A new way of producing hydropower has been developed by scientists over in China. The lightweight power generator uses carbon nanotube fibers in which to produce electricity from the energy of blood flowing through the body. For many years all kinds of people have used the energy from flowing water to produce electricity by simply using the natural power of sea tides.
This is a great form of renewable energy as is not really whether or light dependent. The research team from Fudan University in Shanghai, led by Huisheng Peng, managed to successfully create the fiber rather simply. It works by generating electricity when it becomes surrounded by flowing saline solution. So, that could be a thin tube or a blood vessel. The way it’s constructed is with an array of nanotubes that are wrapped around a polymeric core.
These nanotubes are aligned in sheets and are both electroactive and mechanically stable. In order to generate power, the “fiber-shaped fluidic nanogenerator” (FFNG) was hooked up to the electrodes and either submerged in water or continuously dipped into saline. “The electricity was derived from the relative movement between the FFNG and the solution,” confirmed the scientists.
Overall, the power output efficiency of the system was pretty high compared to any other similar system out there, is more than 20% better in some cases. Other features the FFNG had going for it include its tunability, elasticity, and lightweight design making it perfect to use in a variety of applications.
It can also be made even more flexible and stretchy by simply spinning sheets around an elastic fiber substrate. Wearable electronics could also benefit from FFNG as could the medical field in harvesting electrical energy from the bloodstream of patients.
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