Power Generation
For the first time in the world, a domestic university research team has successfully developed a new technology that enables electricity generation with only one gram of water.
Pusan National University announced on February 13 that a research team led by physics professor Park Hyuk-kyu (photo) had successfully implemented the world’s first electricity generation technology using a very tiny amount of water.
The technology, which enables lighting six LED lamps simultaneously using one gram of water, was published in the latest issue of “Nature Communications,” a prestigious scientific journal published by the Nature Publishing Group.
The research team led by Park succeeded in converting mechanical energy into electrical energy using induced current generated through a change in electrical capacity of electric double layer capacitor (EDLC) formed between water and solid matter.
Park said, “Scientists had long been aware of the fact that the contact area between water and solid matter consists of layers of charge, but had trouble generating electricity because they didn’t understand exactly how such things happened,” adding, “Recently so-called energy harvesting, which converts the energy commonly left unused around us such as vibration, noise, human movement, waste heat at factories, and light into electrical energy, is grabbing keen attention worldwide. The new technology is a kind of energy harvesting using commonplace object which is water.”
He also explained that, “If we fit an equipment created based on this technology to parts of the human body such as the sole of a shoe, moving arms, constantly beating heart muscles, it could continuously provide electricity to small electronic devices like portable cellphones.”