Eather One – When Friction is a Good Thing

Dean Sigler Batteries, Electric Aircraft Components, Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation 1 Comment

Tribolectrics Your editor has long promoted the idea of the Grand Unified Airplane, a vehicle which would essentially power itself from sunlight, piezoelectrics, structural batteries, and even the friction of the air over its surfaces.  He wrote about the concept in the May, 2013 Kitplanes, and has noted an increasing number of articles in scientific journals describing a variety of nanogenerators, including tribolectric types. Tribolectrics are not new, having been discovered in the 18th century and initially quantified by Johan Carl Wilcke, a Swedish Physicist in 1757.  “Tribo” comes from the Greek for “rub,” and as shown in the following video, even the rubbing of air over a surface can generate electricity.  Note that about the 1:25 point Dr. Wang blows across the nanogenerator and lights up the LEDs. Taking that idea and running with it, Warsaw-based designer Michal Bonikowski designed the Eather One to run on electricity generated during the airplane’s movement through the air. As exotic as it …

Nano to Macro – Piezoelectrics Have Power

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation 1 Comment

Two far-flung enterprises are using piezoelectric devices to generate answers to widely disparate questions. The first set of questions is intensely personal. “Can a heart implanted micro robot operate permanently? “Can cell phones and tiny robots implanted in the heart operate permanently without having their batteries charged? These provocative questions highlight a web page from KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, which focuses on the Institute’s work with piezoelectric devices.  Such devices can tranform vibrations, pressure, and other mechanical forces into an electric current.  Older “hi-fi” systems used piezoelectric cartridges in their LP-playing tone arms to transduce the vibrations from a needle touching the record’s grooves into signals to the system’s amplifier. Dr. Zhong Lin Wang explains, “Our FAND (Flexible and Nano-bio-energy Device Lab) group has developed new forms of highly efficient flexible nanogenerator technology using freely bendable piezoelectric ceramic thin film nano-materials and nanocomposite materials that can convert the tiny movements of human body (such as …