Wearable powered by waste and movement
Plastic waste and paper wipes have been repurposed into a wearable device that runs on energy harvested by the wearer's movements.
The prototype device can transmit Morse code, and the team at Surrey University is now focusing on plans to use this technology in smart watches.
"Our research demonstrates that there is a path to creating sustainable technology that runs on electricity powered by us, the users of that technology,” said Dr Bhaskar Dudem, project lead and Research Fellow at Surrey University's Advanced Technology Institute (ATI).
Surrey's device is 'self-powered' thanks to materials that become electrically charged after they come into contact with one another. These Triboelectric Nanogenerators (TENGs) use static charge to harvest energy from movement through electrostatic induction.
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“We didn’t perform any special processing of waste materials, except the hot-pressing treatment of the plastic lid of a coffee cup,” Dr Dudem told The Engineer. “The tissue paper was directly coated with the carbon nanoparticles by brush coating without any processing treatment.”
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