Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

A Tunable Triboelectric Wideband Energy Harvester, Daniel S. Nelson, Alwathiqbellah Ibrahim, Shahrzad Towfighian

Systems Science and Industrial Engineering Faculty Scholarship

The ability to efficiently convert mechanical energy into electrical energy has become an important topic of discussion and research in the last decade. Triboelectric generators have recently been popular for vibration energy harvesting, but despite plenty of research on its material aspect, research on combining mechanical characteristics and voltage generation output has been sparse. Many energy harvesters suffer from low operating bandwidths and are usually restricted to operating at a specific frequency. We propose a tunable triboelectric energy harvester that has a large response over a wide frequency bandwidth at low frequencies. The tunability is implemented by axially pre-loading a …

Energy Harvesting And Storage: The Catalyst To The Power Constraint For Leveraging Internet Of Things (Iot) On Trains, Kelechi Nwogu

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The success of Wireless Sensor Networks is heavily constrained by its reliance on storage technology like batteries, which are a finite resource. Whilst the number of transistors in an IC doubles every 18 months, the energy density of batteries is relatively flat during the same time period. This is a key challenge in leveraging the Internet of Things on trains.

The gravity of this problem is increased by an order of magnitude when the network is to be scaled up to hundreds or thousands of nodes. Comprehensive research and development efforts have been devoted to building ultra-low power sensors. These …

Engineering Microbial Fuels Cells: Recent Patents And New Directions, Justin C. Biffinger, Bradley R. Ringeisen

U.S. Navy Research

Fundamental research into how microbes generate electricity within microbial fuel cells (MFCs) has far outweighed the practical application and large scale development of microbial energy harvesting devices. MFCs are considered alternatives to standard commercial polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell technology because the fuel supply does not need to be purified, ambient operating temperatures are maintained with biologically compatible materials, and the biological catalyst is self-regenerating. The generation of electricity during wastewater treatment using MFCs may profoundly affect the approach to anaerobic treatment technologies used in wastewater treatment as a result of developing this energy harvesting technology. However, the materials …