Jun Yao, Derek Lovley, and Colleagues Make International News with Revolutionary “Air-gen” Research
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Pioneering research at UMass Amherst, as generated by long-time colleagues Associate Professor Jun Yao of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department and Distinguished Professor of Microbiology Derek Lovley, has attracted scores of articles in the national and international media. The widespread coverage includes articles in BBC The Boston Globe, Futurism, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, Science Daily , SciTechDaily, The Jerusalem Post, Wonderful Engineering, Earth.com, Newsweek, USA Today, The Weather Channel India, AdvancedScienceNews, Dubai Week, and many more.
Recent research stemming from the past collaboration between Yao and Lovley demonstrates that nearly any material can be engineered with nanopores to harvest inexpensive, interruption-free electricity. The secret lies in being able to pepper the material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter. See UMass Amherst News Office release.
Yao and his colleagues – Xiaomeng Liu, Hongyan Gao, and Lu Sun – published their new research on “Generic Air-gen Effect in Nanoporous Materials for Sustainable Energy Harvesting from Air Humidity” in the journal Advanced Materials.
According to Yao, “The air contains an enormous amount of electricity. Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt—but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.”
“This is very exciting,” says Liu, Yao’s ECE graduate student. “We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air.”
The groundbreaking work of Yao and Lovley has evolved from research showing in 2020 that electricity could be continuously harvested from the air using a specialized material made of protein nanowires grown from the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens, which was discovered by Lovley.
“What we realized after making the Geobacter discovery,” says Yao, “is that the ability to generate electricity from the air—what we then called the ‘Air-gen effect’—turns out to be generic: literally any kind of material can harvest electricity from air, as long as it has a certain property.”
What is that property? As Yao, says, the material “needs to have holes smaller than 100 nanometers, or less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair.”
As Yao concludes, “Imagine a future world in which clean electricity is available anywhere you go. The generic Air-gen effect means that this future world can become a reality.” (July 2023)
