Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a floorboard made from wood pulp that conducts enough energy to charge batteries or turn on lights when it is stepped on.
Associate professor Xudong Wang, graduate student Chunhua Yao and their collaborators chemically treated wood pulp fibers, which create an electrical charge when they come into contact with untreated fibers.
“So once we put these two materials together, electrons move from one to another based on their different electron affinity,” Wang says in a university news release.
Not only can wood pulp floorboards provide an alternative source of energy, but they also use a cheap and plentiful material, making the product life cycle ecologically sound.
After he fine-tunes the technology, Wang wants to test the energy-producing floorboards on the UW-Madison campus.
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