Artificial plants that harvest energy from rain and wind could be used to power environmental sensors and other outdoor electronics.
A new prototype harvester with flexible electricity-generating textile “leaves” can generate enough electricity to power 10 LEDs with just the movement from wind or raindrops hitting the fabric. That’s not a lot of power, but it’s enough to run sensors that only need to work intermittently or have low power needs, says study senior author Ravinder Dahiya, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern Univ.
“Currently, the most common source of energy for sensors in open spaces is batteries, and they need to be replaced frequently,” Dahiya says. “That itself is a tedious process and not economical, and it was primarily the motivation for looking at automated ways of getting energy.”
Solar cells are a well-established method of harvesting energy from the outdoor environment, he says, but they are brittle and inflexible. For applications requiring a flexible substrate, Dahiya and his team turned to two materials: textile triboelectric nanogenerators (T-TENGs) and textile droplet-based electricity generators (T-DEGs).
T-TENGs consist of two layers...
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