Using Hamsters to Produce Electricity

Researchers from Georgia Tech are currently working on an invention that may very well change the way in which we generally produce electricity. They are attempting to create a technology that would allow even hamsters to produce electrical current, while running on their little wheels with so much speed. The tiny animals seem to never get tired of doing that, and their perseverance is what has given scientists the idea to try this new invention. The prototype is completely scalable, so we could see current-producing clothing made for humans within 3 years.

The device that “powers” the hamster is fairly simple in design, but extremely complicated as far as the technology composing it goes. It looks like a jacket of sorts, very little and very yellow. It's woven out of thousands upon thousands of electricity-inducing fibers, all of them about 50 times smaller in diameter than a human strand of hair.

The team behind the project has announced that a human version could be ready within 3 years exactly because the only difference between the hamster jacket and the human one is its size. Other than that, the basic principles and construction techniques are the same.

According to preliminary tests, such a jacket built for the average human could potentially power up an iPod for as long as it takes. Also, other gadgets, such as PDAs and mobile phones, could benefit from the innovation as well, and all these efforts would translate into a smaller strain placed by the average individual on the regular power grid. Electrical plants would no longer have to produce energy as such high levels, and so the level of greenhouse gases they emit would considerably decrease.

“This can totally be scaled up. This is just the first step. The idea is that we would harvest energy from any body movement, from walking, breathing, from any kind of vibration,” GT researcher Zhong Lin Wang, who is also the co-author of a new study detailing the find that has been published in the March issue of the scientific journal Nano Letters, explains.

“Current power sources are large or antiquated to be implanted into biological systems and don't take advantage of the low power consumption. But if you can harvest that energy from the environment or body movement, you can have a self-powered nano system, providing not only energy for itself but for other devices as well,” Zhong adds, while providing particluars on the basic operating principles of the new class of devices.