A great device, the first of its kind, created electricity from snow

Scientists have developed a unique device that generates electricity from the natural phenomenon of snowfall.

Based on the principles of the triboelectric effect, in which an electric charge is generated after the contact of two materials, researchers' new technology exploits the fact that snow particles carry a positive electrical charge.

Because of this, the snowflakes give up the electrons, provided that they have the opportunity to interact with the negatively charged substance.

"The snow is already loaded, so we thought, why not bring another material with the opposite charge and extract the charge to create electricity?" says chemist Maher El-Kady of UCLA, and also CTO of a research company called Nanotech Energy.

Although no one has ever used snow in this way before, other researchers have done the same thing with other substances.

The team's device is a snow-based triboelectric nanogenerator, a material that relies on the triboelectric effect and electrostatic induction to harvest energy.

In recent years, scientists have built other types of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) that capture electricity from raindrops, physical movements, friction of car tires and even walking on floor.

In all these approaches – including the new TENG on snow – the principle is the same, even if the methods differ slightly, depending on the types of movement and the materials involved.

"Static electricity results from the interaction of a material that captures the electrons and another that gives way," says UCLA chemist and materials scientist Richard Kaner.

"You separate the charges and create electricity from nothing."

With the TENG snow, after designing the device and using 3D printing to make the electrode, they measured its electrical power using a number of different triboelectric materials acting as a functional layer, which were not all equal.

"While snow likes to give away electrons, the performance of the device depends on the efficiency of the other material in extracting these electrons," El-Kady explains.

"After testing a lot of materials, including aluminum foil and teflon, we found that silicone produced more charge than any other material."

The snow TENG installed under a hiking boot. (Abdelsalam Ahmed)

With silicon in place as the triboelectric layer of the device, an electrical charge can be generated by a number of different contact mechanisms, including snow falling directly on or sliding against the silicon layer.

In other configurations, the team tested the silicon layer coming in contact with the snow when it was attached to a bicycle wheel and also under the sole of a hiking boot. .

Although the amounts of electricity generated during the experimental experiments were not enormous, the researchers explain that it would be easy to turn the TENG into snow into solar panels, which would help them to produce electricity during snowy weather , when their solar efficiency would otherwise be reduced or denied.

With snowfall every year on 46 million square kilometers (17.8 million square kilometers) of the Earth's surface, there is a huge opportunity to develop this technology, which could one day be used to do things as portable technology, or be incorporated into biomechanical tracking sensors.

Researchers may be more likely to say in the near future that TENG on snow could be installed in remote and autonomous weather stations in snow-exposed areas, where it could measure the rate of snowfall. and the depth of the snow, in addition to other meteorological functions, such as reading the direction and speed of the wind.

The results are reported in Nano Energy.