Water-induced Electricity Generation And Application By Natural Wood Devices

To find an alternative renewable energy for the conventional fosil fuels is a pressing need in the future.Recent advances in science and technology,especially the continuous development of nanogenerators,there are various ways to collect all kinds of energy in the surrounding environment and convert it into electricity.When external pressure drives electrolyte solution in a capillary tube with charged inner surface,we obtain streaming potential/current.This effect is also manifested when water flows through the micro-channels of a tree,which is driven by capillary pressure and natural evaporation.Thus,by making use of natural evaporation,we took advantage of anisotropic three-dimensional wood structures to fabricate nanogenerators drawing electricity from streaming potential/current.This paper introduced the history and research status of the dynamic electric phenomenon and the theory of double electric layer,and introduce the dynamic electric effect theory based on the micro-nano channel,and introduces the principle of the water volt nanogenerator,and then focused on the preparation of the nanometer power generation device,performance characterization and application of research results.First,by assembling nanogenerators from above four wood species,we compared their current and voltage values,and evaluated effect of multiple parameters,such as wood species,wood height,micro-channel direction relative to the water and mesh electrode size.We select natural growth length of 1 cm high direction wood as experimental materials,and then choose the appropriate method of wood modification processing,improve power performance of the device by test and theoretical calculation.In this context,we employed natural wood to harvest electricity from water evaporation based on streaming potential/current mechanism.Natural wood has intrinsic anisotropic three-dimensional continuous micro-channel structure,thus the hydrodynamic resistance is relatively low,which may lead to high streaming current.The electrodes were polyethylene terephthalate（PET）meshes coated with conductive carbon paste（termed as PET-C）and were tied on a piece of wood with rubber bands.Citric acid was used to enhance the zeta potential and hydrophilicity of wood channels to further improve the output power.As a result,by using this resource abundant material,wood,the fabrication cost is low and the process is easy to be scalable.direct current can be harvested continuously simply through a piece of wood.300 mV open circuit voltage and 10μA short circuit current(I_SC)were recorded from a single device.By series connecting five wood nanogenerators,a calculator can work full functionally as demonstration for practical application.