Bye, Solar: Cheap Electricity-Producing Wood Floors Could Power Future Homes

With more and more people changing their lifestyles to better suit the environment, some of which have left their big houses for off-grid living, there has been an increasing demand for innovative ways to generate energy without harming the planet. A team of researchers has developed a new technology that lets the wooden floors in a house generate electricity.

According to the study published in the journal Nano Energy, Xudong Wang, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and grad student Chunhua Yao have created a simple and cheap method of producing electricity from footsteps.

The wood flooring uses wood pulp, which contains cellulose nanofibers. By undergoing a chemical treatment, these nanofibers could produce an electrical charge when they come in contact with nanofibers that have not undergone the said chemical treatment. The nanofibers can produce energy enough for charging or lighting up a house.

The wood floors work by harnessing energy through a triboelectric nanogenerator, which produces electricity from mechanical energy sources.

Apart from having electrical charge, what makes this study unique is that the material used, wood pulp, is extremely cheap and could be found almost anywhere, unlike other more expensive materials and nonrecycable materials.

“We’ve been working a lot on harvesting energy from human activities. One way is to build something to put on people, and another way is to build something that has constant access to people. The ground is the most-used place," Wang said in a news release form the university.

The study notes that floors that always have heavy traffic, such as stadiums and malls, could use this technology in the future to create energy. Wang is currently planning to build a high-scale phototype of the electricity-profucing wooden panel to introduce to the public the concept of generating energy from footsteps.

“Our initial test in our lab shows that it works for millions of cycles without any problem. We haven’t converted those numbers into year of life for a floor yet, but I think with appropriate design it can definitely outlast the floor itself," Wang said.