Korean research team addresses energy need in wearable devices
17/04/2015
Led by Professor Keon Jae Lee of KAIST’s department of materials science and engineering, the team has described the challenge it took on as making flexible electronics elastic enough to be easily wearable, with biomedical devices and wearable electronics among the application areas in mind.
Only a sufficient level of elasticity will enable materials to stretch to conform to “arbitrarily curved surfaces and moving body parts such as joints, diaphragms, and tendons”, the KAIST team has said. They must also be able to withstand the “repeated and prolonged mechanical stresses of stretching”.
Within this, the development of elastic energy devices is regarded as critical to establish power supplies in stretchable applications. Several researchers have explored diverse stretchable electronics, but have not developed ultra-stretchable and fully-reversible energy conversion devices properly until now.
The KAIST solution is a high-performance and hyper-stretchable elastic-composite generator that uses very long silver nanowire-based stretchable electrodes. Their stretchable piezoelectric generator can harvest mechanical energy to
produce high power output (around 4 Volts) with large elasticity (around 250%) and excellent durability (over 100 cycles).
Professor Lee has commented: “This exciting approach introduces an ultra-stretchable piezoelectric generator. It can open avenues for power supplies in universal wearable and biomedical applications as well as self-powered ultra-stretchable electronics.”
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