlet said: "ay, there's the rub!..."
Twentieth Century Motor Company ping.
No, it wasn’t.
Nicola? Yes he was working on wireless transfer of electricity.
It bankrupted him. Seems power companies didn’t like that idea.
“Who is John Galt?”
5.56mm
Graphene is a zero-gap semiconductor, because its conduction and valence bands meet at the Dirac points. The Dirac points are six locations in momentum space, on the edge of the Brillouin zone, divided into two non-equivalent sets of three points. The two sets are labeled K and K’. The sets give graphene a valley degeneracy of gv = 2. By contrast, for traditional semiconductors the primary point of interest is generally Γ, where momentum is zero. Four electronic properties separate it from other condensed matter systems.
Lol... even france has more nuclear power per capita, at least they did 5 years agoish. Its embarrassing.
This is not a scientific article, it’s scientific blarney. Any REAL science would tell the reader where the energy comes from. It is not sufficient to say from “the environment”. That’s meaningless. Does “the environment” change temperature, does it flow from a source, does it chemically change? We don’t know!
J.P. Morgan.
Nanotubes substitute for windmills— the fluid flows from a pump. What powers the pump?
They left out the part sentence that says, “All the big problems are solved and all we need to do is get it into production.”
Yup, industrialists, bankers, Con Ed… all the above.
Can’t go upsetting the Apple cart now.
If Tesla hadn’t given his patents over to Westinghouse….
So what’s the entropy/energy cost?
“You can ponder perpetual motion
Fix your mind on a crystal day
Always time for a good conversation
There’s an ear for, what you say”
- CCR
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