MIT Engineers Have Discovered a Completely New Way of Generating Electricity

Tiny Particles Power Chemical Reactions

MIT engineers have discovered a way to generate electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create an electric current simply by interacting with an organic solvent in which they’re floating. The particles are made from crushed carbon nanotubes (blue) coated with a Teflon-like polymer (green). Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT. Based on a figure courtesy of the researchers.

Tiny Particles Power Chemical Reactions

A new material made from carbon nanotubes can generate electricity by scavenging energy from its environment.

MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them.

The liquid, an organic solvent, draws electrons out of the particles, generating a current that could be used to drive chemical reactions or to power micro- or nanoscale robots, the researchers say.

“This mechanism is new, and this way of generating energy is completely new,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “This technology is intriguing because all you have to do is flow a solvent through a bed of these particles. This allows you to do electrochemistry, but with no wires.”

In a new study describing this phenomenon, the researchers showed that they could use this electric current to drive a reaction known as alcohol oxidation — an organic chemical reaction that is important in the chemical industry.

Strano is the senior author of the paper, which appears today (June 7, 2021) in Nature Communications. The lead authors of the study are MIT graduate student Albert Tianxiang Liu and former MIT researcher Yuichiro Kunai. Other authors include former graduate student Anton Cottrill, postdocs Amir Kaplan and Hyunah Kim, graduate student Ge Zhang, and recent MIT graduates Rafid Mollah and Yannick Eatmon.

Unique properties

The new discovery grew out of Strano’s research on carbon nanotubes — hollow tubes made of a lattice of carbon atoms, which have unique electrical properties. In 2010, Strano demonstrated, for the first time, that carbon nanotubes can generate “thermopower waves.” When a carbon nanotube is coated with layer of fuel, moving pulses of heat, or thermopower waves, travel along the tube, creating an electrical current.

That work led Strano and his students to uncover a related feature of carbon nanotubes. They found that when part of a nanotube is coated with a Teflon-like polymer, it creates an asymmetry that makes it possible for electrons to flow from the coated to the uncoated part of the tube, generating an electrical current. Those electrons can be drawn out by submerging the particles in a solvent that is hungry for electrons.

To harness this special capability, the researchers created electricity-generating particles by grinding up carbon nanotubes and forming them into a sheet of paper-like material. One side of each sheet was coated with a Teflon-like polymer, and the researchers then cut out small particles, which can be any shape or size. For this study, they made particles that were 250 microns by 250 microns.

When these particles are submerged in an organic solvent such as acetonitrile, the solvent adheres to the uncoated surface of the particles and begins pulling electrons out of them.

“The solvent takes electrons away, and the system tries to equilibrate by moving electrons,” Strano says. “There’s no sophisticated battery chemistry inside. It’s just a particle and you put it into solvent and it starts generating an electric field.”

“This research cleverly shows how to extract the ubiquitous (and often unnoticed) electric energy stored in an electronic material for on-site electrochemical synthesis,” says Jun Yao, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who was not involved in the study. “The beauty is that it points to a generic methodology that can be readily expanded to the use of different materials and applications in different synthetic systems.”

Particle power

The current version of the particles can generate about 0.7 volts of electricity per particle. In this study, the researchers also showed that they can form arrays of hundreds of particles in a small test tube. This “packed bed” reactor generates enough energy to power a chemical reaction called an alcohol oxidation, in which an alcohol is converted to an aldehyde or a ketone. Usually, this reaction is not performed using electrochemistry because it would require too much external current.

“Because the packed bed reactor is compact, it has more flexibility in terms of applications than a large electrochemical reactor,” Zhang says. “The particles can be made very small, and they don’t require any external wires in order to drive the electrochemical reaction.”

In future work, Strano hopes to use this kind of energy generation to build polymers using only carbon dioxide as a starting material. In a related project, he has already created polymers that can regenerate themselves using carbon dioxide as a building material, in a process powered by solar energy. This work is inspired by carbon fixation, the set of chemical reactions that plants use to build sugars from carbon dioxide, using energy from the sun.

