A universal self-charging system driven by random biomechanical energy for sustainable operation of mobile electronics
By Simiao Niu, Xiaofeng Wang, Fang Yi, Yu Sheng Zhou, Zhong Lin Wang. Nature Communications, 2015
613 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Human biomechanical energy is characterized by fluctuating amplitudes and variable low frequency, and an effective utilization of such energy cannot be achieved by classical energy-harvesting technologies. Here we report a high-efficient self-charging power system for sustainable operation of mobile electronics exploiting exclusively human biomechanical energy, which consists of a high-output triboelectric nanogenerator, a power management circuit to convert the random a.c. energy to d.c. electricity at 60% efficiency, and an energy storage device. With palm tapping as the only energy source, this power unit provides a continuous d.c. electricity of 1.044 mW (7.34 W m−3) in a regulated and managed manner. This self-charging unit can be universally applied as a standard ‘infinite-lifetime’ power source for continuously driving numerous conventional electronics, such as thermometers, electrocardiograph system, pedometers, wearable watches, scientific calculators and wireless radio-frequency communication system, which indicates the immediate and broad applications in personal sensor systems and internet of things. Triboelectric nanogenerators utilize triboelectrification for harvesting energy from ambient mechanical motions. Here, the authors report an integrated triboelectric nanogenerator system using only human biomechanical energy to generate mW-level DC electricity that is enough to continuously drive various commercial mobile electronics.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Polymers and Plastics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce878fb9dcd86a2153949fa5306a7f94956a8788
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