588251 external_news 1488569488 1488577132 If you’ve ever rubbed a balloon against your head to make your hair stand on end, you’ve experienced triboelectricity. Researchers at Georgia Tech are now putting such electricity—which is really just an electric charge generated by friction—to good use: They’re using triboelectricity to drive the ionization of molecules in a mass spectrometer.
Materials scientist Zhong Lin Wang, mass spectrometrist Facundo M. Fernández, and coworkers replace the high-voltage power supplies that usually drive ionization with devices called triboelectric nanogenerators, or TENGs. The researchers published their findings in Nature Nanotechnology. Wang and Fernandez are professors in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. 

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