🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE By harvesting the everyday energy of static electricity, scientists may have found the world's most plentiful source of renewable, sustainable power.
The plastic gizmo in Zhong Lin Wang’s hand doesn’t look like tomorrow’s solution to our looming energy crisis. It’s about the size and shape of a small grapefruit, but smooth and translucent. As he shakes it, a smaller ball inside bounces around freely.
“In our environment, everything is moving, everything is changing,” Wang says, still shaking. “It’s all energy, and so much is wasted.” He wants to do something about that. For the last decade and a half, Wang, an electrical engineer and nanotechnologist, has sought ways to scavenge energy from the movements of ordinary life.
Zhong Lin Wang’s pioneering work with triboelectricity has led to inventions like the small generator powering this array of 1,000 LED lights, activated by a tap of the foot. “The idea is to harvest those sparks,” says micro-engineer Jürgen Brugger of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland. He began researching energy-harvesting schemes using triboelectric materials about two years ago, after hearing about Wang’s work.
Triboelectricity’s glow eventually faded. In 1831, British physicist Michael Faraday unveiled the first electromagnetic generator, which uses a moving magnet to induce an electric current in a coiled wire. That changed everything. Today, the generators in coal plants, wind turbines, nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams — basically anything that works by converting physical movement into electricity — has an electromagnetic generator at its heart.
In 2005, Wang focused his lab on designing devices that could power themselves. He worked with piezoelectric crystals, which generate sparks when they’re bent, compressed or otherwise deformed. They were first identified by Marie Curie’s husband more than 100 years ago, but the materials tend to be brittle and hard to work with.
Wang doesn’t want to stop there; he sees the potential for a wealth of untested possibilities. Imagine a matrix of these spheres covering an area of the ocean equal to the state of Georgia and extending about 30 feet down. That’s about a quadrillion spheres. Ramakrishna Podila of Clemson University has been developing these technologies for four years. He recently unveiled a TENG-based wireless energy generation system that uses PLA, a common biodegradable polymer, as one of its electrodes. In lab tests, they found that it can charge another device through the air up to 16 feet away.
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