In the longer term, this approach could also be used to power micro- or nanoscale robots. Strano’s lab has already begun building robots at that scale, which could one day be used as diagnostic or environmental sensors. The idea of being able to scavenge energy from the environment to power these kinds of robots is appealing, he says.

“It means you don’t have to put the energy storage on board,” he says. “What we like about this mechanism is that you can take the energy, at least in part, from the environment.”

Reference: “Solvent-induced electrochemistry at an electrically asymmetric carbon Janus particle” by Albert Tianxiang Liu, Yuichiro Kunai, Anton L. Cottrill, Amir Kaplan, Ge Zhang, Hyunah Kim, Rafid S. Mollah, Yannick L. Eatmon and Michael S. Strano, 7 June 2021, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23038-7

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and a seed grant from the MIT Energy Initiative.

99 Comments on "MIT Engineers Have Discovered a Completely New Way of Generating Electricity"

  1. Jimmy Roberts | June 7, 2021 at 6:50 pm | Reply

    Not new. Same process as a lead-acid battery.

  2. Remember the hype about fuels cells and getting 200 hours from your new laptop fuel cell battery?

  3. Cindy Vengen Yates Ireland | June 7, 2021 at 11:53 pm | Reply

    This is why research funding is so important!. In 1985, I was a marketing consultant for Ian AI firm called Artificial Intelligence Technologies. The company was started by a brilliant Harvard grad named Michael Stock. He had the foresight to hire my then husband, George Yates to head the engineering team. Many of our engineers came from MIT. It was not unusual to drive past our offices at 11pm and see these MIT grads wiorking on their own time. I remember participating in IiJCAI ( International joint conference on artificial intelligence). Ou systems were developed using heuristic paradigms and written using common LISP. We were contacted by many flange ccimpanies! A pagination system we designed for Simon and Schuster published an encyclopedia for NA in sCAR. I remembera CAD/CAM system our engineers developed for the Corvette plant in Bowling Green Kentucky
    This was over 30 years and just recently the benefits of AI are being noticed by the general public! I also remember George working with a man from the Carnegie Mellon Robotics institute named Mark Fox.My ex is still active designing a well

  4. What you need to do is figure out how to use the Earth’s magnetic field and the Ley lines and do it again from all the intersecting magnetic zones around the world using megalithic structures to channel the energy and store it too bad we have nothing like that Tesla said there could be free energy for all

  5. Sounds like a cross between an electrochemical battery and a load of sheer bollocks.

  6. There’s a difference,
    with the lead acid batteries, after the chemical is poured into the encased solid state, required next was a short direct current (electrical) charge, before actual usage.

  7. article provided information.

    f–k narcissists. your comments are just dipsh*ttery.

  8. Nate the electrician | June 8, 2021 at 3:39 am | Reply

    .7v at .000000001 amps? Volts are only half of an equation. This sounds like more marketing hype.

    Show me something that works.

    • Per particle at 250 micron’s is impressive enough. Pack a quarter sized battery, with 63000 they will fit nicely 1 amp. The real use is fluid flow and making chemicals like ketones

  9. Lawrence Dabkowski | June 8, 2021 at 3:47 am | Reply

    Capacitor Banks do the same thing

  10. Larry Dabkowski | June 8, 2021 at 4:03 am | Reply

    Capacitor Banks need to be shunted when not online, because they pick up charge from the atmosphere, now install a battery on it with a charger……cute, but it’s not going to run America

  11. I know nothing about this process, just hope it is a useful process. I’m sure Jimmy and Danny know a lot more than these reseachers!!!

  12. So basically it’s a battery if you have to haveTwo different materials and a flow from one side to the other it’s a battery, did I say it’s a battery there’s nothing really new here folks except the material used and the idea that you take electrons from positrons etc

  13. Good work team! Keep it up.

  14. Ok, real life application or all pipes and wind, thank you…

  15. Misleading/sensational headline.

  16. Dude your site still doesn’t work right on Android chrome

  17. Don’t any Americans attend MIT anymore?

  18. How much energy is inputed to realize the small output?

  19. Clinton Harrold | June 8, 2021 at 7:19 am | Reply

    Yea whatever…I’ll get excited when Gabriel Krons Negative Resistor is released/ reinvented.

