Jul 20, 2015 | No Comments | By Michelle Pagano
Congratulations to HEMI professor Sung Hoon Kang and Mechanical Engineering professor Rajat Mittal, and postdoc Kourosh Shoele for receiving a seed grant from Johns Hopkins Environment, Energy, Sustainability & Health Institute (E2SHI).
The team will receive $25,000 for their project entitled “Harvesting Energy from ‘Piezoleaves’ for Self-Powered Sensors.” The project will span a year, beginning in July.
The project aims to find a solution to the problem of limited life span of batteries for small-scale electronic sensors and sensor networks used in environmental and ecological monitoring, by designing and fabricating piezoelectric membranes (`piezoleaves’) that harvest energy as a result of wind-induced flutter.
Researchers Mittal, Kang, and Shoele will use computational modeling, advanced manufacturing, and experimental testing to optimize design of these peizoleaves so as to maximize the harvested energy. The research team, which also includes graduate and undergraduate students, will construct their own customized piezoleaves and test them in wind-tunnels.
In addition to powering stand-alone sensors, the researchers also hope to use such piezoleaves to form “trees” to harvest both solar and wind energy through thousands of piezoleaves containing solar cells. By generating a comprehensive set of preliminary data on piezoleaves, the team will help electronic sensors become self-powered and contribute scientific knowledge in a field that is currently uncharted.
