Canadian researchers have discovered a new way to generate electricity -- something that nobody in the scientific world has been able to accomplish since Michael Faraday in 1839.

Even though the process is still barely more than a baby on the laboratory bench, Alberta-based scientists are already forecasting a day when the world will be full of cellphones without batteries and calculators powered by energy derived from the flow of pressured water through glass or silicon sieves.

The physical basis for the discovery of the "electrokinetic effect," by Larry Kostiuk and Daniel Kwok of the University of Alberta's engineering department, is simplicity itself.

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Water is squeezed through tiny holes in a non-metallic solid such as glass. As the water passes through, it interacts with the surface of the sieve and creates a thin layer of positively and negatively charged electrons.

These differently charged particles eventually cluster in opposite ends of the sieve and, in so doing, create an electrical engineer's idea of nirvana.

While scientists have realized for decades that a flowing liquid could separate electron charges, no one appears to have linked the effect with a way of generating electricity.

The Alberta team first ran the water through glass tubes about one-tenth the width of an average human hair. The amount of electricity initially generated was so minuscule, the group doubted at first that it had the technology to measure it. That's when graduate student Jun Yang suggested not measuring current flow from a single hole, but from the half million or so in the water filter.

The electricity generated by water flowing for 15 seconds proved to be enough to generate 10 volts of electricity and cause two light-emitting diodes to flash alternately every 10 or 15 seconds.

"The basis for all electrical generation is to separate charges and put all the positives in one place and all the negatives in another. Then you bring them into electrical communication with one another," Prof. Kostiuk explained.

In concrete terms, the Alberta scientists put electrodes at both ends of the tiny channels and then hooked a wire between them. The negatively charged electrons then started to flow in an effort to return to their original jumbled-together state.

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"We call that electricity and it can run your toaster or do whatever else you want," Prof. Kostiuk said about the remixing.

The origin of the discovery, and the basis of a paper to be published today in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineer-ing, was the fruit of a chance encounter.

Prof. Kostiuk, the newly appointed chair of the department of mechanical engineering, decided to spend 30 minutes with faculty members he didn't know in order to understand his colleagues' research so he could promote it at meetings with industry and others.

His first stop was Prof. Kwok, a specialist in surface interactions who had recently been recruited back to Canada from MIT by one of the federal government's Canada research chairs.

"To tell you the truth, I didn't think we would have anything in common," said Prof. Kostiuk, an expert in combustion chemistry. However, he quickly became entranced by Prof. Kwok's research on fluids, solids and charges, and suddenly had a revelation.

"I said, 'Now that you have created this potential difference, why don't we tap into it?' And he went, 'Oh God, nobody has ever thought of that before,' " Prof. Kostiuk said.

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Initially, it didn't seem that tapping into electrokinetics was going to generate enough energy to matter much. "The current moving through a single channel is measured in the order of a billionth of an amp because the channels are so small," Prof. Kostiuk said.

Why had no one thought about creating electricity this way.

"We have taken electricity for granted for so many years, and nobody had problems generating electricity, not to mention that nobody had come up with new ways of doing it for 100 years, that the possibility just didn't come to one's mind," Prof. Kwok said.

Where does one go from here? First, the publication of the new result has been held off for nearly a year so the university could patent the technology.

Second, while he has imagined pressurized water-powered cellphones and calculators in the future, Prof. Kostiuk says a more immediate application of the new technology could be in a very mundane place.

One location where large amounts of water are now filtered daily is a water-purification plant. Therefore, if the mechanics of electrokinetic electricity can be improved, municipal waterworks might advertise themselves some day as the source of both clean water and clean electricity.

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In 1839, Edmund Becquerel discovered how to generate electricty from sunlight; in the same year, Sir William Grove invented the prototype for what became fuel cells. Nuclear power, developed in the 20th century, is a method for generating heat using water, not an electricity-generation process.