HARNESSING LIGHTNING
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Sep 22, 2010, 3:54:37 AM9/22/10
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http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/harnessing-lightning/
POSITIVELY CHARGED HUMIDITY
http://goldbook.iupac.org/E01992.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20014798-54.html
Scientists work to harness lightning for electricity
by Candace Lombardi / August 26, 2010
Nikola Tesla would be jealous. A group of chemists from the University
of Campinas in Brazil presented research on Wednesday claiming they've
figured out how electricity is formed and released in the atmosphere.
Based on this knowledge, the team said it believes a device could be
developed for extracting electrical charges from the atmosphere and
using it for electricity. The team, led by Fernando Galembeck, says
they discovered the process by simulating water vapor reactions in a
laboratory with dust particles common to the atmosphere.
They found that silica becomes more negatively charged when high
levels of water vapor are present in the air, in other words during
high humidity. They also found that aluminum phosphate becomes more
positively charged in high humidity. "This was clear evidence that
water in the atmosphere can accumulate electrical charges and transfer
them to other materials it comes into contact with. We are calling
this 'hygroelectricity,' meaning 'humidity electricity,'" Galembeck
said in a statement. But the discovery, if true, goes against the
commonly held theory among scientists such as the International Union
of Pure and Applied Chemistry, that water is electroneutral--that it
cannot store a charge. Galembeck, who is a member of the IUPAC, told
New Scientist that he does not dispute the principle of
electroneutrality in theory, but that he believes real-life substances
like water have ion imbalances that can allow it to produce a charge.
The hygroelectricity discovery could lead to the invention of a device
that is able to tap into all that energy. Akin to a solar panel, a
hygroelectrical panel on a roof would capture atmospheric electricity
that could then be transferred for a building's energy use, according
to the University of Capinas team. In addition to capturing
electricity, such a device could also be used to drain the area around
a building of its electrical charge, preventing the atmospheric
discharge of electricity during storms--aka lightning. "We certainly
have a long way to go. But the benefits in the long range of
harnessing hygroelectricity could be substantial," Galembeck said. The
research was presented in Boston at the 240th National Meeting of the
American Chemical Society.
STEAM SHOCKS
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=experts-do-cosmic-rays-cause-lightning
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=harness-lightning-for-energy-thanks-2010-08-26
Harness lightning for energy, thanks to high humidity?
by David Biello / Aug 26, 2010
Why do the roiling, black clouds of a thunderstorm produce lightning?
Ben Franklin and others helped prove that such lightning was
discharged electricity, but what generates that electricity in such
prodigious quantities? After all, storms generate millions of
lightning bolts around the globe every year—even volcanoes can get in
on the act as the recent eruption of Eyjafjallajökull did when
photographs captured bolts of blue in the ash cloud.
Perhaps surprisingly, scientists still debate how exactly lightning
forms; theories range from colliding slush and ice particles in
convective clouds to, more speculatively, a rain of charged solar
particles seeding the skies with electrical charge. Or perhaps the
uncertainty about lightning formation is not surprising, given all
that remains unknown about clouds and the perils of studying a storm—
an electrical discharge can deliver millions of joules of energy in
milliseconds.
But Brazilian researchers claim that their lab experiments imply that
the water droplets that make up such storms can carry charge—an
overturning of decades of scientific understanding that such water
droplets must be electrically neutral. Specifically, chemists led by
Fernando Galembeck of the University of Campinas found that when
electrically isolated metals were exposed to high humidity—lots and
lots of tiny water droplets known as vapor—the metals gained a small
negative charge.
The same holds true for many other metals, according to Galembeck's
presentation at the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston on
August 25—a phenomenon they've dubbed hygroelectricity, or humid
electricity. "My colleagues and I found that common metals—aluminum,
stainless steel and others—acquire charge when they are electrically
isolated and exposed to humid air," he says. "This is an extension to
previously published results showing that insulators acquire charge
under humid air. Thus, air is a charge reservoir." The finding would
seem to confirm anecdotes from the 19th century of workers literally
shocked—rather than scalded—by steam. And it might explain how enough
charge builds up for lightning, Galembeck argues.
The scientists envision devices to harness this charge out of thick
(with water vapor) air—a metal piece, like a lightning rod, connected
to one pole of a capacitor, a device for separating and storing
electric charge. The other pole of the capacitor is grounded. Expose
the metal to high humidity (perhaps within a shielded box) and harvest
voltage. "If this could be done safely, it would allow us to have
better control of thunderstorms," Galembeck says, envisioning a
renewable energy source from the humid air of the tropics and mid-
latitudes.
Unfortunately, the finding violates the principle of electric
neutrality, in which the differently charged molecules of an
electrolyte like water cancel out. And although geophysicists and
other atmospheric scientists may not know all the details of how
lightning forms, they do have a general sense, and hygroelectricity
seems to ignore what is largely understood. "It is utter nonsense,"
says atmospheric physicist William Beasley of the University of
Oklahoma, a lightning researcher. "All seriously considered mechanisms
for electrification of thunderstorms that can lead to the kind of
electric fields that are required for lightning involve convection and
rebounding collisions between graupel [a slush ball] and ice particles
in convective storms."
Similar efforts to capture the electricity in a lightning bolt have
failed, most recently, Alternate Energy Holdings's would-be lightning
capture tower outside Houston. The wired tower never worked. "This
concept has been disproven many times over," Beasley notes. What's
more, the amount of energy in a lightning bolt—never mind its
crackling electric grandeur—is but a fraction of the amount of energy
required to run even one 100-watt lightbulb, which uses 100 joules
every second, for a day. But taming lightning is a prospect that has
tempted experimenters since at least the Olympian thunderbolts of
Zeus. Of course, the vast majority of the energy is in the storm itself
—hurricanes, for example, have the heat energy of 10,000 nuclear
bombs. Capturing that energy might prove frazzling.
