A new material creates clean electricity from the air around it

Researchers recently constructed a material capable of generating near constant electricity from just the ambient air around it—thus possibly laying the groundwork for a new, virtually unlimited source of sustainable, renewable energy. In doing so, and building upon their past innovations, they now claim almost any surface could potentially be turned into a generator via replicating the electrical properties of storm cloud, According to a new study published today with Advanced Materials, engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have demonstrated a novel “air generator” (Air-gen) film that relies on microscopic holes smaller than 100 nanometers across—less than a thousandth the width of a single human hair. The holes’ incredibly small diameters rely on what’s known as a “mean free path,” which is the distance a single molecule can travel before colliding with another molecule of the same substance.