The air contains an enormous amount of Electricity, it is something enormous, to think of a cloud that is nothing more than a mass of water vapor, of water droplets, each one of those droplets contains an electrical charge and when the conditions are right , or storm begins and the cloud discharges lightning.
A typical lightning bolt can have from 10,000 to 15,000 million joules, carry 200,000 amperes and reach a temperature of 20,000 degrees Celsius. About 8 million lightning bolts discharge every day on earth, releasing energy comparable to 2 million tons of dynamite.
So there is certainly a lot of energy in the air, unfortunately we do not know how to capture the electricity from lightning in a safe way, we would have to predict the storm, find the place of impact, have equipment that can withstand the tremendous discharge and channel that energy safely to the electrical network without bursting the connection systems and cables.
Nowadays, doing that is impossible, but there is a solution, which is what the engineers who are now making news have given, is to create a custom cloud by continuously collecting electricity from the air. For this, they use a specialized material made of protein nanowires. grown from a bacterium.
The Geobacter sulfurreducens bacterium, yes, this is possible thanks to a bacterium so you can see that not all bacteria are bad, the trick is in nanotechnology the material needs to have holes of 100 nanometers or less, that is one thousandth of the width of a human hair This is because the material must comply with a parameter known as mean free path, which is the distance that a single molecule travels in the air, in this case a water molecule before colliding with another molecule of the same substance.
When the water molecules are suspended in the air, their mean free path is precisely about 100 nanometers. In this way, the nanopores allow the water molecules to pass from the upper part to the lower part of the material, but since the hole is so small, the Molecules collide with the edge of the hole which creates an imbalance of electrical charge somewhat similar to the imbalance that occurs in a thundercloud, only in this case instead of the violent discharge of lightning what occurs is the production more peaceful, constant and flowing electricity.
In the end we would have a battery that works as long as there is moisture in the air and unless you live in an extremely dry desert, moisture is always in the air 24/7 and this is a tremendous advantage over one of the main problems of technologies such as wind or solar energy, which only work in certain atmospheric conditions.
Finally, because moisture in the air diffuses into three-dimensional space and the thickness of the Air-gen device is only a fraction of the width of a human hair, many thousands of sheets could be stacked, one on top of the other, thus increasing the efficiency of the amount of energy collected.
At the moment the engineers have shown that it is possible to collect electricity from the air, we hope to see their project carried out on a large scale, to know how much energy it is capable of collecting and to help us finally have a new source of clean and cheap energy at reach of the whole world.
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