ION IMBALANCE
http://www.free-energy-info.com/P6.pdf
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19367-can-we-grab-electricity-from-muggy-air.html
Can we grab electricity from muggy ai?
by Colin Barras / 26 August 2010
Every cloud has a silver lining: wet weather could soon be harnessed
as a power source, if a team of chemists in Brazil is to be believed.
In 1840, workers in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, reported painful electric
shocks when they came into close contact with steam leaking from
factory boilers. Both Michael Faraday and Alessandro Volta puzzled
over the mysterious phenomenon, dubbed steam electricity, but it was
ultimately forgotten without being fully understood.
Fernando Galembeck at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil,
is one of a small number of researchers who thinks there is a simple
explanation, but it involves accepting that water can store charge – a
controversial idea that violates the principle of electroneutrality.
This principle – which states that the negatively and positively
charged particles in an electrolyte cancel each other out – is widely
accepted by chemists, including the International Union of Pure and
Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). "I don't dispute the IUPAC statement for
the principle of electroneutrality," says Galembeck. "But it is seldom
applicable to real substances," he says, because they frequently show
ion imbalances, which produce a measurable charge.
His team electrically isolated chrome-plated brass tubes and then
increased the humidity of the surrounding atmosphere. Once the
relative humidity reached 90 per cent, the uncharged tube gained a
small but detectable negative charge of 300 microcoulombs per square
metre – equating to a capacity millions of times smaller than that of
an AA battery.
Sensitive Victorians
The Victorian workers would have had to have been particularly
sensitive souls to complain of such a shock, but Galembeck thinks his
study shows steam electricity may be a credible phenomenon. He thinks
the charge builds up because of a reaction between the chrome oxide
layer that forms on the surface of the tube and the water in the
atmosphere. As the relative humidity rises, more water condenses onto
the tube's surface. Hydrogen ions in the water react with the chrome
oxide, leading to an ion imbalance that imparts excess charge onto the
isolated metal.
The work finds favour with Gerald Pollack at the University of
Washington in Seattle. Last year he suggested that pure water could
store charge and behave much like a battery, after finding that
passing a current between two submerged electrodes created a pH
gradient in the water that persisted for an hour once the current had
been switched off. He says this is evidence that the water stores
areas of positive and negative charge, but the experiment led to a
lively debate in the pages of the journal Langmuir over whether the
results really violated the principle of electroneutrality or whether
there were salt impurities in the water that led it to behave like a
conventional electrochemical cell. Pollack calls the Campinas team's
work "interesting". "It opens the door to many new possibilities," he
says.
Power from air
Galembeck thinks those possibilities include harnessing atmospheric
humidity as a renewable power source, as light is converted to
electricity in solar panels. "My work is currently targeted to verify
this possibility and to explore it," he says. However, he acknowledges
that most researchers remain to be convinced that what he calls
"hygroelectricity" will ever get off the ground.
Allen Bard at the University of Texas falls within that majority. "In
general I think that it is true that our understanding of
electrostatic phenomena and charging at solid/gas interfaces is
incomplete," he says. "I am, however, very sceptical about these
phenomena being harnessed as a power source. The amounts of charge and
power involved are very small."
References: Galembeck presents his work at a national meeting of the
American Chemical Society in Boston this week; it was previously
published in Langmuir, DOI: 10.1021/la102494k. Pollack's work was
published in Langmuir, DOI: 10.1021/la802430k; the resulting debate in
the journal can be followed here, here, and here.
ENERGY in the AIR
http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=222&content_id=CNBP_025407&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=197f0546-bbdc-45b0-94c6-e91b94bf2541
Electricity collected from the air could become the newest alternative
energy source
Aug. 25, 2010
Imagine devices that capture electricity from the air ― much like
solar cells capture sunlight ― and using them to light a house or
recharge an electric car. Imagine using similar panels on the rooftops
of buildings to prevent lightning before it forms. Strange as it may
sound, scientists already are in the early stages of developing such
devices, according to a report presented here today at the 240th
National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). “Our research
could pave the way for turning electricity from the atmosphere into an
alternative energy source for the future,” said study leader Fernando
Galembeck, Ph.D. His research may help explain a 200-year-old
scientific riddle about how electricity is produced and discharged in
the atmosphere. “Just as solar energy could free some households from
paying electric bills, this promising new energy source could have a
similar effect,” he maintained. “If we know how electricity builds up
and spreads in the atmosphere, we can also prevent death and damage
caused by lightning strikes,” Galembeck said, noting that lightning
causes thousands of deaths and injuries worldwide and millions of
dollars in property damage.
The notion of harnessing the power of electricity formed naturally has
tantalized scientists for centuries. They noticed that sparks of
static electricity formed as steam escaped from boilers. Workers who
touched the steam even got painful electrical shocks. Famed inventor
Nikola Tesla, for example, was among those who dreamed of capturing
and using electricity from the air. It’s the electricity formed, for
instance, when water vapor collects on microscopic particles of dust
and other material in the air. But until now, scientists lacked
adequate knowledge about the processes involved in formation and
release of electricity from water in the atmosphere, Galembeck said.
He is with the University of Campinas in Campinas, SP, Brazil.
Scientists once believed that water droplets in the atmosphere were
electrically neutral, and remained so even after coming into contact
with the electrical charges on dust particles and droplets of other
liquids. But new evidence suggested that water in the atmosphere
really does pick up an electrical charge. Galembeck and colleagues
confirmed that idea, using laboratory experiments that simulated
water’s contact with dust particles in the air. They used tiny
particles of silica and aluminum phosphate, both common airborne
substances, showing that silica became more negatively charged in the
presence of high humidity and aluminum phosphate became more
positively charged. High humidity means high levels of water vapor in
the air ― the vapor that condenses and becomes visible as “fog” on
windows of air-conditioned cars and buildings on steamy summer days.
“This was clear evidence that water in the atmosphere can accumulate
electrical charges and transfer them to other materials it comes into
contact with,” Galembeck explained. “We are calling this
‘hygroelectricity’, meaning ‘humidity electricity’.”
