Charge your smartphone by yelling at it

Posted by tranced
How about when you run out battery on your smartphone, you shout at it at it gets recharged! Sounds ludicrous right? Researchers from Georgia Tech Institute of Technology have decided to prove you wrong. They have developed a rollable, 125 μm thin, paper-based triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) that can harvest energy from your speech and deliver a maximum power density of 121 mW/m2.

The researchers used a laser to zap a grid of microscopic holes in the paper, then coated one side in copper and laid it on top of a thin sheet of Teflon, joining the two sheets at one edge. As the sound waves vibrate the two sheets in different ways, it causes the two sheets to come in and out of contact generating electricity. The experiment is pretty similar to charge developed when a person rubs a balloon with hair.

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