新技術能用雨滴發電

Tapping into the water cycle and generating electricity from rainy days could be one way to grow our renewable energy use.

利用水循環在雨天發電可以成爲利用可再生能源的方法。

Until now, scientists have been unable to get water droplets to produce a significant amount of power - but we may finally have a breakthrough.

科學家到目前爲止還不能利用水滴大量發電，但我們可能終於有所突破了。

While we're still a long way from umbrellas that double up as generators, the latest approach shows there might be a way to get power from rain showers at a level of efficiency that makes these systems practical.

雖然我們還不能把雨傘變成發電機，但最新的方法表明可能有了利用雨水發電的有效可行的方法。

New research has found a method that could generate enough power from a single droplet of rain to light up 100 LED bulbs. That's a big jump forward in efficiency, in the region of several thousand times.

新的研究發現了一種方法，用1滴雨發的電能點亮100個LED燈泡。效率大大提高了，大約是以前的幾千倍。

"Our research shows that a drop of 100 microlitres of water released from a height of 15 centimetres [5.9 inches] can generate a voltage of over 140V, and the power generated can light up 100 small LED lights," says biomedical engineer Wang Zuankai from the City University of Hong Kong (CityU).

香港城市大學生物醫學工程師王鑽開說：“我們的研究表明從15釐米（5.9英寸）高的地方滴下的100微升的水發電量超過140V，能點亮100個小的LED燈。”

That sounds like a surprising amount of voltage, but the engineers used some ingenious tricks to make it happen.

這發電量聽起來驚人，但工程師爲此使用了一些巧妙的技巧。

Scientists have been looking into this type of power production for years, but the physics of converting the energy of raindrops into electricity are much harder to do than harvesting the energy from a rising tide or a flowing stream.

科學家近些年一直在研究這種發電方法，但把雨滴的能量轉化爲電能的物理學難度比利用漲潮或流水發電高得多。

There's plenty of work still to do to get this ready for practical use however, with the researchers hoping to have a prototype ready in the next five years.

但要真正投入使用，還有大量工作要做，研究人員希望在未來五年能做出一個樣品。