In the future, he added, it may be possible to develop collectors,
similar to the solar cells that collect the sun to produce
electricity, to capture hygroelectricity and route it to homes and
businesses. Just as solar cells work best in sunny areas of the world,
hygroelectrical panels would work more efficiently in areas with high
humidity, such as the northeastern and southeastern United States and
the humid tropics. Galembeck said that a similar approach might help
prevent lightening from forming and striking. He envisioned placing
hygroelectrical panels on top of buildings in regions that experience
frequent thunderstorms. The panels would drain electricity out of the
air, and prevent the building of electrical charge that is released in
lightning. His research group already is testing metals to identify
those with the greatest potential for use in capturing atmospheric
electricity and preventing lightning strikes. “These are fascinating
ideas that new studies by ourselves and by other scientific teams
suggest are now possible,” Galembeck said. “We certainly have a long
way to go. But the benefits in the long range of harnessing
hygroelectricity could be substantial.”
CONTACT
Fernando Galembeck
http://www.fapesp.br/materia/5057/pfpmcg/professor-fernando-galembeck.htm
email : fernagal [at] igm.unicamp [dot] br
Gerald Pollack
http://faculty.washington.edu/ghp/researcthemes/water-based-technology
http://faculty.washington.edu/ghp/
email : ghp [at] u.washington [dot] edu
SEE ALSO : POLYWATER BATTERIES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVBEwn6iWOo
http://www.uwtv.org/newsletter/insider_0408.asp
Dr. Gerald Pollack’s views on water have been called revolutionary. He
attests that, despite what Mr. Wizard may have taught you, there are
actually four phases of water: solid, liquid, vapor and gel. This
fourth phase, Pollack says, may in fact be the most important of all.
“If you want to understand what happens in any system – be it
biological, or physical, or chemical, or oceanographic, or
atmospheric, or whatever – it doesn’t matter, anything involving
water, you really have to know the behavior of this special kind of
gel-like water, which dominates.”
Pollack’s water studies have led to amazing possibilities: that water
acts as a battery, that this battery may recharge in a way resembling
photosynthesis, that these water batteries could be harnessed to
produce electricity. He discusses these ideas in a lecture now playing
on UWTV: “Water, Energy and Life: Fresh Views From the Water’s Edge.”
Yet the search for these fresh views has not been without struggle.
“Before I became controversial, I almost never had a problem; I had
large amounts of funding,” Pollack, a UW professor of bioengineering,
explained. “The more controversial I became, the more difficult it’s
been to get money. There were several really dry years. “And now it’s
gotten better because I think people are beginning to recognize the
importance of the work on water. So it’s improving, but it’s still not
easy.”
The study of water has a long history of unpopularity, Pollack said.
“Six or seven decades ago, water was a really interesting subject. A
lot of people thought that water had a particular chemistry – that it
interacted with other molecules and was really an important feature of
any system that contained water. Then, research almost stopped 40
years ago. There were two scientific debacles that took place that
made everybody highly skeptical of any kind of research on water.” The
first of these concerned polywater. “Some findings seemed to imply
that water acted as though it was a polymer; in other words, all the
molecules would somehow join together into a polymer and create some
really weird kinds of effects,” Pollack described. Eventually, these
results – first presented by a Russian chemist – were discredited.
“The nails were driven into the coffin of water research by another
debacle that took place 20 years later, and that was the idea of water
memory,” Pollack said. “The idea was that water molecules could have
memory of other substances into which it had been in contact.”
A debate in the science journal Nature eventually moved public opinion
against this theory as well. “So because of these two incidents,
scientists absolutely stayed away from water because water research
was treacherous,” Pollack said. “You could drown in your own water.”
Yet, these murky waters were not enough to deter Pollack from the
subject. He first broached the topic in his 2001 book “Cells, Gels and
the Engines of Life.” “The book asserts, contrary to the textbook
view, that water is the most important and central protagonist in all
of life,” Pollack said. “There are so many realms of science where
water is central. In order to understand how everything works, you
need to know the properties of water.” As Pollack sought to understand
water, his focus turned to a particular phase near hydrophilic
surfaces that didn’t quite fit in. “The three phases of water that
everybody knows about in the textbook just don’t do it. In fact, it’s
a 100-year-old idea that there’s a fourth phase of water. This is not
an original idea.” Though the concept of a liquid crystalline, or gel-
like, phase of water has been around for some time, the generally
accepted view is that this kind of water is only two or three
molecular layers thick. “And what we found in our experiments is that
it’s not two or three layers, but two or three million layers. In
other words, it’s the dominant feature,” Pollack said.
With this revelation in hand, Pollack focused his attention on this
mostly unstudied phase of water. He has since discovered much about
its underestimated thickness, its capacity to create a charge, its
connections to photosynthesis and its practical applications. The
thickness of this gel-like water may explain why items of higher
density than water – such as a coin – can float. Surface tension is at
work, but it arises from this thick, gel-like surface layer. “Turns
out that the thickness depends on the pH,” Pollack said. “If you
increase the pH, we found that this region gets thicker. It also gets
thicker with time. So if you wait long enough, and if you have the
right conditions, and maybe enough light beating down on it, you could
conceivably get a very thick layer. “If we come up with the right
conditions, maybe it’s true that we can walk on water – if this region
can be made thick enough.”
Biblical aspirations aside, the energy carried within this water and
the water near it may be even more impressive. Dr. Pollack works in
his lab to demonstrate some of the unusual properties of water. “This
kind of water is negative, and the water beyond is positive. Negative,
positive – you have a battery,” Pollack explained. “The question is,
how is it used and might we capitalize on this kind of battery?” The
key to understanding how this water battery works is learning how it
is recharged. “You can’t just get something for nothing – there has to
be energy that charges it,” Pollack said. “This puzzled us for several
years, and finally we found the answer: it’s light. It was a real
surprise. So if you take one of these surfaces next to water, and you
see the battery right next to it, and you shine light on it, the
battery gets stronger. It’s a very powerful effect.” This effect takes
on entirely new possibilities when considered in terms of the water
within our bodies. “I’m suggesting that you – inside your body –
actually have these little batteries, and, remember, the batteries are
fueled by light,” Pollack said. “Why don’t we photosynthesize? And the
answer is, probably we do. It may not be the main mechanism for
getting energy, but it certainly could be one of them. In some ways,
we may be more like plants and bacteria than we really think.”
