High-power electrokinetic energy conversion in a glass microchannel array

Abstract

The electrokinetic conversion of flow work to electricity using a glass microchannel array coated with nano-layers of gold that serve as electrodes on both its ends was studied and a maximum power output of 1 mW at an efficiency of 1.3% is reported. The establishment of such a high power generation capability in combination with a low pressure drop (26 kPa) makes this electrokinetic work conversion device more practical than those previously reported in literature.

A Filter Paper‐Based Nanogenerator via Water‐Drop Flow

“…[16] In addition, the as-harvested energy has various resources, such as wind, [17][18][19] heat energy, [20,21] solar power, [22] vibration, [23,24] mechanical energy, [25] electromagnetic waves, [26] chemical energy, [27] and water energy. [11,28,29] Therein, the nanogengerator induced from water-flow [30][31][32][33][34] and water evaporation [29,35] is a majority part of the water energy nanogenerator. Generally, the energy-produced principle from water-flow and water evaporation could be divided into two categories according to the surface properties of the nanogenerator.…”

Capillary transport of two immiscible fluids in presence of electroviscous retardation

“…This observation is termed as the electroviscous retardation, reported for both single phase and multiphase processes [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. On the upside, the generation of an streaming potential may be tapped to convert the fluid mechanical energy into electrical energy -the efficiency of this process is termed as the electrokinetic energy conversion efficiency [18,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. The fact that the presence of a lower conducting phase could be exploited to obtain an enhanced streaming current has been demonstrated on a lab-on-a-chip platform [39].…”

Microfluidic energy conversion device : by application of two phase flow

“…[13] By using EDL overlap, maximal efficiencies of nanodluidic devices were theoretically predicted to be 12%. However, due to surface conductance [31], the position of electrodes [21], surface chemistry and other reasons [32,33], it has not been achieved experimentally.…”

“…[18] b. glass microchannel array consisting of an array of 3. 4×10 5 circular microchannels, each with a pore diameter of 10 μm, with its two faces coated with a 100 nm layer of gold [21] With the developing micro/nanofluidic technology, where it is possible to obtain quite high surface to volume ratio devices, the energy conversion from the streaming current came back in the researchers sight. Many experiments and theories have been developed during the last decades.…”

“…By decreasing the resistance and the capacitance of the whole system, the electrical output power of a device with a 10 m diameter pore array ( Figure 3b) can reach one milliWatt and an energy conversion efficiency of 1.3%. [14,21,24] …”