Design and Investigation of triboelectric and thermoelectric energy harvesting techniques for real time applications

Abstract

newline In today s consumer-oriented market, researchers are attempting to harness energy from ambient sources for sustainable energy generation leading to reduction of dependency on conventional energy sources. Energy harvesting methods offers enormous opportunities to derive energy from our natural surroundings to directly operate self-powered devices or storing it for later use. Generating energy from our nearby environment seems to be a promising solution to address the growing concerns of powering small devices and sensors. Energy harvesters are similar to transducers, designed to extract energy from sources available in environment and convert it into useable electrical energy. This research aims to show the practical implementation of Triboelectric and Thermoelectric energy harvesting using hardware prototypes and set-up. A useable amount of energy is extracted from an energy harvester and results are validated using a hardware model for real-time application. newlineChapter 1: Introduction newlineChapter 1 presents a brief introduction to various technologies for renewable energy harvesting. A brief introduction to triboelectricity, piezoelectricity, thermoelectricity, pyroelectricity and RF energy harvesting is presented. Further, hybrid energy harvesters are explained in this chapter. The motivation for this research and corresponding research gaps in the presented field are accentuated. In order to fill the listed research gaps, research objectives are selected and listed for present work. newlineChapter 2: Design and Development of Triboelectric Sensor for generic counting application newlineTriboelectricity is based on the concept of frictional contact between two triboelectric materials to generate flow of electrons. Chapter 2 aims to explore the design and testing of a triboelectric material-based sensor. To demonstrate a possible practical application of triboelectricity. A PTFE and aluminium sensor strip are used to generate a voltage spike acting as input data for an Arduino Uno controller connected for data...