Trees and Electricity

By Liliana Usvat
Blog 229-365

Trees produce electricity and can give if out - it appears that trees resonate at 7.8 Hz like soil and out brains - so trees must have some balancing function.

A team from QUT’s International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health (ILAQH), led by Professor Lidia Morawska, and including Dr. Rohan Jayaratne and Dr. Xuan Ling, ran experiments in six locations all over Brisbane and found that positive and negative ion concentrations in the air were twice as high in heavily wooded areas than in open grassy areas, such as parks.

In 1891, Nikola Tesla gave a lecture for the members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York City, where he made a striking demonstration. In each hand he held a gas discharge tube, an early version of the modern fluorescent bulb. The tubes were not connected to any wires, but nonetheless they glowed brightly during his demonstration. Tesla explained to the awestruck attendees that the electricity was being transmitted through the air by the pair of metal sheets which sandwiched the stage. He went on to speculate how one might increase the scale of this effect to transmit wireless power and information over a broad area, perhaps even the entire Earth. As was often the case, Tesla's audience was engrossed but bewildered.

 Other Experiments

Connecting electrodes driven into a tree trunk and the ground nearby can provide a current. But last year Andreas Mershin's team at MIT showed that using electrodes made of the same metal also gives a current, meaning another effect must be at work. Mershin thinks the electricity derives from a difference in pH between the tree and the soil, a chemical imbalance maintained by the tree's metabolic processes.

Trees seem capable of providing a constant voltage of anywhere between 20 and a few hundred millivolts – way below the 1.5 volts from a standard AA battery and close to the level of background electrical noise in circuits.

We can  to obtain a usable voltage from big-leaf maple trees by adding a device called a voltage boost converter. The converter spends most of its time in a kind of stand-by mode as it stores electrical energy from the tree, periodically releasing it at 1.1 volts.

Trees could power gadgets to monitor their own physiology or their immediate surroundings, for ecological research. 

Energy harvested from trees can power sensors that monitor temperature and humidity inside forests. It is done in Canton, Massachusetts.

Links

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/tesla/lostjournals/lostjournals07.htm