New scientific device creates electricity from snowfall
newsroom.ucla.eduA lot of comments here seem to be missing the point. This isn't supposed to add electricity to the grid. It just makes a self sufficient weather station to measure snowfall. Which is cool.
A lot of times you'd want to measure such things away from the grid without having to worry about batteries.
Something I'm curious about is whether similar tech could be used to self sufficiently measure pollen.
Yeah the electricity output isn't the point but the fact the power generated is the raw signal. I wonder mostly about the accuracy and precision of such a sensor. Even its "not snow" triggers could be scientifically useful. Imagine if say it was sensitive enough it could identify particulates and tell where heavy metal pollutants land on the tarp.
Well I know that lysimeter based snowfall measurement systems can be a real pain for remote stations in winter, so to me this is the exciting bit.
I think the article does't clarify that point, because it says:
"The new device could be integrated into solar panels to provide a continuous power supply when it snows, he said."
>“The device can work in remote areas because it provides its own power and does not need batteries,” said senior author Richard Kaner
Second paragraph.
The point is, when it snows, often the sun is blocked, or the solar panels might get covered. While it is snowing this device can continue to work without batteries.
I think for clarity, the article should touch on the magnitude of the power output in human terms.
For example, some models of the Nissan Leaf electric car have a small solar panel on the roof.
Surprisingly, I think this is a selling point for the car or the option package that includes the panel because people think this car will give you many miles of free driving.
However, it's supposed to maintain the 12v battery, but its 5 watts of power might not be sufficient power for even that minor task.
Nobody is missing the point because solar panels are a thing. A solar powered calculator probably produces more power than this. Not how they didn't say how much power was produced, because it's probably picowatts.
* A new device - snow-based triboelectric nanogenerator, or snow TENG - creates electricity from falling snow, among other potential uses.
* Richard Kaner (highly influential and cited scientist) and team used 3D printing to design a device that combines silicone with an electrode.
* Thanks to “the ease of fabrication and the availability of silicone” the device, which is essentially a small sheet of plastic, could be produced at low cost.
* It can work in remote areas, doesn’t need batteries, and could be used in solar panels, or self-powered wearables for tracking athletes.
PS. Yesterday posted on https://bullets.tech - I'm looking for people interested in science to help us writing summaries and selecting scientific content
See also:
Lord Kelvin's thunderstorm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_water_dropper
Vaneless ion wind generator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaneless_ion_wind_generator
How does it work, exactly? Can you just attach a lead to a blob of silicone and begin consuming the energy as soon as snow exposure begins?
UCLA is finding ways to handle all the snow they see
The amount of power they will be harvesting will probably lead to revolution in measuring miniscule amounts of power :)
Does it rely on the user moving around to knock off snow that accumulated?
tl;dr: Snow is positively charged and gives up electrons. Silicone is negatively charged. When falling snow contacts the surface of silicone, that produces a charge that the device captures, creating electricity.
This appears to be more useful for wearables than as a replacement for solar panels in the winter. I can't imagine the amount of power generated could be that great. It reminds me of one of those stationary bikes hooked up to a toaster.
"This appears to be more useful for wearables than as a replacement for solar panels in the winter."
That's a degree of bullshit so high that it has me seriously questioning what otherwise sounds at least reasonable. Yeah, I know, every science paper has to connect itself to some fashionable area of research that will excite the grant writers, like renewable energy or climate change, but the idea that it would ever be practical to capture that much power from snow is absurd. This is a particularly tenuous connection. The upper bounds on this technique are tiny; any advantage it may have is in its ability to deliver tiny amounts of power to places that would otherwise have none. If snow had any significant amount of energy in it, we'd know, because we'd get shocked when we stood in it.
I think I'm going to settle on feeling bad for the scientists that they've done such interesting work and were forced by the system to spew such heavy bullshit on top of it to keep getting funded.
>>If snow had any significant amount of energy in it, we'd know, because we'd get shocked when we stood in it.
But....we don't get shocked when we stand out in the sun? And yet solar power is a real thing!
I am sure people scoffed back in the 1800's when scientist first worked with solar power.
"But....we don't get shocked when we stand out in the sun? And yet solar power is a real thing!"
The reason I said "shocked" is not that shocking is the only way that energy can manifest itself. It's because it's the way that significant static electricity manifests, the claimed mechanism being used to obtain power.
You can tell just by standing in the sunlight that it has substantial energy, because you get warm, along with anything else in the sunlight. Therefore it has at least enough energy to do that. Not to mention power the ecosystem.
"I am sure people scoffed back in the 1800's when scientist first worked with solar power."
With all due respect, you do not appear to be in a position to be lecturing people about this sort of thing. You may not understand how energy works, but some people do.
Are there any other planets or moons in the solar system that would be better for this trick?
