Raindrops falling on my head
Mar. 4th, 2008 by Al 
The last few days where I stay have experienced some rainy weather, make me think of rain power.We talk about solar and wind power, why not rain?If we are to harness natural power of our environment and turn them into energy, we should not discount this source.
In a study by a physics journal shown by authors Romain Guigon, Thomas Jager, Ghislain Despesse and Jean-Jacques Chaillout, write about how it is possible to recover energy from the impact of a raindrop of water.To measure such energy, they built a rain catcher which would allow them to control the amount of water falling on top of a piezoelectric material, in this case made out of polyvinylidene fluoride. A piezoelectric material is a material that is able to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy . Their results were interesting: slow falling droplets produce more energy than high falling droplets, and as you’d expect, the larger the water droplet, the more energy that was generated.
The total amount of energy recovered was not much as 1 droplet can generate only between 1 microwatt to 12 milliwatts.It’s not going to power up anything much but the research seems promising as piezoelectric technology is still new .Remember what they once said about solar energy.
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