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Can Trees be the Ultimate in Green Power!?
Can you remember at school, you have tried the potato battery experiment know that plant material can be a source of electricity. In this case, the energy comes from reduction and oxidation reactions eating into the electrodes, which are made of two different metals...
The same effect was thought to lie behind claims that connecting electrodes driven into a tree trunk and the ground nearby can provide a current.
Shoving electrodes into tree trunks to harvest electricity may sound like the stuff of dreams, but the idea is increasingly attracting interest. If we can make it work, forests could power their own sensor networks to monitor the health of the ecosystem or provide early warning of forest fires.
Devices that lose water the way trees transpire through their leaves could also be used to supply power, according to M. Maharbiz at the University of California, Berkeley. His team recently showed that evaporation from simulated leaves can act like a mechanical pump, and that the effect can be harnessed to provide power.
article Colin Barras in newscientist.com
Parviz's paper: IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, in press,
Mershin's paperPLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002963,
Maharbiz's paper: Applied Physics Letters, DOI: 10.1063/1.3157144
.
The same effect was thought to lie behind claims that connecting electrodes driven into a tree trunk and the ground nearby can provide a current.
Shoving electrodes into tree trunks to harvest electricity may sound like the stuff of dreams, but the idea is increasingly attracting interest. If we can make it work, forests could power their own sensor networks to monitor the health of the ecosystem or provide early warning of forest fires.
Devices that lose water the way trees transpire through their leaves could also be used to supply power, according to M. Maharbiz at the University of California, Berkeley. His team recently showed that evaporation from simulated leaves can act like a mechanical pump, and that the effect can be harnessed to provide power.
article Colin Barras in newscientist.com
Parviz's paper: IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology, in press,
Mershin's paperPLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002963,
Maharbiz's paper: Applied Physics Letters, DOI: 10.1063/1.3157144
.
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