In a world hungry for clean energy, engineers have created a new material that converts the simple mechanical vibrations all around us into electricity to power sensors in everything from pacemakers to spacecraft.
The first of its kind and the product of a decade of work by researchers at the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto, the novel generating system is compact, reliable, low-cost and very, very green.
“Our breakthrough will have a significant social and economic impact by reducing our reliance on non-renewable power sources,” said Asif Khan, a Waterloo researcher and co-author of a new study on the project. “We need these energy-generating materials more critically at this moment than at any other time in history.”
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Researchers developed this crystal, a highly piezoelectric material, to produce electricity.