All of these innovative ideas may have practical applications as well.
Water in its gel-like phase excludes solutes. “It’s actually pretty
pure,” Pollack explained. “If you could collect this water right near
the surface, it should be free of bacteria, for example, and maybe
also viruses. So we’ve constructed a prototype device in the
laboratory that shows excellent separation, on the order of 200 to 1.
And we’re now trying to scale this up to practical quantities of water
that could be filtered.” A second possibility is extracting electrical
energy from this natural water battery. “We’ve so far been able to get
only small amounts of electrical energy out, but we just started the
project,” Pollack said. “If this process that we found is the same as
photosynthesis, or the same principle, and I do think it may be, then
it’s a pretty efficient system.”
Pollack and other researchers clearly have a long and complex
challenge ahead as they seek to understand water in new ways. But you
don’t have to know Pollack well to see that the challenge itself is
part of the intrigue of pursuing such work. “I’m so compelled to
continue our studies because they reveal so much and they answer so
many questions – even already – questions that have remained
unanswered for so long. For Pollack, finding answers is a way of life.
“I dream this stuff,” he confessed. “It never leaves me. If I’m
sitting on the plane, sitting on the toilet seat, standing in the
shower, it’s on my mind always. “When I see something in nature that
doesn’t seem right, or doesn’t seem explained yet, I just can’t stop
thinking about it. Thinking about how it might work. I dwell on the
problem. I never stop.”
SEE ALSO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTtmU2lD97o
CONTACT
Daniel Nocera
http://www.suncatalytix.com/tech.html
http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/dgn/www/people/nocera.shtml
http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/dgn/www/research/solar.shtml
email : nocera [at] mit [dot] edu
PERSONALIZED ENERGY
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/nocera-0514.html
by David L. Chandler / May 14, 2010
Expanding on work published two years ago, MIT’s Daniel Nocera and his
associates have found yet another formulation, based on inexpensive
and widely available materials, that can efficiently catalyze the
splitting of water molecules using electricity. This could ultimately
form the basis for new storage systems that would allow buildings to
be completely independent and self-sustaining in terms of energy: The
systems would use energy from intermittent sources like sunlight or
wind to create hydrogen fuel, which could then be used in fuel cells
or other devices to produce electricity or transportation fuels as
needed.
Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and Professor of
Chemistry, says that solar energy is the only feasible long-term way
of meeting the world’s ever-increasing needs for energy, and that
storage technology will be the key enabling factor to make sunlight
practical as a dominant source of energy. He has focused his research
on the development of less-expensive, more-durable materials to use as
the electrodes in devices that use electricity to separate the
hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water molecules. By doing so, he aims to
imitate the process of photosynthesis, by which plants harvest
sunlight and convert the energy into chemical form.
Nocera pictures small-scale systems in which rooftop solar panels
would provide electricity to a home, and any excess would go to an
electrolyzer — a device for splitting water molecules — to produce
hydrogen, which would be stored in tanks. When more energy was needed,
the hydrogen would be fed to a fuel cell, where it would combine with
oxygen from the air to form water, and generate electricity at the
same time. An electrolyzer uses two different electrodes, one of which
releases the oxygen atoms and the other the hydrogen atoms. Although
it is the hydrogen that would provide a storable source of energy, it
is the oxygen side that is more difficult, so that’s where he and many
other research groups have concentrated their efforts. In a paper in
Science in 2008, Nocera reported the discovery of a durable and low-
cost material for the oxygen-producing electrode based on the element
cobalt.
Now, in research being reported this week in the journal Proceedings
of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), Nocera, along with
postdoctoral researcher Mircea Dincă and graduate student Yogesh
Surendranath, report the discovery of yet another material that can
also efficiently and sustainably function as the oxygen-producing
electrode. This time the material is nickel borate, made from
materials that are even more abundant and inexpensive than the earlier
find. Even more significantly, Nocera says, the new finding shows that
the original compound was not a unique, anomalous material, and
suggests that there may be a whole family of such compounds that
researchers can study in search of one that has the best combination
of characteristics to provide a widespread, long-term energy-storage
technology. “Sometimes if you do one thing, and only do it once,”
Nocera says, “you don’t know — is it extraordinary or unusual, or can
it be commonplace?” In this case, the new material “keeps all the
requirements of being cheap and easy to manufacture” that were found
in the cobalt-based electrode, he says, but “with a different metal
that’s even cheaper than cobalt.” The work was funded by the National
Science Foundation and the Chesonis Family Foundation.
But the research is still in an early stage. “This is a door opener,”
Nocera says. “Now, we know what works in terms of chemistry. One of
the important next things will be to continue to tune the system, to
make it go faster and better. This puts us on a fast technological
path.” While the two compounds discovered so far work well, he says,
he is convinced that as they carry out further research even better
compounds will come to light. “I don’t think we’ve found the silver
bullet yet,” he says. Already, as the research has continued, Nocera
and his team have increased the rate of production from these
catalysts a hundredfold from the level they initially reported two
years ago.
John Turner, a research fellow at the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory in Colorado, calls this a nice result, but says that
commercial electrolyzers already exist that have better performance
than these new laboratory versions. “The question then is under what
circumstances would this system provide some advantage over the
existing commercial systems,” he says. For large-scale deployment of
solar fuel-producing systems, he says, “the big commercial
electrolyzers use concentrated alkali for their electrolyte, which is
OK in an industrial setting were engineers know how to handle the
stuff safely; but when we are talking about thousands of square miles
of solar water-splitting arrays, and individual homeowners, then an
alternative electrolyte like this benign borate solution may be more
viable.” The original discovery has already led to the creation of a
company, called Sun Catalytix, that aims to commercialize the system
in the next two years. And his research program was recently awarded a
major grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research
Projects Agency.