  20. @Uncle Sam gotta make enough to go. I got accepted, but there was no way I could afford the tuition.

  21. Please research to find a way to grow back hair on a bald head.

    • They have actually, and believe it or not the miraculous hair regrowth drug is of all things…. Weed. No BS. Specifically a topical application of different cannabis compounds (different studies tried diffetent compounds) such as cbd, cbg, cbc, thcva, cbdva and other cannabinoid compound extracts along with extracts of peppermint/menthol which helps with absorbtion. All of the studies reported success and one study showed remarkable promise indicating human test subjects experiencing ~40% follicle increases per square inch (cm?) in areas the mixture was applied in comparison to control/placebo subjects. Check out this link and explore the studies linked in the references at the bottom of the page. Theres a yon of research going into this and one link i saw mentioned preclinical trials being conducted so the public is well on its way to benefitting from this research. (Seems a lot more relevant and promising for real world benefit than this janky micro pseudo battery technology from the article lol)

      https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37305187/

  22. Scavenge energy from the environment, as long as that environment is an “electron hungry” organic solvent?

  23. TL;DR
    Something to do with Internet Explorer in boxes?

  24. I can do that with a potato and generate higher voltage.

  25. Great 👍

  26. Would be good to know how Newtons second law works in this system.

  27. What’s the lifespan of the reaction?

  28. Ok so clearly people aren’t taking the time to read. This isn’t a battery, batteries hold an electrical charge, not generate them. Batteries have to be charged first in order to use a current from one. This concept completely eliminates any need to build a charge in order to be used. This is rather new, as generating electricity from basically nothing without the use of wires hasn’t been done before. Sure it isn’t going to have any mass-scale applications in the near-future, but it does open the door for research into such things. People need to stop acting like they know so much about everything each and every time a new discovery is made. Obviously it isn’t going to do much right now. But 20-30 years in the future we could have what is essentially a pocket sized generator that never runs out of electricity, all based on this idea. Instead of trying to put it down as useless info or a waste of time, how about supporting the people that spent who knows how much time to find this out? I don’t see any of you taking the time and effort to make discoveries like this.

    • Makes me think of electronic impulse running along a nerve. Liked your comment. ☺

    • CreativeCircuits | June 9, 2021 at 2:23 pm | Reply

      Mathew, your understanding of what a battery is, is a bit flawed. A battery is merely a chemical reaction and does not necessarily need to be charged externally and yes this has been done for many years. The oldest recorded use is believed to be in ancient Egypt while building the pyramids. You may have heard of the Bagdad battery. This was a very simple battery technology that used an acid based electrolyte reaction to copper.

      Yes, there several different types of batteries and what we use today is mostly the type that can be recharged externally.

      Most of the batteries or at least all of the publicaly available batteries are those that will diminish and consume the material of which they are made of, so in that sense this is unlike these batteries.

      But, there are many of us that have demonstrated self charging phenomena that does not consume or is very longstanding in lifetime longevity reactions to processed carbon and nano carbon. This is not new!

      There is even published demonstrated electrical producing properties of structured water that will produce usable and large amounts of watts from nothing other than the reaction of structured water when a hydrophilic/hydrophobic material is placed in what was discovered as an exclusion zone in this structured water. Dr. Gerald Pollock in his research and papers on the Fourth State of Water discusses how infrared light was discovered in producing and build up and storing electrons in this structured water set up when this was exposed to the light emitting from a living body known as infrared light.

      Where is all of the hype of these findings or the endless findings and research of many of us that demonstrate the electrical charging phenomena of various properties of manipulated carbon?

      Well, the truth is that they will never give this knowledge to the public or hype it up in articles like this unless they can make big money from it and it does not upset the infrastructure of money currently being made from the tech of today.

      Even though it may greatly benefit all of the world, if it does not remain in the control of corporations and it cannot make them money or if it liberates the public from this control you will not see it produced for the public.

