Singapore scientists just made it possible to get electricity from every raindrop

Turns out, your next source of electricity might just be rain power.

Scientists in Singapore have figured out how to turn single raindrops into electricity.

No, it’s not science fiction; this clever system uses gravity, water, and a bit of stainless steel to light things up.

And while it’s not powering entire cities (yet), it’s a big step toward clean energy from the clouds.

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Companies around the world have been finding innovative ways to create clean energy.

For example, this Swiss company came up with an idea that could power 300,000 homes with train tracks.

Now, a group of Singaporean scientists has turned their attention to a simple solution: rain power.

The research is led by Siowling Soh, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore.

It is a very basic idea: take water falling through a tube, and turn it into electricity.

Most similar systems rely on large volumes of water moving fast, like ships that use giant blades to make electricity out of ocean currents.

This new method focuses on individual droplets, like raindrops, and harnesses the charge created when water flows over a surface.

Here’s how it works: water droplets fall from a container through a narrow vertical tube, about 32 centimeters tall and 2 millimeters wide.

As the droplets hit the tube, they trap bits of air and fall in a kind of broken, ‘plug flow’ style instead of as a continuous stream.

This quirky flow seems to help the water’s electrical charge separate more efficiently.

Wires at the top and bottom of the tube then collect the electricity.

One of these tubes produced 440 microwatts, which is not massive, but enough to be noticed.

When four tubes were used together, the team managed to power 12 LED lights for 20 seconds using just rain power.

While that’s not exactly grid-scale energy, the efficiency was the real surprise.

The system converted more than 10 percent of the falling water’s energy into electricity, which is thousands of times better than earlier similar experiments.

So what’s the big deal about rain power? Soh says it’s all about untapped potential.

“Rain falls from a few kilometers up in the sky,” he points out.

“So there’s a lot of room in three-dimensional space to harvest rain energy.”

That means rooftops, buildings, and maybe even umbrellas could one day become tiny power stations.

While we’re still a way off from charging your phone with a rain shower, this tech shows how even the smallest drop can make a difference.

This is similar to another idea conceived by a Canadian company, which came up with a system to generate electricity using a waterwheel.

Who knew clean energy could be as simple as getting caught in the rain?

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