World First Evaporation-driven Engine created, Harvesting Power from Vapours The clean energy sources have got an addition on their list, with the researches at the University of Columbia devising the world's first evaporation-driven engine that runs by harvesting energy from the evaporating water. The study published in the journal Nature Communications today employed the bacterial spores to harness this energy.

Peter Fratzl, biomaterial researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, stated," This is not the first time that evaporation energy has been captured, but it is the first time that it has been done a scale where objects could be moved. The work pushes a great idea all the way into a practical demonstration of the potential".

The technology has been developed by a team of bioengineers led by Ozgur Sahin at Columbia University by making use of the property of bacterial spores, which swell upon absorption of water and contract when they lose water.

When billions of these spores were glued together on several plastic tapes called HYDRAs (hygroscopic-driven artificial muscles), their movement was used to create energy that powered an engine which could run LED lights and even drive a miniature car!

Sahin informed that his system could be hundreds times cheaper to build per unit area than solar tapping, and the engine costs less than $5 to build.

Fratzl further asserted that this is a very impressive breakthrough as the engine is essentially harvesting useful amounts of energy from the infinitely small and naturally occurring gradients near the surface of water. The best fact is that these tiny temperature gradients exist everywhere, even in some of the most remote places on Earth.