May

15

An Engineered Virus Makes Electricity

May 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity using the piezoelectric effect, creating a new way to generate electric power. The milestone could lead to tiny devices that harvest electrical energy from the vibrations of everyday tasks, something that could [...]

Sep

27

Piezoelectric Power Grows Ten Times

September 27, 2011 | Leave a Comment

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has discovered a new material that has 10 times the piezoelectric effect of crystals and ceramics making it suitable for perhaps hundreds of everyday uses.  A 10-fold increase is going to have impact. ORNL’s Volker Urban and colleagues at Technical University Aachen in Germany noticed the reverse piezoelectric effect [...]

May

4

Harvesting Power From Vibrations

May 4, 2011 | 2 Comments

University of Michigan electrical engineers have built a piezoelectric generator that can harness energy from vibrations and convert it to electricity with five to 10 times greater efficiency and power than other devices in its class. It’s smaller than a penny. The UM team has built a complete system that integrates a high-quality energy-harvesting piezoelectric [...]

Feb

21

Progress on the Thermoelectric Front

February 21, 2011 | 1 Comment

Researchers from Boston College, MIT, Clemson University and the University of Virginia have used a nanotechnology processing technology to achieve a 60 to 90 percent increase in the thermoelectric figure of merit of p-type half-Heusler, a common bulk semiconductor compound. The team’s paper has been published in the journal Nano Letters. Half-Heusler compounds and the [...]

Sep

9

A New Player In Waste Heat Recovery

September 9, 2010 | 3 Comments

According to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s 2008 report (a pdf), more than two-thirds of the fuel used to generate power in the United States is lost as heat.  The report claims the U. S. has the lowest energy productivity (a measure of how much raw energy goes into every dollar of GDP) of any [...]

Mar

29

Batteries vs. Generators or Both

March 29, 2010 | 5 Comments

Tiny generators that could produce enough electricity from random, ambient vibrations to power a wristwatch, pacemaker or wireless sensor would offset a bit of lithium and stacked might replace some of those transformer blocks to recharge batteries. Khalil Najafi, chair of electrical and computer engineering and Tzeno Galchev, a doctoral student at the University of [...]

Mar

24

Hydrogen Fuel from Sound

March 24, 2010 | 6 Comments

Sound is energy is motion whether in gasses, fluids or through solid materials it could be something worth pursuit. A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is on it with a new material made from crystals of zinc oxide that, when immersed in water, absorb vibrations and develop areas of strong negative and positive charge. [...]

Jul

31

Micro Power Is Getting Bigger and Smaller

July 31, 2009 | 4 Comments

Driven by the vision of our society one day being basically self-propelled, a team of University of Houston scientists has set out to both amplify and provoke that potential in materials known as piezoelectrics, which naturally produce electricity when literally subjected to strain. Engineers at Leeds in the U.K. are developing a way to capture [...]