![]() Those electrons can be drawn out by submerging the particles in a solvent that is hungry for electrons. They found that when part of a nanotube is coated with a Teflon-like polymer, it creates an asymmetry that makes it possible for electrons to flow from the coated to the uncoated part of the tube, generating an electrical current. That work led Strano and his students to uncover a related feature of carbon nanotubes. In 2010, Strano demonstrated, for the first time, that carbon nanotubes can generate "thermopower waves." When a carbon nanotube is coated with layer of fuel, moving pulses of heat, or thermopower waves, travel along the tube, creating an electrical current. The new discovery grew out of Strano's research on carbon nanotubes-hollow tubes made of a lattice of carbon atoms, which have unique electrical properties. Other authors include former graduate student Anton Cottrill, postdocs Amir Kaplan and Hyunah Kim, graduate student Ge Zhang, and recent MIT graduates Rafid Mollah and Yannick Eatmon. The lead authors of the study are MIT graduate student Albert Tianxiang Liu and former MIT researcher Yuichiro Kunai. Strano is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications. In a new study describing this phenomenon, the researchers showed that they could use this electric current to drive a reaction known as alcohol oxidation-an organic chemical reaction that is important in the chemical industry. This allows you to do electrochemistry, but with no wires." ![]() "This technology is intriguing because all you have to do is flow a solvent through a bed of these particles. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. "This mechanism is new, and this way of generating energy is completely new," says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. The liquid, an organic solvent, draws electrons out of the particles, generating a current that could be used to drive chemical reactions or to power micro- or nanoscale robots, the researchers say. ![]()
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