You’ve heard of Mexican jumping beans, but how about electricity-generating water droplets? Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reported earlier this week that water droplets that “jump” from a water-repelling surface acquire a charge that prevents them from returning to that surface. The find makes an important leap in a burgeoning effort to harness “jumping” water droplets in making power plants more efficient.

“The concept of jumping droplets is not new, and we have been working on it and publishing papers for a while now,” says Nenad Miljkovic, a postdoctoral associate at MIT and a co-author on the paper,published in Nature Communications.

“However, none of the previous studies (including ours) had any idea that the droplets were charged.”

The MIT research team had built upon a previous experiment, which revealed that droplets jump under certain conditions when they collide on a surface covered with a special water-repelling coating known as a superhydrophobic surface. As the droplets collide, the release of excess surface energy causes them to jump.

The new study found that not only do the water droplets jumped off the surface, but they also repelled from each other in midflight, which the team was able to detect by using a high-speed video camera. The scientists in the study realized the effect was caused through the formation of a net positive electrical charge created when the droplets leap off the surface.

According to the press release detailing the discovery, “By applying the appropriate charge to a nearby metal plate, jumping droplets can be pulled away from the surface, reducing the likelihood of their being pushed back onto the condenser either by gravity or by the drag created by the flow of the surrounding vapor toward the surface.”

According to the MIT research team, the energy produced by these jumping water droplets could be incorporated into power plant design. In power plants, a boiler produces steam that is then turned into mechanical energy in a turbine. Excess steam from the turbine gets converted back into water in a condenser for reuse. Water congeals in a thin film on the current condenser’s surface, and before new water droplets can form there, this water must fall away from the surface and put back to the boiler, which takes a lot of time.

Results from these findings would speed up the process, thereby increase the overall efficiency of power plants.