I'm not sure if you maybe meant this for some other post, but if you did mean this, there aren't that many other atmospheres in the solar system where there is A: a surface that B: any sort of machine can be on (sorry Venus) and C: has a charged massive object moving. (I don't list atmosphere explicitly but C essentially requires it; it's not going to happen in a vacuum.) We're down to Mars and Titan, basically.
Mars is an interesting question; how charged are those sand storms? It might pose the opposite problem of excessive power density!
Titan I just don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised there's some sort of charge flowing around, it's just a question of how much. Charge is pretty fundamental to mass, after all, and when things get moving it's not that hard to end up with static electricity to at least some degree.
>Silicone is negatively charged.
It's definitely not negatively charged, it just has a propensity for accumulating negative charge (like in the cloth and rod static electricity experiment).
Does this have the potential to be a lightning rod of any kind?
Despite my strong skepticism of this technology being used as a replacement or even supplement for solar panels anytime in the near future, I really admire the creative thought process that led them to get even the miniscule results they did.
I'm not a chemist or phyhsicist in any regard, so I can't say whether this could be the stepping stone to something more large scale down the line. Could anyone shed light on whether there are any physical limits given the materials used (slilcone, snow, etc.) to how much energy you could extract?
In the paper, the product produces 0.2 mW/m^2
Solar panels produce 175W/m^2 for comparison.
If this ever produced 1W/m^2 I'd be shocked.
And that's the production during snowfall. Even here in Michigan, the sun shines a great deal more than we literally have snow falling. And if the snow is falling all day, it's going to be a light snow that probably isn't reaching 0.2mW/m^2.
Plus, if I'm seeing the physics here in my head properly based on their description, you can't just stick this out in the snow like a panel and get a consistent 0.2mW/m^2 even under optimal snow conditions. As the snow accumulates on the collector it'll insulate the collector from the rest of the snow. You really want the snow to be brushing the collector and then departing having given up its excess charge, not accumulating on it. Sunlight obviously does not present this problem, since it basically is 100% made out of charge (if you'll pardon the sloppy terminology, asp precision wouldn't really buy anything here), so there's no additional mass to dispose of, just any waste heat issues that may arise.
I'm pretty sure that in real conditions the difference between the two would be another two or three orders of magnitude larger, which is why my other post is so grumpy. It's multiple orders of magnitude obviously not even remotely feasible, to the point it's almost insulting that it was said.
I'm pretty skeptical as well that this is useful for really anything. That energy density is so low that I can't think of a single application where either batteries, solar, wind, or some combination of the above wouldn't both work better and be cheaper.
Just to put a little perspective out there, 0.2 mW/m^2 means that 1 square meter of this stuff would take 600 days in ideal production to match the amount of energy stored in one charge of a single rechargeable AA (~3Wh).
1 clear day, plus a tiny solar cell and a AA and you can get 600 operating days of energy really easily.
And here's the thing, if this thing gets buried, it isn't going to generate electricity. So you have to imagine an environment where the snow is constantly melting, you can get a giant sheet of this stuff, and for whatever reason there is no battery chemistry that would work.
You could say "Well, it would make a good snow detector".. but even that it somewhat silly. Because, again, if it gets buried it won't be detecting more snow. So now you need some complex rigging to keep it from collecting snow so it can register that snow is falling. Why not a camera? A weight sensor? etc. Plenty of pretty cheap and low power equipment can do just this without the additional concerns introduced by this piece of tech.
This thing is useless. Maybe interesting to make, definitely not practical for really any application.
Is the power enough to melt the snow to clear the panels of the snow. That could be a good use for it. Solar pan
It is not.
It takes 2.09J/g to heat ice 1 degree.
> Despite my strong skepticism of this technology being used as a replacement or even supplement for solar panels anytime in the near future
I doubt the point is to replace or supplement solar. The point is probably to have a less bulky or expensive way to run remote sensors
My skepticism comes from this particular line in the article:
> The new device could be integrated into solar panels to provide a continuous power supply when it snows, [El-Cady] said.
The abstract of the researh paper itself[0] also reflects this sentiment:
> We envision these devices could potentially be integrated into solar panels to ensure continuous power supply during snowy weather conditions.
Granted, it's more of a pipe dream for the future than an original design goal for the technology, which does work well for said remote sensors
[0] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221128551... (Link may not be accessable to all, feel free to reply with a mirror)
100% useless but very clever nonetheless.
We've asked you several times to please comment more substantively. Would you mind trying a bit harder?
Cute. Remember the fad for "energy generating sidewalks"? That got far enough that there's a startup.[1] It's useless as a power generator, so they figured out how to market it as a hype generator. "Pavegen creates high engagement with citizens by converting their footsteps into energy, data and rewards." They're on Instagram, etc.
...it still generates energy. It's a small amount for a small application, but it's purposeful energy.