  29. Most of you are missing the point. The idea is to use the charge locally for an electrochemical reaction. It has nothing to do with batteries for producing electricity.

    • CreativeCircuits | June 9, 2021 at 2:42 pm | Reply

      Gavin, yes it does have everything to do with producing electrical energy! It is about being able to use nanotubes of carbon to chemically rest and produce electrons that are collected in a fluid just as a battery does. They are merely distracting you with they way they utilize it or plan to utilize it.

      Nothing new in the technology just a new way to use it and a new way of compiling a vehicle to utilize it.

  30. Gordon doesn’t need to hear all this, he’s a professionally trained scientist!

  31. Definitely not new. Egypt and Mexicans used that kind of electricity in the past(hundred , thousands years ago). In their “batteries “

  32. But does the Teflon coating possess the same toxic properties as Teflon?

    • The chemicals one might produce with this are far more toxic and dangerous than teflon, like methyl ethyl ketone that seems to be used for manufacturing everything in your home & office.

  33. This really intrigues me. I have thought about the interaction of electrons in the universe and how one day just the movement of these particles could be used to power everything for eternity. We all contain an electrical charge. We are all batteries. What if we had batteries that attract and collect all unused energy? The world could power itself!

  34. Imagining a world of nanobots that steal bits of electricity generated by creatures like humans…

  35. Anthony Lueder | June 8, 2021 at 1:04 pm | Reply

    All hail the Supreme know alls at MIT, shungite with naturally occurring nanotubes hasn’t been used forever to create natural magnoelectric fields for ages or anything, the gods at MIT finally granted us cattle a half truth, thanks!

  36. Nope, not a lead acid battery and no that’s not how it works. Did you read the entire thing?? And definitely not a capacitor. Common people, if this could someday power nano bots how could that not help us? Everything new doesn’t automatically have a benefit for us today. Even tomorrow. Quit reading the title and maybe a paragraph then making a judgment. And yes if you’d like I’ll either point you to how todays batteries work even yesterday’s or I can instruct you personally.

  37. What if the solvent was made up of a bunch of free radicals what would happen then?

  38. Interesting for sure however I think after DuPont screwed things up for the planet that we can do with less “Teflon-like materials”. Industry has proven itself to be incapable of leaving behind toxic messes.

  39. Two things missing from the article: energy density (watts per cc of volume) and does anything have to be replaced / renewed / rechargetedd.

  40. Forrest Ross Witt | June 8, 2021 at 5:10 pm | Reply

    Not new, different!I hear alot of poo pooers. That’s the new American spirit. Let the Chinese figure it out. They’re smarter than us, right? We’ll use it after they patent it.

    • CreativeCircuits | June 9, 2021 at 2:58 pm | Reply

      Forrest, haha. The Chinese are very good at taking the ideas and technology of others and then simply building it cheaper and selling it to us.

      The corporate greed of Western nations is what drives the engine of which the Chinese own the world. The masses are what they capitalize on while our corporations refuse to let go of their high earnings. The masses simply want what they can afford and care little about where it is produced. It is a machine destined to destroy itself.

      Self reliance is the answer to all of the failures of corporate and government control. Build it yourself and work hard for the things you want and produce them yourself. The laziness of buying what you are given and the control you give it over you. The enslavement of living in a machine that operates out of greed and dictates to you what you can have access to. The minds of the masses that believe everything the see in articles like these and trust that what you are told is Truth by those that only wish to take your sweat equity and control your every move.

      Think for yourselves and build it yourself and stop being led like chattle every step of the way.

  41. Saint Andrews | June 8, 2021 at 5:28 pm | Reply

    Teala

  42. Carbon. P. Dubbs

  43. There are always HATERS,IT never fails.

  44. Michael A Putnam | June 8, 2021 at 7:40 pm | Reply

    Sounds like a power source for an AI Bionic logic circuitry. What are the human central nervous system impulses?

