Technology made to advance self-powering devices like consumer electronics and defense innovations

A fascination with movie technology that exhibited robots perform self-repair through a liquid formula motivated a Purdue University professor to make his own discoveries — which are now helping to lead the way for advancements in self-powering devices such as consumer electronics and defense innovations.

The Purdue team, led by Wenzhuo Wu, the Ravi and Eleanor Talwar Rising Star Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering, has created wearable technology to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy.

“Our work presents an important step toward the practical realization of self-powered, human-integrated technologies,” Wu stated.

The Purdue team designed a liquid-metal-inclusion based triboelectric nanogenerator, called LMI-TENG. Triboelectric energy harvesting transducers — devices which help conserve mechanical energy and turn it into power — are predicted to be a $480 million market by 2028, as per IDTechEx.

The LMI-TENG can harvest and sense the biomechanical signals from the body and use those to help power and direct technological devices. The LMI-TENG consists of a layer of liquid metal embedded functional silicone sandwiched between two Ecoflex layers.

“We realized that liquid represents the ultimate form of anything that can be deformable and morphing into different shapes,” Wu stated. “Our technology will enable wearable electronics to take otherwise wasted energy and transform it into energy that can power and control electronic devices and tools used in military defense and consumer applications. Our technology allows the synergistic engineering of TENG components at the material, structural and output levels.”

The Purdue technology has applications for many self-powered innovations for emerging technologies, such as wearable sensors, pervasive computing, advanced health care, human-machine interfaces, robotics, user interfaces, augmented reality, virtual reality, teleoperation and the Internet of Things, said Wu.

Source: Shengjie Gao, Ruoxing Wang, Chenxiang Ma, Zihao Chen, Yixiu Wang, Min Wu, Zhiyuan Tang, Ning Bao, Dong Ding, Wenxuan Wu, Fengru Fan, Wenzhuo Wu. Wearable high-dielectric-constant polymers with core–shell liquid metal inclusions for biomechanical energy harvesting and a self-powered user interface. Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 2019; DOI: 10.1039/C9TA01249D