A fascination with movie technology that showed robots perform self-repair through a liquid formula inspired a Purdue University professor to make his own discoveries - which are now helping to lead the way for advancements in self-powering devices such as consumer electronics and defense innovations.

The Purdue team, led by Wenzhuo Wu, the Ravi and Eleanor Talwar Rising Star Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering, has created wearable technology to convert mechanical energy into electrical energy.

"Our work presents an important step toward the practical realization of self-powered, human-integrated technologies," Wu said.

The Purdue team invented a liquid-metal-inclusion based triboelectric nanogenerator, called LMI-TENG. Triboelectric energy harvesting transducers - devices which help conserve mechanical energy and turn it into power - are predicted to be a $480 million market by 2028, according to IDTechEx.

The LMI-TENG can harvest and sense the biomechanical signals from the body and use those to help power and direct technological devices. The LMI-TENG consists of a layer of liquid metal embedded functional silicone sandwiched between two Ecoflex layers.

The Purdue technology is featured in the February edition of the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, which named it one of 2019's HOT papers.

"We realized that liquid represents the ultimate form of anything that can be deformable and morphing into different shapes," Wu said.

"Our technology will enable wearable electronics to take otherwise wasted energy and transform it into energy that can power and control electronic devices and tools used in military defense and consumer applications. Our technology allows the synergistic engineering of TENG components at the material, structural and output levels."

Wu said the Purdue technology has applications for many self-powered innovations for emerging technologies, such as wearable sensors, pervasive computing, advanced health care, human-machine interfaces, robotics, user interfaces, augmented reality, virtual reality, teleoperation and the Internet of Things.

Research paper

Related Links
Purdue University
All about the robots on Earth and beyond!

Tweet

Thanks for being here; We need your help. The SpaceDaily news network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain. With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords. Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year. If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceDaily Contributor $5 Billed Once credit card or paypal		SpaceDaily Monthly Supporter $5 Billed Monthly paypal only

Progress on lifelong learning machines shows potential for bio-inspired algorithms
Washington DC (SPX) Mar 13, 2019
Today's machine learning systems are restricted by their inability to continuously learn or adapt as they encounter new situations; their programs are fixed after training, leaving them unable to react to new, unforeseen circumstances once they are fielded. Adding new information to cover programming deficits overwrites the existing training set. With current technology, this requires taking the system offline and retraining it on a dataset that incorporates the new information. It is a long and a ... read more