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Friday, March 29, 2024

New device harvests electricity from human motion

Vanderbilt University’s Nanomaterials and Energy Devices Laboratory has developed a new, ultrathin energy harvesting system that has the potential to power your cell phone, fitness tracker and other personal electronic devices as you walk, wave and even when you are sitting down.

Currently, there is a tremendous amount of research aimed at discovering effective ways to tap ambient energy sources. “Compared to the other approaches designed to harvest energy from human motion, our method has two fundamental advantages,” said Pint. “The materials are atomically thin and small enough to be impregnated into textiles without affecting the fabric’s look or feel and it can extract energy from movements that are slower than 10 Hertz—10 cycles per second—over the whole low-frequency window of movements corresponding to human motion.”

The Vanderbilt lab’s ultrathin energy harvester is based on the group’s research on advanced battery systems. Over the past three years, the team has explored the fundamental response of battery materials to bending and stretching. They were the first to demonstrate experimentally that the operating voltage changes when battery materials are placed under stress. Under tension, the voltage rises and under compression, it drops.

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