{"id":76625,"date":"2018-03-27T08:02:06","date_gmt":"2018-03-27T18:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=76625"},"modified":"2020-01-13T14:16:58","modified_gmt":"2020-01-14T00:16:58","slug":"new-energy-harvesting-method","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2018\/03\/27\/new-energy-harvesting-method\/","title":{"rendered":"New energy harvesting method is game changer for self-powered devices"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>
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Three water drops illuminating 20 LED<\/abbr>s<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Harvesting energy in place has been considered a potential game-changing technology, especially for applications that require long-term, unattended operations of distributed devices, such as wireless sensors, wearable electronics, medical implants, etc. It could also have larger grid-scale potential. After years of researching, a group of University of Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> at M\u0101noa<\/a> engineers have made a breakthrough that paves the way for harvesting the abundantly available and, yet, extremely low-level, ambient energy, the holy grail for self-powered devices.<\/p>\n

While abundant in the environment, ambient energy sources for mini electronic devices are often of a low-level, intermittent nature, making it an insurmountable challenge for scavenging. The researchers, led by David T. Ma<\/strong><\/a>, interim associate dean and professor in civil engineering in the College of Engineering<\/a>, discovered a method to snowball any arbitrarily low level ambient energy to a useable level. Â鶹´«Ã½has filed an international patent based on this invention.<\/p>\n

This unprecedented exponential growth of harvested energy results from an intentionally introduced instability in a scavenger through repetitively switching the scavenger between two configurations. An energy scavenger is a device that harvesting energy from the environment. According to the article<\/a> published in Communications Physics<\/em> on March 22, 2018, the method is a generic one, applicable for energy conversion between different forms.<\/p>\n

Ma\u2019s group used mini electrical generator fabricated with droplet capacitors to harvest energy that enabled the necessary switching. Within a few cycles of reconfiguration, a generator with three water droplets could produce a voltage of 56V, enough to light up 20 LED<\/abbr>s. Although they demonstrated the idea using mini generators, the researchers believe it can be scaled up for large-scale applications and it holds potential for revolutionizing grid-level DC<\/abbr> power supply systems. <\/p>\n

Other team members included a PhD<\/abbr> student J. Yu<\/strong>, and an undergraduate student intern E. Ma<\/strong>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UH<\/abbr> M\u0101noa engineering researchers have discovered a method to snowball any arbitrarily low level ambient energy to a useable level<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[179,182,158,9],"class_list":["post-76625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","tag-college-of-engineering","tag-engineering","tag-publication","tag-uh-manoa","entry","has-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76625"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76631,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76625\/revisions\/76631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}