We all know the steam engine, which is actually a heat engine: the heated water vapor (think wood wagons carrying the old trains), it expands and moves a piston that moves the wheels.
Now US researchers they succeeded for the first time to operate a machine, a small toy car, with the energy produced during evaporation.
The base system is a bacterial spores, which act as a muscle or as a piston .
According to the researchers explained in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications , these spores swell when the humidity increases and shrinks when it becomes drier.
This capacity, observed by the researcher Ozgur Sahin, offers the ability to push and pull objects with a higher energy density than other materials used for these tasks in engineering.
With this system, the study’s authors created various devices to show the ability of his idea of harnessing the energy of evaporation.
One such example is a wheel formed by spores attached to plastic strips. Half of the wheel is maintained in a dry environment, making the spores to shrink and plastic tapes to bend, causing a jerk, while the other half is placed in a humid environment it makes spores swell and tapes stretch.
With the toggle mechanism, as if it were a muscle that contracts and stretches, the wheel keeps moving. Then joining the mechanism to a dolly, you can create a kind of car in miniature.
The idea of the researchers is to improve the mechanism to implement it on a larger scale and use it to produce electricity generators of floating electricity.
“Evaporation is a fundamental force of nature is everywhere and is more potent than other forces like wind or waves,” said Sahin, University of Columbia.
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