POSITIVELY CHARGED HUMIDITY
http://goldbook.iupac.org/E01992.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20014798-54.html
Scientists work to harness lightning for electricity
by Candace Lombardi / August 26, 2010
Nikola Tesla would be jealous. A group of chemists from the University
of Campinas in Brazil presented research on Wednesday claiming they've
figured out how electricity is formed and released in the atmosphere.
Based on this knowledge, the team said it believes a device could be
developed for extracting electrical charges from the atmosphere and
using it for electricity. The team, led by Fernando Galembeck, says
they discovered the process by simulating water vapor reactions in a
laboratory with dust particles common to the atmosphere.
They found that silica becomes more negatively charged when high
levels of water vapor are present in the air, in other words during
high humidity. They also found that aluminum phosphate becomes more
positively charged in high humidity. "This was clear evidence that
water in the atmosphere can accumulate electrical charges and transfer
them to other materials it comes into contact with. We are calling
this 'hygroelectricity,' meaning 'humidity electricity,'" Galembeck
said in a statement. But the discovery, if true, goes against the
commonly held theory among scientists such as the International Union
of Pure and Applied Chemistry, that water is electroneutral--that it
cannot store a charge. Galembeck, who is a member of the IUPAC, told
New Scientist that he does not dispute the principle of
electroneutrality in theory, but that he believes real-life substances
like water have ion imbalances that can allow it to produce a charge.
The hygroelectricity discovery could lead to the invention of a device
that is able to tap into all that energy. Akin to a solar panel, a
hygroelectrical panel on a roof would capture atmospheric electricity
that could then be transferred for a building's energy use, according
to the University of Capinas team. In addition to capturing
electricity, such a device could also be used to drain the area around
a building of its electrical charge, preventing the atmospheric
discharge of electricity during storms--aka lightning. "We certainly
have a long way to go. But the benefits in the long range of
harnessing hygroelectricity could be substantial," Galembeck said. The
research was presented in Boston at the 240th National Meeting of the
American Chemical Society.
STEAM SHOCKS
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=experts-do-cosmic-rays-cause-lightning
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=harness-lightning-for-energy-thanks-2010-08-26
Harness lightning for energy, thanks to high humidity?
by David Biello / Aug 26, 2010
Why do the roiling, black clouds of a thunderstorm produce lightning?
Ben Franklin and others helped prove that such lightning was
discharged electricity, but what generates that electricity in such
prodigious quantities? After all, storms generate millions of
lightning bolts around the globe every year—even volcanoes can get in
on the act as the recent eruption of Eyjafjallajökull did when
photographs captured bolts of blue in the ash cloud.
Perhaps surprisingly, scientists still debate how exactly lightning
forms; theories range from colliding slush and ice particles in
convective clouds to, more speculatively, a rain of charged solar
particles seeding the skies with electrical charge. Or perhaps the
uncertainty about lightning formation is not surprising, given all
that remains unknown about clouds and the perils of studying a storm—
an electrical discharge can deliver millions of joules of energy in
milliseconds.
But Brazilian researchers claim that their lab experiments imply that
the water droplets that make up such storms can carry charge—an
overturning of decades of scientific understanding that such water
droplets must be electrically neutral. Specifically, chemists led by
Fernando Galembeck of the University of Campinas found that when
electrically isolated metals were exposed to high humidity—lots and
lots of tiny water droplets known as vapor—the metals gained a small
negative charge.
The same holds true for many other metals, according to Galembeck's
presentation at the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston on
August 25—a phenomenon they've dubbed hygroelectricity, or humid
electricity. "My colleagues and I found that common metals—aluminum,
stainless steel and others—acquire charge when they are electrically
isolated and exposed to humid air," he says. "This is an extension to
previously published results showing that insulators acquire charge
under humid air. Thus, air is a charge reservoir." The finding would
seem to confirm anecdotes from the 19th century of workers literally
shocked—rather than scalded—by steam. And it might explain how enough
charge builds up for lightning, Galembeck argues.
The scientists envision devices to harness this charge out of thick
(with water vapor) air—a metal piece, like a lightning rod, connected
to one pole of a capacitor, a device for separating and storing
electric charge. The other pole of the capacitor is grounded. Expose
the metal to high humidity (perhaps within a shielded box) and harvest
voltage. "If this could be done safely, it would allow us to have
better control of thunderstorms," Galembeck says, envisioning a
renewable energy source from the humid air of the tropics and mid-
latitudes.
Unfortunately, the finding violates the principle of electric
neutrality, in which the differently charged molecules of an
electrolyte like water cancel out. And although geophysicists and
other atmospheric scientists may not know all the details of how
lightning forms, they do have a general sense, and hygroelectricity
seems to ignore what is largely understood. "It is utter nonsense,"
says atmospheric physicist William Beasley of the University of
Oklahoma, a lightning researcher. "All seriously considered mechanisms
for electrification of thunderstorms that can lead to the kind of
electric fields that are required for lightning involve convection and
rebounding collisions between graupel [a slush ball] and ice particles
in convective storms."
Similar efforts to capture the electricity in a lightning bolt have
failed, most recently, Alternate Energy Holdings's would-be lightning
capture tower outside Houston. The wired tower never worked. "This
concept has been disproven many times over," Beasley notes. What's
more, the amount of energy in a lightning bolt—never mind its
crackling electric grandeur—is but a fraction of the amount of energy
required to run even one 100-watt lightbulb, which uses 100 joules
every second, for a day. But taming lightning is a prospect that has
tempted experimenters since at least the Olympian thunderbolts of
Zeus. Of course, the vast majority of the energy is in the storm itself
—hurricanes, for example, have the heat energy of 10,000 nuclear
bombs. Capturing that energy might prove frazzling.
ION IMBALANCE
http://www.free-energy-info.com/P6.pdf
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19367-can-we-grab-electricity-from-muggy-air.html
Can we grab electricity from muggy ai?
by Colin Barras / 26 August 2010
Every cloud has a silver lining: wet weather could soon be harnessed
as a power source, if a team of chemists in Brazil is to be believed.
