Nanomanufacturing of Wearable Electronics for Energy Conversion and Human-Integrated Monitoring
Abstract
Recently, energy crisis and environment pollution has become global issues and there is a great demand for developing green and renewable energy system. At the same time, advancements in materials production, device fabrication, and flexible circuit has led to the huge prosperity of wearable devices, which also requires facile and efficient approaches to power these ubiquitous electronics. Piezoelectric nanogenerators and triboelectric nanogenerators have attracted enormous interest in recent years due to their capacity of transferring the ambient mechanical energy into desired electricity, and also the potential of working as self-powered sensors. However, there still exists some obstacles in the aspect of materials synthesis, device fabrication, and also the sensor performance optimization as well as their application exploration. Here in this research, several different materials possessing the piezoelectric and triboelectric properties (selenium nanowires, tellurium nanowires, natural polymer hydrogel) have been successfully synthesized, and also a few novel manufacturing techniques (additive manufacturing) have been implemented for the fabrication of wearable sensors. The piezoelectric and triboelectric nanogenerators developed could effectively convert the mechanical energy into electricity for an energy conversion purpose, and also their application as self-powered human-integrated sensors have also been demonstrated, like achieving a real-time monitoring of radial artery pulses. Other applications of the developed sensors, such as serving as electric heaters and infrared cloaking devices are also presented here. This research is expected to have a positive impact and immediate relevance to many societally pervasive areas, e.g. energy and environment, biomedical electronics, and human-machine interface.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Wu, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Energy|Physiology|Analytical chemistry|Chemistry|Design|Industrial engineering|Materials science|Mechanics|Nanotechnology|Physics
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