  45. It is very good for transducers

  46. A few Muslim and Asian names of researchers made me smile

  47. Skyler Fuller | June 9, 2021 at 3:00 am | Reply

    Can you make electric car batteries out of it by using algae as a source of organic fuel for it

  48. All that flowed through my mind was nanotech and ways to manipulate the human body.

    As, I read the stories here, it starts to seem like a lot of projects are made up for the sake of sounding scientific and pulling the wool over the eyes of people not knowing about the a.i. mind system. The ego of the mind of people who think they know secrets is such a phenomenon that even the people corrupted by it seem to be completely locked into a state of narcissism. It’s one thing to work on something for the good of mankind and it’s another to blatantly disregard ones own humanity and wisdom for the sake of misleading people to create the illusion in a virtual imaginary way.

    Kind of like, the space x shuttle launch. It’s a 9:09 length video. At the 9:00 there is a flash that is so quick you hardly see it. There are a few more in the last 9 seconds. Well, I managed to capture the flash and it’s a bizarre picture of what looks to be a sort of underwater or decompression chamber. There is a huge hexagon frame holding it together and a hugs 3 blade fan in the middle. Seeing as though, there all along the 6s and 9s and the 3 is perception,. Upside down and inside out seems to be the theme. Their only fooling themselves.

  49. May I present the human method for solving problems. If you’ve got too much of something, find something else that eats it.

    I wonder how people 100 years in the future will address the “trillions of microscopic CO2-eating robots” problem. XD

    Jokes aside, to all those pooh-poohing this as a waste of time, every step is important. From discovering a star no human will visit to generating a pointless new element for a billionth of a second, anything and everything could end up being a stepping stone to something infinitely greater.

    As a simple microbiologist, with zero experience in carbon nanotubes but just enough knowledge to understand the lingo, this article made for a good read for me. Cool stuff.

  50. Bloom box anyone? The last guy who tried this wanted con-ED prices and then dissapeared

  51. Some other guys doing some other stuff will see this and it will spark an idea. That’s what’s really cool about the internet and the truly wondrous times we live in. Say hello to Kismet for me.

  52. This is about PRODUCING electricity, not STORING it (like a battery).

  53. Isaac Daniel Shoff | June 9, 2021 at 4:57 am | Reply

    Wow that is amazing!
    I invented free electricity!
    Well free is not so true but electricity that is created from magnets that regenerate by spinning they keep there charge and never loose there magnetic charge. The magnets spin in a donut, cylinder. The magnets cause fan blades to spin generating wind! The wind makes other parts spin that creates electricity much like a windmill does! This tech I invented the spinning magnets that are on you tube that can light a light bulb is science invention!
    It is electricity to power vehicles without ever having to refuel or plug in to recharge vehicles charge while parked or driving to full capacity!
    I invented all this stuff years ago! Piece of sh*t whites set out to steal invention enter science on intro st give false credit, and as well steal and keep me from making money, and why they are whites with college degrees and I never attended college they are just piece of sh*t white people like so many whites are and monitor my namec to steal any and all inventions I have and distribute to piece of sh*t white folks!
    Enough said!
    Even invented a new way for space travel that is safe and affordable!
    They working to steal that invention too!

    • Dude, do you even know history or the basic laws of science? Electricity is generated primarily by spinning wires inside magnets or by spinning a magnet inside wires. As for your invention, it has one major flaw that is entirely fatal to the concept: the amount of energy in the universe is constant, in other words, you can’t use energy to create more energy. You spin the magnet inside your cylinder, which does generate electricity. The magnet is directly connected to a fan that blows into another fan that connects to the magnet via gear or belt system. Thanks to this thing called friction, you lose a percentage of the energy you generate as heat from moving parts and air resistance. With that being the case, if the first fan spins at 100 rpm for example, then the second would have to spin faster to keep up. And since the second fan is connected to the magnet and subsequently there first fan, the rpms would have to get higher and higher to sustain the system. This is completely and utterly impossible because a system only has the energy it started with. The only way to keep your generator functioning would be through an external energy source which completely defeats the purpose of powering itself……
      Before you make claims that you have an amazing and revolutionary idea, check your facts and concepts to make sure that they can work in the first place, and then prototype and test your design. Once you’ve done all of that, then you can make such claims because you have real evidence and real credibility that is deserving of recognition.

