Molecular thermal motion harvester for electricity conversion

Abstract

Molecular thermal motion has been studied but yet never been utilized as an energy source. In this work, we demonstrate that the energy of liquid molecular thermal motion can be converted into electrical energy by a novel harvesting device, the molecular thermal motion harvester (MTMH). The MTMH was made by using two ZnO-based nano-arrays and one of which was gold coated to form a Schottky junction. The assembled electrodes were immersed in different liquid phase environments. The device was demonstrated to convert the molecule thermal energy of the liquid into a continuous and stable electric current. The output voltage and current can achieve 2.28 mV and 2.47 nA, respectively, and increase with the liquid temperatures. This strategy opens new insights into the development of mini- and micro-scale energy sources, and it can be expected the MTMH will have broad applications in the future.