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Researchers at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, Mechanical department here have generated electricity from clothes drying in natural ambience.
The research was done at a 'dhobi ghat' using 50 wet clothes with a surface
area of 3,000 square meters which was put for drying by washermen in a remote
village.
The clothes were connected to a commercial super-capacitor. In
the process, the researchers were able to reliably charge up to around 10 volts
in almost 24 hours. This stored energy is enough to glow a white LED for more
than 1 hour.
Speaking to ANI Professor Suman Chakraborty of Mechanical
Engineering Department, IIT Kharagpur said: "We have done very significant
consistent research to figure out that this is indeed a possible phenomenon and
developed a technology to source electricity from clothes drying in open space.
This power may not be used for large scale application but is good enough to
change the lives of a rural community."
Demonstrating the research
Professor Chakraborty said: "Clothes are illusively complex, if we look into a
cloth we will see that it is made of a very complex yet regular structure of
cellulose fibers. These cellulose fibers have certain charges in their walls.
Now if you immerse a piece of cloth in a salt solution and have transpiration by
surface tension then the salt solution will flow and ionise as it moves along
the different passages of the cellulose fibers. The movement of ions in a
continuous process generates a continuous voltage. If connected to an external
register and can generate small power."
The low-cost technique for
electricity generation is in huge demand and till now people have used pressure
gradient for migrating the ions from any channels or any devices.
"Now we
have developed a technique where we have used a surface energy of the device in
order to drive the liquid through the device and also we have utilized the
evaporation from the surface so that we get the continuous migration of the
ions," said PhD scholar Sankha Shuvra Das of Mechanical Engineering Department,
IIT Kharagpur.
He further said that for the first time a cloth-based
device has been developed. "The root area of the cloth is in contact with the
liquid solution and due to the surface tension of the cloth, it is basically
driving the ions in a forward direction or in a downstream direction."
"After some time when the surface gets saturated with the liquid we connect a
nanovolt meter probe and the electricity is generated," he added.
"We
observed that from a single unit of such devices we are able to get 500 to 700
millivolts. We further have upscale these devices may be up to 40 or 60 unit and
have connected those devices in a series and parallel connection. From this
experiment we observed that that from that 40-50connection we are able to
generate 12 to 13 volts electric potential," Das said.
The IIT research team is planning to implement this technology to
remote areas where the availability of electricity is a major concern.
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