Wood-based Technology Creates Electricity from Heat
Researchers at the University of Maryland have created a heat-to-electricity device that runs on ions that could someday harness the body’s heat to provide energy.
Liangbing Hu and Robert Briber – both professors in the UMD Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) - and Siddhartha Das of the UMD Department of Mechanical Engineering (ME), transformed a piece of wood into a flexible membrane that generates energy from the same type of electric current (ions) that the human body runs on. This energy is generated using charged channel walls, and other unique properties of the wood’s natural nanostructures. With this new wood-based technology, they can use a small temperature differential to efficiently generate ionic voltage, as demonstrated in a paper published March 25 in Nature Materials.