In 1840, workers in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, reported painful electric
shocks when they came into close contact with steam leaking from
factory boilers. Both Michael Faraday and Alessandro Volta puzzled
over the mysterious phenomenon, dubbed steam electricity, but it was
ultimately forgotten without being fully understood.
Fernando Galembeck at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil,
is one of a small number of researchers who thinks there is a simple
explanation, but it involves accepting that water can store charge – a
controversial idea that violates the principle of electroneutrality.
This principle – which states that the negatively and positively
charged particles in an electrolyte cancel each other out – is widely
accepted by chemists, including the International Union of Pure and
Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). "I don't dispute the IUPAC statement for
the principle of electroneutrality," says Galembeck. "But it is seldom
applicable to real substances," he says, because they frequently show
ion imbalances, which produce a measurable charge.
His team electrically isolated chrome-plated brass tubes and then
increased the humidity of the surrounding atmosphere. Once the
relative humidity reached 90 per cent, the uncharged tube gained a
small but detectable negative charge of 300 microcoulombs per square
metre – equating to a capacity millions of times smaller than that of
an AA battery.
Sensitive Victorians
The Victorian workers would have had to have been particularly
sensitive souls to complain of such a shock, but Galembeck thinks his
study shows steam electricity may be a credible phenomenon. He thinks
the charge builds up because of a reaction between the chrome oxide
layer that forms on the surface of the tube and the water in the
atmosphere. As the relative humidity rises, more water condenses onto
the tube's surface. Hydrogen ions in the water react with the chrome
oxide, leading to an ion imbalance that imparts excess charge onto the
isolated metal.
The work finds favour with Gerald Pollack at the University of
Washington in Seattle. Last year he suggested that pure water could
store charge and behave much like a battery, after finding that
passing a current between two submerged electrodes created a pH
gradient in the water that persisted for an hour once the current had
been switched off. He says this is evidence that the water stores
areas of positive and negative charge, but the experiment led to a
lively debate in the pages of the journal Langmuir over whether the
results really violated the principle of electroneutrality or whether
there were salt impurities in the water that led it to behave like a
conventional electrochemical cell. Pollack calls the Campinas team's
work "interesting". "It opens the door to many new possibilities," he
says.
Power from air
Galembeck thinks those possibilities include harnessing atmospheric
humidity as a renewable power source, as light is converted to
electricity in solar panels. "My work is currently targeted to verify
this possibility and to explore it," he says. However, he acknowledges
that most researchers remain to be convinced that what he calls
"hygroelectricity" will ever get off the ground.
Allen Bard at the University of Texas falls within that majority. "In
general I think that it is true that our understanding of
electrostatic phenomena and charging at solid/gas interfaces is
incomplete," he says. "I am, however, very sceptical about these
phenomena being harnessed as a power source. The amounts of charge and
power involved are very small."
References: Galembeck presents his work at a national meeting of the
American Chemical Society in Boston this week; it was previously
published in Langmuir, DOI: 10.1021/la102494k. Pollack's work was
published in Langmuir, DOI: 10.1021/la802430k; the resulting debate in
the journal can be followed here, here, and here.
ENERGY in the AIR
http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=222&content_id=CNBP_025407&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=197f0546-bbdc-45b0-94c6-e91b94bf2541
Electricity collected from the air could become the newest alternative
energy source
Aug. 25, 2010
Imagine devices that capture electricity from the air ― much like
solar cells capture sunlight ― and using them to light a house or
recharge an electric car. Imagine using similar panels on the rooftops
of buildings to prevent lightning before it forms. Strange as it may
sound, scientists already are in the early stages of developing such
devices, according to a report presented here today at the 240th
National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). “Our research
could pave the way for turning electricity from the atmosphere into an
alternative energy source for the future,” said study leader Fernando
Galembeck, Ph.D. His research may help explain a 200-year-old
scientific riddle about how electricity is produced and discharged in
the atmosphere. “Just as solar energy could free some households from
paying electric bills, this promising new energy source could have a
similar effect,” he maintained. “If we know how electricity builds up
and spreads in the atmosphere, we can also prevent death and damage
caused by lightning strikes,” Galembeck said, noting that lightning
causes thousands of deaths and injuries worldwide and millions of
dollars in property damage.
The notion of harnessing the power of electricity formed naturally has
tantalized scientists for centuries. They noticed that sparks of
static electricity formed as steam escaped from boilers. Workers who
touched the steam even got painful electrical shocks. Famed inventor
Nikola Tesla, for example, was among those who dreamed of capturing
and using electricity from the air. It’s the electricity formed, for
instance, when water vapor collects on microscopic particles of dust
and other material in the air. But until now, scientists lacked
adequate knowledge about the processes involved in formation and
release of electricity from water in the atmosphere, Galembeck said.
He is with the University of Campinas in Campinas, SP, Brazil.
Scientists once believed that water droplets in the atmosphere were
electrically neutral, and remained so even after coming into contact
with the electrical charges on dust particles and droplets of other
liquids. But new evidence suggested that water in the atmosphere
really does pick up an electrical charge. Galembeck and colleagues
confirmed that idea, using laboratory experiments that simulated
water’s contact with dust particles in the air. They used tiny
particles of silica and aluminum phosphate, both common airborne
substances, showing that silica became more negatively charged in the
presence of high humidity and aluminum phosphate became more
positively charged. High humidity means high levels of water vapor in
the air ― the vapor that condenses and becomes visible as “fog” on
windows of air-conditioned cars and buildings on steamy summer days.
“This was clear evidence that water in the atmosphere can accumulate
electrical charges and transfer them to other materials it comes into
contact with,” Galembeck explained. “We are calling this
‘hygroelectricity’, meaning ‘humidity electricity’.”
