We all may have faced a problem, to go outside in a hurry, but when we left our house, felt that our mobile phone battery is about to die because we forgot to charge it. It is a common problem with most of us. To overcome these problems scientists had made many types of research. Scientists hope to invent devices which can harvest energy in our surroundings to charge our mobile phones, laptops, and other electronic gadgets.
In this scenario, scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology( MIT) have developed super-thin bendy materials that can absorb wireless internet and other electromagnetic radiations and convert them into electricity.
The leader of the researcher’s team Tomás Palacios, said this research paved a way to develop energy harvesting covers ranging from small tablecloths to large wrappers for buildings that extract energy from the environment to power electronic gadgets like sensors. When you have this type of device you can collect energy from the environment for 24 hours and store for later use.
According to researchers, we can cover our desk with an electronic tablecloth and even if we are only a few hours a day at a desk, it would be harvesting energy the whole time.
Researches connected a bendy antenna to flexible thin semiconductor sheet. They observed that the antenna picks up Wi-Fi and other radio frequency signals and convert them into alternating current. Alternating current is converted into direct current with the help of molybdenum disulphide semiconductor diode.
Ambient Wi-Fi signals can fill up the office with more than 100 microwatts of power which can be harnessed by using energy harvesting devices. The system designed by MIT scientists has an efficiency of 30% to 40%, which can produce 40 microwatts of power when exposed to signals having 150 microwatts of power.
According to the researchers, “It doesn’t sound like much compared with the 60 watts that a computer needs, but you can still do a lot with it. You can design a wide range of sensors, for environmental monitoring or chemical and biological sensing, which operate at the single microwatt level. Or you could store the electricity in a battery to use later.”
Energy harvesting devices already exist like Rectenna but these are made from conventional semiconductors which are, rigid, fragile and practically impossible to make into sheets. By contrast, molybdenum disulphide films can be made into large enough sheets in industries to collect a useful amount of energy.
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