CHINA – One of the great challenges of renewable energy, is to be able to achieve higher efficiency of stored – obtain larger amounts energy with available resources.  Solar energy, for example, has the great problem where when a solar panel is installed in low light, the generation will be negligible.

Since in areas where the weather is bad in terms of hours of sunshine is usual rain, the solution cannot be more complementary. A group of researchers in China have come up with a solution to this by using graphene. They discovered that, in addition to photovoltaics, adding a thin layer of graphene of one atom thick on the solar panel can generate energy from raindrops.

In this case, when there is water, graphene joins electrons with positively charged ions. The salt separated rainwater in calcium, sodium and ammonium, which makes graphene and natural water a great combination to transform energy.

To achieve this, it takes advantage that water has high adhesion to the layer of graphene.  This makes a dual layer being formed with graphene electrons, which is also known as pseudocapacitor.  The energy difference between these layers is so great that electricity is generated, and the best thing is that it can be stored.

 Layers, with the reaction of ions generated in the laboratory lot of microvolts, obtained an energy conversion efficiency of 6.53%, which is already more than what had been achieved so far.

Since the concentration of salts in rainwater is lower than they have tested in a controlled manner, the future goal is to improve the use of different ions.