Every step you take has the possibility to create energy – if you’re walking on the right kind of floor.
Material science researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered how to build wood flooring material that converts the pressure of your feet on the floor into eletricity.
Xudong Wang, an associate professor of materials science and engineering who leads the reaserch told Business Insider that the science behind this technologyu is pretty simple. The floor is made out of pressed wood pulp, which is separated into a series of small layers that have different electrical charges. Each layer is less than a milimeter thick and has small spaces between each one of them. When people walk over them, their wheight causes the layers to be pressed against each other.
““Basically if we have two different materials that have different abilities to attract electrons, then once we put them together electrons will transfer from one to the other,” Wang says.
In other words, the fact that the layers are chemically treated to have different charges makes the eletrons flow naturally from one layer to the other as soon as they get in touch, generating charges. So, when the layers separate, the eletrons tries to correct this imbalance and get back to where they just left.
This movement between different atoms is, by definition, an electric current. To store this electricity, the wood floor forces the eletrons to pass through an external circuit as it returns to correct the imbalance of charges.
This kind of energy is known as “triboeletricity” and is created when material with different charges rub against other materials. It’s the same thing that happens when our clothes produce static electricity.
Wang says that the material can currently produce a few milliwatts by step, so it would be more effective if used in places with high traffic of people, suchj as shopping malls, stadiums and subway stations.
Even though the floor doesn’t produce energy to supply an entire building, Wang estimates that if 80 thousand people in a stadium dive one step each, this would generate enough energy to feed more than 100 spotlights in the same stadium. And future versions of the floor will probably increase the quantity of layers so they can get even more energy.
The scientists chose to make the material from wood pulp, a material that contains tiny cellulose fibers that can be chemically treated to generate electric charges. Cellulose is a organic compound that is in plants’ cells and is frequently used as food additive.
Wood pulp is a pretty cheap material, so Wang believes that the price of this electric floor will not be more than 20% of the traditional wood floors.
The next step for the team is to build a floor between 15 and 30 m², that Wang estimates will be ready until the end of this semester. The sample they have now has only 30 cn², but he is confident that bigger versions will not be hard to build.
“Our approach is very gradual. It’s just a chemical process and wood panel pressing”, says Wang. “So those approaches are — I would say — commercially ready for the larger scale.”
Wang believes that the product is a complement to solar panels, another form of renewable energy that generates energy from solar beams. But he affirms that the wood floor is even better than the solar panels, since they can generate energy at moment of the day.
“If people are walking on it they won’t feel the difference,” he says, “and if you look at it, it will just look like a floor.”
Leave A Comment