Skip to content

Clean, limitless power from graphene? Researchers find a way

Graphene once again shows how ridiculously clever it can be as scientists discover a way to generate current from Brownian motion.

Hope Corrigan
Hope Corrigan
2 min read
Clean, limitless power from graphene? Researchers find a way

Graphene is one of my favourite things. It’s amazingly conductive, incredibly thin and scientists just keep finding amazing new things to do with it.

Graphene is single-atom-thin layers of carbon. That’s literally as thin as things get without doing weird subatomic business. And while the research is slow and steady it is being explored for use in everything from batteries to water filtration to solar panels to sensor technologies and so, so much more.

This process has caused what is referred to as the “graphene effect” in my household. If you hear someone make an incredulous noise or say something like “What can it do now?” while reading something, you can usually reply with “graphene?” and be right on the money.

Today that noise has been made once again because physicists at the University of Arkansas have built a circuit that can generate clean and apparently unlimited low-voltage power using graphene’s thermal motion.

Part of the reason this is so cool is because it’s meant to be impossible. Thermal motion boiled down is the random movement of atoms without an electrical current. Things naturally push and pull against each other, when suspended in a liquid or gas (it's known as Brownian motion). There’s a lot of math involved which I’ll confess to not totally understanding right now but this process isn’t supposed to create energy.

Unless it’s graphene, apparently.

Freestanding graphene is the thin stuff we’re talking about. Three years ago physicists discovered that it could be used to harvest energy from itself. It’s the way the layer moves, and by putting two diodes that convert alternating current to direct current, it looks like they can now harvest the thermal motion (which shouldn’t technically be energy at all, really) and make usable electricity.

It’s wild. It’s absolutely bonkers.

Even more amazingly there’s no actual difference in temperature between the graphene and the circuit that harvests the energy. Because that would be impossible according to the second law of thermodynamics. Incredibly basically (put by me, not a scientist): energy is heat, heat can’t be created without energy, things should get colder. This is what leads us ever closer to entropy.

It’s not exactly a fun rule, but it is a rule and we’ve found a way to essentially generate energy without breaking it. Even if it is in very small amounts.

And these very small amounts just get even cooler. Because of how slow the thermal motion is, the current the circuit gets its hands on is at low frequencies. Electronics love low frequencies and function more efficiently on them.

The next step in this research is to try to store this current to act as a battery replacement which would again, be incredibly cool.

But like I said, we’ve been making incredulous and excited noise about graphene discoveries for almost 10 years in this house without much to show for it in consumer terms. I look forward to a graphene powered future, assuming we last long enough to see it.

Ideas

Hope Corrigan

Secretly several dogs stacked on top of one another in a large coat, Hope has a habit of getting far too excited about all things videogames and tech. She loves the new accomplishments and ideas huma


Related Posts

Handwriting beats typing for information encoding in the brain

Is handwriting better than typewriting for learning? A study by Professor Audrey van der Meer at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and published in Frontiers in Psychology, has tackled this debate and found evidence that you're better off with a pen in your hand. "We

Upright Go S review: a nudge toward better posture

The Upright Go S wants to help you improve your posture and develop better sitting habits. And it works – as long as you want to actually do the work too.

Upright Go S review: a nudge toward better posture

What are the best games of 2022 so far?

There are plenty of games worthy of GOTY discussion already. The GamesHub team join us to examine the best games of 2022 so far.

What are the best games of 2022 so far?