Flexible and Hybrid Energy Harvesting Device Combining Piezoelectric and Electrostatic Conversions

Unmet Need
Demand for flexible and wearable technology is increasing around the world in many sectors, such as fashion and healthcare. As these product lines increase, they can be applied to many more industries, such as energy harvesting. Energy harvesting extracts surrounding environmental energy (in forms like mechanical, thermal, and solar), offering a solution to environment destroying products such as oil. Mechanical energy is widely available and has mostly untapped potential in the marketplace. In addition, as data continues to grow while electronic products continue to shrink in size, these developments have grown the efficiency and applicability of sensor applications. This device meets the need for a smaller and more flexible system that has increased efficiency and frequency bandwidth in harvesting mechanical energy, based on the novel combined energy harvesters, piezoelectric and electrostatic.  
 
Technology Overview
The proposed invention comprises a new hybrid and flexible energy harvesting device utilizing combined piezoelectric and electrostatic energy harvesters. This device not only solves the problem of clean energy, it also improves on past devices that only use one source of energy to harvest hybrid energy, in which it utilizes the two harvesters simultaneously to produce more energy even more efficiently. There are three different design versions of this wearable technology, allowing for further application on more clothes or items. 
 
Stage of Development
The inventors have presented a flexible and wearable technological device utilizing an efficient 2-pronged hybrid energy harvesting method. This method harvests energy from piezoelectric and electrostatic energy.  
 
Publications
Lee, J. H., Kim, et al. Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 4(21), 7983-7999.
Kim, J., et al. Apl Materials, 5(7), 073804.
 

Category(s):