Piezoelectric Energy Source for Smart Factory Applications - SmartEnergy

Project summary

SmartEnergy aims to develop an integrated, miniaturized, highly energy efficient, maintenance-free and environmentally-friendly energy source, with extensive scalability and reconfigurability. The system integrates a MEMS piezoelectric energy harvester, a rectifier circuit and a supercapacitor, and shows a great promise to replace conventional energy sources and significantly reduce the environmental impact. The proposal covers a new technology based on advanced multifunctional materials, including highly efficient piezoelectric materials and carbon nanotubes, with optimized nanostructured metal oxides and gel electrolytes. The project will start from TRL 3 and will reach TRL 5. The development is largely industry-driven, with Renault as the end-user that is looking to upgrade factory processes monitoring through low power autonomous sensor nodes. Thus, SmartEnergy has a great potential to drive down cost, while making smart factory and IoT applications greener and more robust.