MIT Researchers Create Power Generator That Draws Electricity From The Air

One of the biggest challenges that modern society faces is the matter of generating electricity. For most of the past century, power generation was done with the consumption of fossil fuels. In the past three decades, solar power and other renewable sources have become more prevalent, which have made things better. Recently, MIT researchers have created a device that might change everything by drawing electricity from the air called the “Thermal Resonator.”

In the press release that was recently published talking about the new development, the technology basically depends on changing temperatures of the atmosphere. Called thermoelectricity, devices with this kind of property generate power when one side is a different temperature than the other. Since the temperature of air changes all the time depending on elevation, power generation can be done perpetually.

The professor in charge of the discovery is Michael Strano, a chemical engineer at the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. According to him, what they have created is probably one of the most convenient means of generating power available and it focuses on a resource that is hardly ever used.

“We basically invented this concept out of whole cloth,” Strano explained. “We’ve built the first thermal resonator. It’s something that can sit on a desk and generate energy out of what seems like nothing. We are surrounded by temperature fluctuations of all different frequencies all of the time. These are an untapped source of energy.”

The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Communications, which notes that material engineering has progressed to a point where a property called “thermal effusivity” or the ability of heat to travel through a substance can be used to generate electricity, has become more efficient. The “thermal resonator” manages to do this, though, there still the usual limitations of an early example of new technology.