SemiSerious

A recent article in Technology Review caught my eye today. A group of engineers at the University of Southampton in England have built a prototype accelerometer powered by ambient vibrations. I’m happy to see the vibrations that I could never escape and drove me up the wall during my grad student days doing noise measurements are being put to good use. Before going any further, let me first point out that my one of my colleagues here at the firm independently produced a plan to harvest the energy of ground vibrations created by cars and trucks to power our traffic lights. With his concept now proven at the milliwatt scale, we need to check whether this technology scales.

Speaking of scaling, that was obviously a problem for reducing the size of a microgenerator while maintaining useful output power levels. This could be a true breakthrough in terms of making wireless sensor networks widespread (big brother is watching you). The Technology Review article identified another cool source for this type of technology, but at the more modest scale of about 10cm. That company is aptly named, Perpetuum. They have these larger microgenerators installed today at industrial plants such as the Yorkshire waste water treatment plant. But Perpetuum also appears to have an even smaller generator than Soton U.  This device is based on MEMS, and simulations suggest peak power levels of 36mW.

For now, the folks at Southampton have by far the smallest working prototype microgenerator, but it sounds like Perpetuum might be the ones to squeeze the well-worn “nano” into the name of their newest device.

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