Energy Harvesting

Significance of Alphabet Exiting Giant Drones Including Airborne Wind Energy. Alphabet/ Google and Facebook exiting large drones does not mean such aircraft are a failure. In Alphabet, a sister company of Google, was acquisition Makani in California and later Hawaii trialling a huge drone with eight propeller-generators and a 70 meter wingspan.

It is well known that face masks do not protect you from bacteria and certainly not from the latest coronavirus. They stop you emitting as much when you sneeze. Beyond infection, there is increasing concern about fine particulates in the air, now proven to pass through your whole body. These are no longer seen as leading to only respiratory diseases and heart failure. Research now links them to depression, birth problems and more. How can we make more effective face masks and air filters generally?

Unwanted static accumulation leads to hazards such as lightning, ignition, dust explosions, dielectric breakdown, electronic damage, and unpleasant shock on touching things. Deliberate creation of static charge leading to spark discharge was long ago achieved by the Wimshurst machine and Van der Graaf generator and party tricks such as rubbing a balloon on your clothing to make it adhere. None of these were useful beyond research and entertainment.

In energy harvesting in general, there is 100 times the market potential in high power rather than low power. In this article IDTechEx explores this opportunity.

Engineers have demonstrated a flexible device that harvests the heat energy from the human body to monitor health. The device surpasses all other flexible harvesters that use body heat as the sole energy source.

Hanergy is a large Chinese company. In past years, it has been in trouble for allegedly false accounting but it has been a global leader in flexible and thin film photovoltaics including GaAs and copper indium gallium diselenide CIGS and it has its own advanced silicon photovoltaics PV.

Here come previously impossible devices and structures. The new IDTechEx report, "Smart Material Opportunities in Structural Electronics 2020-2030" analyses and forecasts a remarkable $200 billion materials opportunity by making dumb structures smart.

Wearable electronics could be perpetually powered by stretchy, self-mending materials that use body heat to generate electricity. Three carefully curated organic compounds have been combined to develop a prototype thermoelectric material that is both stretchy and self-healing, can generate its own electricity, and is robust enough to withstand the stresses and strains of daily life.

BioSolar Inc plans to evolve its technology to become a larger scale developer of breakthrough battery technologies for the electric vehicle market.