Day Night Energy Harvesting Devices

Intellectual Merits: This small Business Innovation Research Phase I project seeks to develop innovative energy harvesting device capable to scavenge energy from environment radiations (light), covering wavelengths from 0.3 to 14.0 micrometer for numerous military and commercial applications. The device has the harvesting efficiency of more than 30% for daylight and >25 % for the radiations covering from 3 to 14 micrometer. All day and night energy harvesting devices are required as an alternate power supplies for various remotely located sensing system, unmanned aircraft, distributed wireless network system, ground-based warning and monitoring system to power the systems directly and/or to recharge the batteries, when necessary. To date several techniques for energy harvesting are being used and they are mainly based on vibration, electromagnetic, electrostatic etc. However, these techniques are location dependencies and none of these techniques could provide enough energy to operate system mentioned. Today’s solar cell can be used as the energy harvester; however, they are only harvest when the daylight is present. In addition, today solar cell is not also high efficient, so that it requires more area to achieve make high power. A goal in Phase-I program is to carry on research and development of proposed energy harvesting device, capable to continuously scavenge energy from environment all day and night to power and/or recharge the battery. Banpil will demonstrate: by (a) identifying and carrying out the conceptual design, modeling and simulation of the proposed energy harvesting device, and also nano-structured harvesting device as the risk mitigate, (b) design and simulation of the process for fabricating harvesting device, and (c) design analyses of the harvesting device to achieve target performance at 300K in Phase-I. Recognizing the vast application potential of Banpil’s harvesting device, several DoD Agencies and industrial partners have expressed strong interest in using and commercializing this technology. In Phase II, Banpil will work DoD for specific aplication and also with several leading system companies who expressed strong interest on proposed energy harvestign device, as a part of commercialization of the harvesting device technology.