  54. The whole “take energy from the environment to power nano type robots” gives me forbidden West vibes lol

  55. Corrosion Engineers have utilized graphite anodes packed in calcined coke breeze for years in impressed current cathodic protection systems. The way im understanding this,, MIT has found a way to essentially convert the corrosion cell to a sacrificial anode with the right chemicals. 0.7 V is ok but think they could bump this output up a bit. Good job, MIT

  56. Ah well you know, I have no grade whatsoever in this field of research, but I read a lot of tech stuff on several tech sites that promise huge investmentopportunities, and based upon my internet research and what I hear from my cousin Jimmy who does some free courses on Carnegie Mellon, I can say this entire article is a load of BS.

  57. Who knows what applications become because of something so small. Remember, Ideas beget tomorrow’s solutions.

  58. John La Russa | June 9, 2021 at 9:10 am | Reply

    NOT the same as a lead-acid battery AT ALL! Did you fail to understand that the object being powered by a lead-acid battery has to be both be big enough to CARRY such a power source with it as well as ALWAYS be encumbered by the weight & size of the battery power source! But by this new method the object doesn’t carry any such battery with it but rather a micro- or even nano-tube containing the nano-particals that use the carbon dioxide IN THE AIR to generate the power to run the micro- or nano-tech that simply IS NOT POSSIBLE if it must carry a lead-acid battery power-source with it. Plus the lead-acid battery will run out of power eventual thus limiting the possible range & usable life-span of all things powered by a battery that are set free to roam & function independently of any ongoing human interaction whereas with this new power source & barring any defects or external damage all free-roaming tech can run forever, never running out of power as long as it always has access to carbon dioxide from the atmosphere! They could roam the planet doing whatever they were designed to do for decades or even longer without ever needing any human interaction – but battery powered objects cannot possibly have such freedom, independence, or lifespan. Batteries must be carried with you no matter what kind they are & that means more weight & additional mass to whatever they power – this is micro- to nano-sized using the carbon-dioxide in the air around us to complete the power-generating process! There is literally NO comparison between the two.

    • CreativeCircuits | June 9, 2021 at 12:25 pm | Reply

      First of all, nobody said anything about LEAD acid. By the very definition of battery this is all that it is, a chemical reaction to a solution or electrolyte to carbon. It does not matter that the carbon is made into nanotubes from hydrocarbonization techniques. The carbon will do many interesting phenomena when it is processed in different ways such as making graphene or any number of derivatives of carbon and different types of carbon. On larger scales many of us have demonstrated usable and awesome electrical production results. This technology is suppressed by big tech and the release of this tech is controlled by them and funded by them. If any of us develope anything usable it is squashed or stollen and then later released by those they fund to be at the advantage of their financial bottom line. No new tech is ever released to the masses without first exhausting all of the financial gain of the current tech.
      We unfortunately live in a world of greed that is manipulated by money and not by a benevolent mind set of human advancement or growth. Those that are in control care nothing for the benefit of the rest of us, but only how they can minimize damage to what they are making money in and how they may make more money and never release a tech that will empower those they control.

  59. This not new. At Columbia University we developed a membrane that is being used in the Hudson River to generate electricity as water flows from the river water to the Ocean’s salt water.

  60. Uncle Sam pft, Americans have all kinds of names that sound all kinds of ways, Asian Spanish Middle Eastern and you think you are smart? How many people here have invented anything of even potential use? It seem to me from what I understood from the article is that it can work with solar energy and organic materials are used. That sounds like a lot of potential. I’m not a genius but at least I’m not pretending to be one.

