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10/20/03 New Clean Energy Source Discovered!
The "electrokinetic" water battery. Researchers have demonstrated a new way of producing electricity from flowing water. ( For technical details, read the paper here. ) Professors Daniel Kwok and Larry Kostiuk in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta report in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering a new method of generating electric power by harnessing the natural electrokinetic properties of a liquid, such as ordinary tap water, when it is pumped through tiny microchannels.
"When we took a syringe of water and squeezed it through the filter, we got enough power to light a light bulb," said Larry Kostiuk of the University of Alberta in Canada. "The harder you push the syringe, the more volts you get.
"At first, the researchers used glass tubes about one-tenth the width of a human hair, then scaled up to half a million of the holes and found that water flowing through them for 15 seconds generated 10 volts of electricity."
The technique is based on understanding that when a non-conducting glass container is filled with water, the glass develops a tiny electric charge while the water takes on the opposite charge. The Canadian researchers hypothesised that if the water was continually pumped through tiny glass tubes, the water would continually sweep away the tiny charge and generate an electric current.
"This discovery has a huge number of possible applications," says Kostiuk. "It could be a new alternative energy source to rival wind and solar power, although this would need huge bodies of water to work on a commercial scale. “Hydrocarbon fuels are still the best source of energy but they're fast running out and so new options like this one could be vital in the future.
4/15/03: Only 2% of roads in California use rubberized asphalt concrete, yet it can save as much as $22,000 per lane mile, it lasts longer, makes less noise and disposes of the waste tires that sometimes cause huge toxic fires.
4/15/03: 23,000,000 tons of plastic waste were landfilled in 1999 and the amount increases annually. H.SMARTech, Inc. has created an environmentally friendly process to convert scrap tires, PET beverage bottles and foam plastics to fuel with no pollution.
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