Daniel Kwok, an engineering professor at the University of Alberta, said Monday he has been inundated with e-mails and media calls from around the globe. "I've been getting phone calls from all over the world, like London, Australia, Asia-Pacific, the U.S.," Kwok said. "I was surprised. I was not expecting it to be like that."
Fellow inventor Larry Kostiuk, chairman of the mechanical engineering department, was in Los Angeles recently, doing interviews with U.S. networks, Kwok said.
The discovery was announced in a research paper by Kwok and Kostiuk. The paper appeared Monday in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, published by the London-based Institute of Physics.
With the help of two graduate students, the two professors were able to light a small bulb by simply squeezing a syringe of ordinary tap water through a glass "filter" with microscopic-sized holes they call microchannels.
They invented their "electrokinetic" water battery by harnessing the natural energy that is created on a very tiny scale when a flowing liquid meets a solid surface, creating an electrical charge. Water forced through a microchannel results in the movement of positive and negatives ions in such a way that one end becomes positive and the other negative.
The inventors are particularly excited by the fact the electricity is produced cleanly and involves no moving parts.
The discovery could in a matter of years lead to batteries for everyday items such as cellphones and calculators being powered by pressurized water.
Because theoretically there is nothing to prevent the technology from being scaled up, it could eventually lead to larger power production, although that would require huge bodies of water to work on a commercial scale, Kostiuk said.
Kwok said not only has he received correspondence from academics already offering suggestions for the research, it appears to have captured the public imagination as well - judging from the many congratulatory e-mails from individuals.
"Everybody knows about electricity and everybody knows about water. . . It really caught public attention because . . . nobody has been able to come up with a new method of generating electricity for the last 160 years."
There may be medical applications as well, he said.
But the professors know they are just on the cusp of a new field of knowledge.
Much work needs to be done to understand the new power source and how it can be developed. "I see it as pioneering work," Kwok said.
Hydroelectricity is created by converting the kinetic energy of falling water to electrical energy through a turbine and a generator.
Kostiuk and Kwok's discovery uses the potential energy of the microscopic interaction between the liquid and the solid to directly produce electricity.
Although the power generated from a single cell is extremely small, millions of parallel channels can be used to increase the output.
In electromagnetic induction (discovered by Michael Faraday in 1831), electricity is produced by the interaction of an electric conductor with a magnetic field. The process is used in electric generators.
The university moved quickly to apply for a patent and has been working with the scientists to develop commercial strategies.
Major electricity breakthroughs:
1800: Allesandro Volta discovers electrochemical effect, used in batteries.
1821: Thomas Seebeck discovers Seebeck effect, used in thermoelectric generators.
1831: Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction, used in electric generators.
1839: Edmond Becquerel discovers photovoltaic effect, used in solar cells.
1839: Sir William Grove discovers proton exchange membranes used in fuel cells.
2002: Larry Kostiuk and Daniel Kwok discover electrokinetic effect, could lead to pressurized water battery and other uses.