Generating electricity from water typically requires large hydroelectric turbines to be efficient. However, a new team of researchers has recently discovered a way to utilize even ordinary amounts of falling water — like rainwater — to produce electricity in a simpler, more accessible manner.
Recorded in the ACS Central Science journal, the study outlines a way to use vertical tubes to channel electrical charge separation through rain-sized falling droplets. Although charge separation for small amounts of water is typically inefficient, the researchers utilized a water pattern known as "plug flow" to ultimately generate five times the amount of electricity as a steady stream of falling water.
"Water that falls through a vertical tube generates a substantial amount of electricity by using a specific pattern of water flow: plug flow," researcher Siowling Soh said in a post by the American Chemical Society on Tech Xplore, referring to a simple setup where the collision of individual water droplets with the top of the tube enabled better separation of electrical charges. "This plug flow pattern could allow rain energy to be harvested for generating clean and renewable electricity."
The majority of electricity generation — about 60% in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration — occurs through the burning of dirty fuels, which releases carbon dioxide and other Earth-warming gases into the atmosphere. As a result, our rising electricity demand drives up our global temperatures, leading to more intense weather events and threats to food and public health.
Alternatives to fuel-burning, like solar energy and hydroelectric power, can help limit carbon pollution and mitigate climate catastrophe.
In the past, increasing the efficiency of energy generation from small amounts of falling water proved ineffective, according to the Tech Xplore post, and required more energy than it produced, if successful. The researchers' plug flow technique enabled more than a 10% electricity yield for the patterned falling water — a number doubled when the team set up moving water through two tubes, rather than one.
Unlike hydroelectric turbines, the plug flow method can make use directly of the kinetic energy from falling rainwater.
"Water from natural sources (e.g., rain and rivers) can flow through the channel under its own weight (i.e., without the need for a pump)," the study noted. "Therefore, renewable energy from nature can be harvested freely for generating electricity."
In the end, the team's trial plug flow system lit up 12 LEDs for 20 seconds. Since the system is scalable depending on the amount of rainwater and the number of vertical tubes involved in the setup, the researchers hope that urban spaces such as rooftops make use of the discovery.
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