  61. Danny L Bradshaw | June 9, 2021 at 11:13 am | Reply

    Ok as a plan old joe how is this going to help well my electricity bill disappear the article mentioned robots,can it power a car, or are we just going to read an article and say cool

  62. CreativeCircuits | June 9, 2021 at 11:43 am | Reply

    I have been working with battery chemistry for several years now and there are several chemistries that do this with carbon. They are self charging to a certain level and structured water will also self charge without any outside input, or in the structured water models, they create what is called an exclusion zone that divides by inserting a hydrophobic/hydrophilic material and actually use infrared light to produce usable energy. This is even published in the work of Gerald Polluck and his studies of the fourth state of water. There are many of us demonstrating this phenomena that do not get any attention, yet you take some students from MIT to stumble on the works of others and they get a Nobel prize?

  63. Rampant negativity is always the best mindset for creativity and finding solutions. Oh, wait. It isn’t.

  64. It’s a new way to generate electricity. Even if it’s currently useless for practical application, it’s still a revolutionary discovery. Also, this’s form of generating electricity is able to be scaled down to extremely microscopic sizes which you definitely can’t do with lead acid or other battery types. This doesn’t use a chemical reaction of acids and metals to generate electricity like a battery does, nor does it release stored electricity that has been externally supplied like a capacitor. This is the kind of technology that can completely revolutionize the world of micro electronics. And in the future I’m sure it may even have practical uses for the general public as well.

  65. “This “packed bed” reactor generates enough energy to power a chemical reaction called an alcohol oxidation, in which an alcohol is converted to an aldehyde or a ketone. Usually, this reaction is not performed using electrochemistry because it would require too much external current.”
    I admit that I am not even close to grasping the scope of this discovery, but for those who are saying they want to see real world applications, it seems that they already showed at least one.

    • CreativeCircuits | June 9, 2021 at 12:45 pm | Reply

      As I posted before. This is not new. Many of us have demonstrated such things. There are numerous papers of people that are not MIT students that have demonstrated the very same tech.

      What is done with these publications is promote the works of those that are already bought and paid for by some big tech firm to pave the way for yet another trickle of technology to the masses. It will probably never be released to the public sector because more money can be made in the private sector off of the public. It will never be released publicly to allow the public any independence from paying for metered electricity.

      The point of the publication is not for our benefit but is merely a political and business tool for those that stand to benefit financially. We are merely manipulated by these things and led to believe the tech is new.

  66. There’s a lot this article fails to address. Firstly, I didn’t see anything addressing the major efficiency determination in that circuit, i.e. how long does the fuel last.

    Secondly, nobody mentioned how large the circuit had to be to COLLECT the energy produced. Just how large the sample fuel block size was.

    Thirdly, there’s no accounting for waste production, how it would be accumulated or disposed of, or how this could REALISTICALLY be adapted to environments and materials naturally occurring.

    It’s great that this can be done, but it’s a huge misleading leap to say that THIS could power… anything. For any period of time. Let alone sustainably. And I don’t think that’s a failing of the research, I think that’s a failing on this media outlet for hyping something up that’s in it’s earliest stages of development. Just like people did, and sometimes still do, with quantum computers.

    • CreativeCircuits | June 9, 2021 at 1:38 pm | Reply

      Leo,I do not think the article mentions anything being consumed, but merely an electron reaction to the carbon and the fluid as a medium of which the electrons are collected. So, there is no waste.

      They mention making the nano tubes of carbon in a more dense application to increase the output so this would be essentially limitless or at least to any usable level of scale.

      Yes, I would agree with you that this is a hype piece and I have already pointed out it is merely a tool to someone’s financial benefit.

      The tech is already available if you want to build your own device and with a dilegent amount of research you can find works of many of us that teach and provide ways to be energy self reliant. But unfortunately most people would prefer to pay for something someone else built or just keep paying for the metered electricity. Most people are actually dissuaded from reliable sources of proven tech by those big tech suppressors with their techniques of using Newton’s laws to paint anyone not in their pocket as fraudulent.

      So, unless you have the knowledge or understanding of chemistry and battery tech or electrical engineering, most will be kept in the dark and control buble of those that use their money power to their own advantage.

      There is only one way that Truth and growth without enslavement or control can happen and that is when money does not have any role in science and technology.

  67. If I may humbly submit that the larger point is the small size this new design lends itself to.

    And the use of chemicals that are far less toxic than using a rayovac to power a tiny device.