In the future, he added, it may be possible to develop collectors,
similar to the solar cells that collect the sun to produce
electricity, to capture hygroelectricity and route it to homes and
businesses. Just as solar cells work best in sunny areas of the world,
hygroelectrical panels would work more efficiently in areas with high
humidity, such as the northeastern and southeastern United States and
the humid tropics. Galembeck said that a similar approach might help
prevent lightening from forming and striking. He envisioned placing
hygroelectrical panels on top of buildings in regions that experience
frequent thunderstorms. The panels would drain electricity out of the
air, and prevent the building of electrical charge that is released in
lightning. His research group already is testing metals to identify
those with the greatest potential for use in capturing atmospheric
electricity and preventing lightning strikes. “These are fascinating
ideas that new studies by ourselves and by other scientific teams
suggest are now possible,” Galembeck said. “We certainly have a long
way to go. But the benefits in the long range of harnessing
hygroelectricity could be substantial.”
CONTACT
Fernando Galembeck
http://www.fapesp.br/materia/5057/pfpmcg/professor-fernando-galembeck.htm
email : fernagal [at] igm.unicamp [dot] br
Gerald Pollack
http://faculty.washington.edu/ghp/researcthemes/water-based-technology
http://faculty.washington.edu/ghp/
email : ghp [at] u.washington [dot] edu
SEE ALSO : POLYWATER BATTERIES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVBEwn6iWOo
http://www.uwtv.org/newsletter/insider_0408.asp
Dr. Gerald Pollack’s views on water have been called revolutionary. He
attests that, despite what Mr. Wizard may have taught you, there are
actually four phases of water: solid, liquid, vapor and gel. This
fourth phase, Pollack says, may in fact be the most important of all.
“If you want to understand what happens in any system – be it
biological, or physical, or chemical, or oceanographic, or
atmospheric, or whatever – it doesn’t matter, anything involving
water, you really have to know the behavior of this special kind of
gel-like water, which dominates.”
Pollack’s water studies have led to amazing possibilities: that water
acts as a battery, that this battery may recharge in a way resembling
photosynthesis, that these water batteries could be harnessed to
produce electricity. He discusses these ideas in a lecture now playing
on UWTV: “Water, Energy and Life: Fresh Views From the Water’s Edge.”
Yet the search for these fresh views has not been without struggle.
“Before I became controversial, I almost never had a problem; I had
large amounts of funding,” Pollack, a UW professor of bioengineering,
explained. “The more controversial I became, the more difficult it’s
been to get money. There were several really dry years. “And now it’s
gotten better because I think people are beginning to recognize the
importance of the work on water. So it’s improving, but it’s still not
easy.”
The study of water has a long history of unpopularity, Pollack said.
“Six or seven decades ago, water was a really interesting subject. A
lot of people thought that water had a particular chemistry – that it
interacted with other molecules and was really an important feature of
any system that contained water. Then, research almost stopped 40
years ago. There were two scientific debacles that took place that
made everybody highly skeptical of any kind of research on water.” The
first of these concerned polywater. “Some findings seemed to imply
that water acted as though it was a polymer; in other words, all the
molecules would somehow join together into a polymer and create some
really weird kinds of effects,” Pollack described. Eventually, these
results – first presented by a Russian chemist – were discredited.
“The nails were driven into the coffin of water research by another
debacle that took place 20 years later, and that was the idea of water
memory,” Pollack said. “The idea was that water molecules could have
memory of other substances into which it had been in contact.”
A debate in the science journal Nature eventually moved public opinion
against this theory as well. “So because of these two incidents,
scientists absolutely stayed away from water because water research
was treacherous,” Pollack said. “You could drown in your own water.”
Yet, these murky waters were not enough to deter Pollack from the
subject. He first broached the topic in his 2001 book “Cells, Gels and
the Engines of Life.” “The book asserts, contrary to the textbook
view, that water is the most important and central protagonist in all
of life,” Pollack said. “There are so many realms of science where
water is central. In order to understand how everything works, you
need to know the properties of water.” As Pollack sought to understand
water, his focus turned to a particular phase near hydrophilic
surfaces that didn’t quite fit in. “The three phases of water that
everybody knows about in the textbook just don’t do it. In fact, it’s
a 100-year-old idea that there’s a fourth phase of water. This is not
an original idea.” Though the concept of a liquid crystalline, or gel-
like, phase of water has been around for some time, the generally
accepted view is that this kind of water is only two or three
molecular layers thick. “And what we found in our experiments is that
it’s not two or three layers, but two or three million layers. In
other words, it’s the dominant feature,” Pollack said.
With this revelation in hand, Pollack focused his attention on this
mostly unstudied phase of water. He has since discovered much about
its underestimated thickness, its capacity to create a charge, its
connections to photosynthesis and its practical applications. The
thickness of this gel-like water may explain why items of higher
density than water – such as a coin – can float. Surface tension is at
work, but it arises from this thick, gel-like surface layer. “Turns
out that the thickness depends on the pH,” Pollack said. “If you
increase the pH, we found that this region gets thicker. It also gets
thicker with time. So if you wait long enough, and if you have the
right conditions, and maybe enough light beating down on it, you could
conceivably get a very thick layer. “If we come up with the right
conditions, maybe it’s true that we can walk on water – if this region
can be made thick enough.”
Biblical aspirations aside, the energy carried within this water and
the water near it may be even more impressive. Dr. Pollack works in
his lab to demonstrate some of the unusual properties of water. “This
kind of water is negative, and the water beyond is positive. Negative,
positive – you have a battery,” Pollack explained. “The question is,
how is it used and might we capitalize on this kind of battery?” The
key to understanding how this water battery works is learning how it
is recharged. “You can’t just get something for nothing – there has to
be energy that charges it,” Pollack said. “This puzzled us for several
years, and finally we found the answer: it’s light. It was a real
surprise. So if you take one of these surfaces next to water, and you
see the battery right next to it, and you shine light on it, the
battery gets stronger. It’s a very powerful effect.” This effect takes
on entirely new possibilities when considered in terms of the water
within our bodies. “I’m suggesting that you – inside your body –
actually have these little batteries, and, remember, the batteries are
fueled by light,” Pollack said. “Why don’t we photosynthesize? And the
answer is, probably we do. It may not be the main mechanism for
getting energy, but it certainly could be one of them. In some ways,
we may be more like plants and bacteria than we really think.”
