Moisture-based green energy harvesting over 600 hours via photocatalysis-enhanced hydrovoltaic effect

Peng Duan, Chenxing Wang, Yinpeng Huang, Chunqiao Fu, Xulei Lu, Yong Zhang, Yuming Yao, Lei Chen, Qi-Chang He, Linmao Qian and Tingting Yang ()
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Peng Duan: Southwest Jiaotong University
Chenxing Wang: Southwest Jiaotong University
Yinpeng Huang: Southwest Jiaotong University
Chunqiao Fu: Southwest Jiaotong University
Xulei Lu: Southwest Jiaotong University
Yong Zhang: Southwest Jiaotong University
Yuming Yao: Southwest Jiaotong University
Lei Chen: Southwest Jiaotong University
Qi-Chang He: Southwest Jiaotong University
Linmao Qian: Southwest Jiaotong University
Tingting Yang: Southwest Jiaotong University

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Harvesting the energy from the interaction between hygroscopic materials and atmospheric water can generate green and clean energy. However, the ion diffusion process of moisture-induced dissociation leads to the disappearance of the ion concentration gradient gradually, and there is still a lack of moisture-based power generation devices with truly continuous operation, especially the duration of the current output still needs to be extended. Here, we propose a design for reconstructing the ion concentration gradient by coupling photocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction with hydrovoltaic effect, to report a moisture-enabled electric generator (MEG) with continuous current output. We show that the introduction of the photocatalytic layer not only absorbs light energy to greatly increase the power generation of the MEG (500% power density enhancement), but more importantly, the photocatalytic hydrogen evolution process consumes the pre-stacked ions to restore the ion concentration gradient, allowing the MEG to continuously output current for more than 600 hours, which is 1 to 2 orders of magnitude higher than the great majority of existed MEGs in terms of the current output duration.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-55516-z

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