    For instance, you don’t want a microscopic device floating around your body powered by a lead acid battery- no matter how small. It is asking to powering a submarine with a steam engine… True, more work needs to be done with some of the chemicals involved.

    But if we are ever to combat disease and age related organ failures, we need a battery that can function at below the microscopic level of cells.

    As such, this looks promising.

    No one said you will be starting your car or powering your Tesla with this discovery.

    The push is urgent and needed if we are to deal with many diseases, disorders and birth defects, especially aming those of us whom are aging.

    Last I checked, that was everyone.

    Perhaps this will go nowhere, but one must move a lot of coal to find a diamond. This is akin to Edison and his team learning 1,000 ways to make a light bulb- that does not work.

    I council patience for everyone and encouragement for these designers and researchers at MIT.

  68. Geoffrey Bailey | June 9, 2021 at 10:33 pm | Reply

    I’m disappointed at some of the lousy comments here. I can’t tell what this will produce, but I’m willing to give it more time. The most important part of the article is here:

    “In future work, Strano hopes to use this kind of energy generation to build polymers using only carbon dioxide as a starting material. In a related project, he has already created polymers that can regenerate themselves using carbon dioxide as a building material, in a process powered by solar energy. This work is inspired by carbon fixation, the set of chemical reactions that plants use to build sugars from carbon dioxide, using energy from the sun.”

    There is a difference between what can be created in a lab and what will work in real life. The people behind these projects should be given a chance to prove what they can do before people write them off.

  69. Luckily, most of my fellow commenters are more intelligent than the MIT researchers making these discoveries, and have debunked this academic hucksterism! Thank goodness for the Einsteins in the peanut gallery steering us straight.

    I’m personally excited to see where this new discovery takes technology. If you risk reading far enough, they share ideas for real world applications.

    PS. this discovery != a battery

  70. I know things is a bad idea for once.tanning deny from the environment. That statement alone suggest that these guys ate too intelligentgo be doing what they think they are trying to do. Do how will the environment keep up with energizing it’s self.if we’re taking the energy to power these robots from it.number two.with AI on the verge of almost as stupid takung energy for our environment( without even askig we the people) Artificial (made fake not real) intelligence ( knowledge. Smart) come on guys. Wtf is happening on this planet. Nothing but some people with devrees f’ing up tje world

  71. This is to power micro robots. Nano technology is improving.. This will not power the world. But will improve like all new invention. The electric companies are greedy filthy companies that do not care about anything but profits. All fuels and electricity should be minimum cost.. The taxes should be none..gas electric. Tobacco spirits.should have no tax. But such things will never happen. With all the greedy filthy politicians..

  72. Sound like bio gel packs from Star Trek

  73. We might finally have a power source for the Gates vaccine chip. Now all we need is a nano antenna that can transmit worldwide.

  74. A ZPM ALSO KNOWN AS A ZERO POINT MODULE IN SCI-FI STAR GATE.

  75. Aleksandr Vasilenko | June 22, 2021 at 10:05 pm | Reply

    Interesting indeed! Most comments left are either confused people thinking it’s a very poor battery or trolls that just want to spam.

    The amount of electricity generated is extremely tiny, yes, but the concept is amazing! Not sure what the applications can be, but if studied more I am sure someone will find something! Tiny sensors that need enough power to perform a simple scan and transmit some data wirelessly.

  76. N jacobinbaraj | January 4, 2022 at 7:08 am | Reply

    Very nice to hear about latest technological ideas

  77. Rickee Ricardo Reyes | September 25, 2022 at 6:00 am | Reply

    I agree with Matthew B.
    Most comments are know it all know, with nothing else to bring to the table. Magnets are environment’s cleanest “battery”, that lasts the longest. I’ve added them to gravity to spin a turbine in my recently conceptualized system.
    Tesla believed we MIGHT figure out how to use either gravity or magnetism alone to power machinery.
    This system could go in your ev trunk, though you won’t have much space. My guess is a home version would look like a silo. Approximately 8 ft around and 12 ft high. Guessing 100-300 watts continously.
    Be well.

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