All of these innovative ideas may have practical applications as well.
Water in its gel-like phase excludes solutes. “It’s actually pretty
pure,” Pollack explained. “If you could collect this water right near
the surface, it should be free of bacteria, for example, and maybe
also viruses. So we’ve constructed a prototype device in the
laboratory that shows excellent separation, on the order of 200 to 1.
And we’re now trying to scale this up to practical quantities of water
that could be filtered.” A second possibility is extracting electrical
energy from this natural water battery. “We’ve so far been able to get
only small amounts of electrical energy out, but we just started the
project,” Pollack said. “If this process that we found is the same as
photosynthesis, or the same principle, and I do think it may be, then
it’s a pretty efficient system.”
Pollack and other researchers clearly have a long and complex
challenge ahead as they seek to understand water in new ways. But you
don’t have to know Pollack well to see that the challenge itself is
part of the intrigue of pursuing such work. “I’m so compelled to
continue our studies because they reveal so much and they answer so
many questions – even already – questions that have remained
unanswered for so long. For Pollack, finding answers is a way of life.
“I dream this stuff,” he confessed. “It never leaves me. If I’m
sitting on the plane, sitting on the toilet seat, standing in the
shower, it’s on my mind always. “When I see something in nature that
doesn’t seem right, or doesn’t seem explained yet, I just can’t stop
thinking about it. Thinking about how it might work. I dwell on the
problem. I never stop.”
SEE ALSO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTtmU2lD97o
CONTACT
Daniel Nocera
http://www.suncatalytix.com/tech.html
http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/dgn/www/people/nocera.shtml
http://web.mit.edu/chemistry/dgn/www/research/solar.shtml
email : nocera [at] mit [dot] edu
PERSONALIZED ENERGY
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/nocera-0514.html
by David L. Chandler / May 14, 2010
Expanding on work published two years ago, MIT’s Daniel Nocera and his
associates have found yet another formulation, based on inexpensive
and widely available materials, that can efficiently catalyze the
splitting of water molecules using electricity. This could ultimately
form the basis for new storage systems that would allow buildings to
be completely independent and self-sustaining in terms of energy: The
systems would use energy from intermittent sources like sunlight or
wind to create hydrogen fuel, which could then be used in fuel cells
or other devices to produce electricity or transportation fuels as
needed.
Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and Professor of
Chemistry, says that solar energy is the only feasible long-term way
of meeting the world’s ever-increasing needs for energy, and that
storage technology will be the key enabling factor to make sunlight
practical as a dominant source of energy. He has focused his research
on the development of less-expensive, more-durable materials to use as
the electrodes in devices that use electricity to separate the
hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water molecules. By doing so, he aims to
imitate the process of photosynthesis, by which plants harvest
sunlight and convert the energy into chemical form.
Nocera pictures small-scale systems in which rooftop solar panels
would provide electricity to a home, and any excess would go to an
electrolyzer — a device for splitting water molecules — to produce
hydrogen, which would be stored in tanks. When more energy was needed,
the hydrogen would be fed to a fuel cell, where it would combine with
oxygen from the air to form water, and generate electricity at the
same time. An electrolyzer uses two different electrodes, one of which
releases the oxygen atoms and the other the hydrogen atoms. Although
it is the hydrogen that would provide a storable source of energy, it
is the oxygen side that is more difficult, so that’s where he and many
other research groups have concentrated their efforts. In a paper in
Science in 2008, Nocera reported the discovery of a durable and low-
cost material for the oxygen-producing electrode based on the element
cobalt.
Now, in research being reported this week in the journal Proceedings
of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), Nocera, along with
postdoctoral researcher Mircea Dincă and graduate student Yogesh
Surendranath, report the discovery of yet another material that can
also efficiently and sustainably function as the oxygen-producing
electrode. This time the material is nickel borate, made from
materials that are even more abundant and inexpensive than the earlier
find. Even more significantly, Nocera says, the new finding shows that
the original compound was not a unique, anomalous material, and
suggests that there may be a whole family of such compounds that
researchers can study in search of one that has the best combination
of characteristics to provide a widespread, long-term energy-storage
technology. “Sometimes if you do one thing, and only do it once,”
Nocera says, “you don’t know — is it extraordinary or unusual, or can
it be commonplace?” In this case, the new material “keeps all the
requirements of being cheap and easy to manufacture” that were found
in the cobalt-based electrode, he says, but “with a different metal
that’s even cheaper than cobalt.” The work was funded by the National
Science Foundation and the Chesonis Family Foundation.
But the research is still in an early stage. “This is a door opener,”
Nocera says. “Now, we know what works in terms of chemistry. One of
the important next things will be to continue to tune the system, to
make it go faster and better. This puts us on a fast technological
path.” While the two compounds discovered so far work well, he says,
he is convinced that as they carry out further research even better
compounds will come to light. “I don’t think we’ve found the silver
bullet yet,” he says. Already, as the research has continued, Nocera
and his team have increased the rate of production from these
catalysts a hundredfold from the level they initially reported two
years ago.
John Turner, a research fellow at the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory in Colorado, calls this a nice result, but says that
commercial electrolyzers already exist that have better performance
than these new laboratory versions. “The question then is under what
circumstances would this system provide some advantage over the
existing commercial systems,” he says. For large-scale deployment of
solar fuel-producing systems, he says, “the big commercial
electrolyzers use concentrated alkali for their electrolyte, which is
OK in an industrial setting were engineers know how to handle the
stuff safely; but when we are talking about thousands of square miles
of solar water-splitting arrays, and individual homeowners, then an
alternative electrolyte like this benign borate solution may be more
viable.” The original discovery has already led to the creation of a
company, called Sun Catalytix, that aims to commercialize the system
in the next two years. And his research program was recently awarded a
major grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research
Projects Agency.
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