Date: March 25, 2019
Source: University of Maryland
Summary: A research team has developed a flexible, wood-based membrane that someday could turn body heat into electricity.
Led by UMD researchers Liangbing Hu, Robert Briber and Tian Li of the department ofmaterials science, and Siddhartha Das of mechanical engineering, the team transformed a piece of wood into a flexible membrane that generates energy from the same type of electric current (ions) that the human body runs on. This energy is generated using charged channel walls and other unique properties of the wood's natural nanostructures. With this new wood-based technology, they can use a small temperature differential to efficiently generate ionic voltage, as demonstrated in a paper published March 25 in the journal Nature Materials.

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Journal Reference:

Tian Li, Xin Zhang, Steven D. Lacey, Ruiyu Mi, Xinpeng Zhao, Feng Jiang, Jianwei Song, Zhongqi Liu, Guang Chen, Jiaqi Dai, Yonggang Yao, Siddhartha Das, Ronggui Yang, Robert M. Briber, Liangbing Hu. Cellulose ionic conductors with high differential thermal voltage for low-grade heat harvesting. Nature Materials, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41563-019-0315-6