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It is reported excitingly in a previous letter (Nano Lett. 2011, 11, 3123) that a small piece of graphene sheet about 30 × 16 μm(2) immersed in flowing water with 0.6 M hydrochloric acid can produce voltage ~20 mV. Here we find that no measurable voltage can be induced by the flow over mono-, bi- and trilayered graphene samples of ~1 × 1.5 cm(2) in size in the same solution once the electrodes on graphene are isolated from interacting with the solution, mainly because the H(3)O(+) cations in the water adsorb onto graphene by strong covalent bonds as revealed by our first-principles calculations. When both the graphene and its metal electrodes are exposed to the solution as in the previous work, water flow over the graphene-electrode system can induce voltages from a few to over a hundred millivolts. In this situation, the graphene mainly behaves as a load connecting between the electrodes. Therefore, the harvested energy is not from the immersed carbon nanomaterials themselves in ionic water flow but dominated by the exposed electrodes.
Yin et al. (Fri,) studied this question.