by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office Cambridge MA (SPX) Jan 14, 2013
MIT engineers have created a new polymer film that can generate
electricity by drawing on a ubiquitous source: water vapor. The
new material changes its shape after absorbing tiny amounts of
evaporated water, allowing it to repeatedly curl up and down.
Harnessing this continuous motion could drive robotic limbs or
generate enough electricity to power micro- and nanoelectronic
devices, such as environmental sensors. "With a sensor powered
by a battery, you have to replace it periodically. If you have
this device, you can harvest energy from the environment so you
don't have to replace it very often," says Mingming Ma, a
postdoc at MIT's David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer
Research and lead author of a paper describing the new material
in the Jan. 11 issue of Science. "We are very excited about this
new material, and we expect as we achieve higher efficiency in
converting mechanical energy into electricity, this material
will find even