April 25, 2024

Reggie Dao

11th Grade

Fountain Valley High School

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, there have been several ways of producing energy to fuel our daily resources. Although the introduction of fossil fuels and manufactured energy is still prominent in the market, we’ve turned ourselves toward more natural sources of energy. Currently, society is leaning more towards a wide variety of renewable gasses ranging from solar power, wind power, and hydropower. Specifically for solar power technology, the strategy of collecting energy from the rain has been applied to fuel the electricity in today’s houses. But what exactly is rain energy? Rain energy is a small amount of energy that can be transformed into electricity combined with solar panels, providing kinetic energy from the water constantly moving and dripping down. We can continue to benefit from these new sources of renewable energy, and rain energy is a source that can assist with the solar power industry.

Our world of scientists and engineers looks forward to beautifying and improving the health of our Earth, trying to use all of nature we can find instead of producing artificial, and unhealthy practices to produce electricity. However, the power of only the sun may not be sufficient by itself when it comes to the invention of solar panels, which is why rain energy is beneficial to come into the picture. But, the difficulty of collecting these small droplets of fast, moving water can be hard to manage or develop. This is why a device called a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is an invention made to collect energy from the rain to assist with charging power to buildings. It utilizes liquid-solid contact electrification, sucking up all the energy from the rain and implementing all of it into the solar panels, converting it into energy that can be used for electricity. TENG can be helpful when it comes to collecting rain energy, but with an alteration of it, D-TENG is even more capable of harvesting the hydro from the rain. This specific renewal of an invention allows multiple TENGs to connect, lowering the electricity output. Through multiple D-TENGS laid out on solar panels, it can benefit the Earth’s climate change problem and still efficiently fuel houses the way non-renewable sources do. 

Rain energy is not a common use of energy, coming from its small size and it being difficult to harvest energy from it. But as years go on and nonrenewable sources tend to destroy our Earth, the reliance on rain energy can increase when it comes to fueling our buildings. It’s good to consider rain energy as a great source, being renewable and providing us with the energy that we need.