Elson Sepulveda gets on one of his bikes and rides 30 miles or more. He gets a good workout on those days, but as an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University, he knows some of it is wasted energy. All of that pedaling could be harnessed and converted into electricity to power his phone or some other electronic gadget.
Sepulveda and his colleagues report in the journal Nano Energy on a new film-like material capable of turning motion into electricity. The material is similar to other piezo-electrics in that it generates a voltage when it's squeezed or pressed. But what sets this one apart is that it's paper thin and flexible and each time it's folded, the voltage increases.
"This increased voltage upon folding is not possible using other solid piezoelectric materials," Sepulveda told Seeker.If that voltage could be efficiently directed into a current, it could reduce the nuisance of recharging or even eliminate it.'What if you could take the mechanical energy from swiping pages on your tablet and use that to charge the battery of the device itself?" said Sepulveda. "That could reduce the time required to recharge your device."
To create the device, Sepulveda and his team used a combination of fabrication techniques and thin layers of substances including silver, polyimide, polypropylene ferroelectret and electrically charged particles onto a silicon wafer, creating a sheet that was peeled away from the chip as if it were a sticker.
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