“Even though a thin sheet of the device gives out a very tiny amount of electricity or power, in principle, we can stack multiple layers in vertical space to increase the power.” So what would it take to power the rest of the screen, or indeed a whole house? “The beauty is that the air is everywhere,” says Yao. We were considered the freaks – the guys who were saying something completely impossible Prof Andriy Lyubchyk, Catcher project

The device they have come up with is the size of a thumbnail, one-fifth the width of a human hair, and capable of generating roughly one microwatt – enough to light a single pixel on a large LED screen. “You have a positive pull and a negative pull, and when you connect them the charge is going to flow.”įor their recent study, Yao’s team have moved on from nanowires, and instead are punching materials with millions of tiny holes, or nanopores. “So it’s really like a battery,” says Yao. Each bump, the team realised, lent the material a small charge, and as the frequency of bumps increased, one end of the tube became differently charged from the other. The UMass Amherst team were surprised to find that the device, which comprised an array of microscopic tubes, or nanowires, was producing an electrical signal regardless.Įach nanowire was less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, wide enough that an airborne water molecule could enter, but so narrow it would bump around inside the tube.

But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.” “We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. “To be frank, it was an accident,” says the study’s lead author, Prof Jun Yao.

Autodesk inventor 2015 work plane