Climate change and global warming have severely impacted the planet and we are all trying to find cleaner ways of producing energy. We are ensuring that we avoid fossil fuels-based energy resources.
In a move to encourage that, researchers at IIT Mandi have developed a way to generate electricity by simply walking on a street. You read that right.
The methods involve piezoelectric materials. These are basically the ones that are known to interconvert mechanical energy and electrical energy.
The researchers have embedded the material into the streets where the movement of people, vehicles, etc. helps in converting it into energy. It basically turns mechanical energy into electricity.
While this might sound cool in theory, in reality, it is not as impactful as the energy produced by the materials is extremely low, that sort of limits their applications.
To make things better, the researchers have revamped the application with a new technology called graded polling. Dr Rahul Vaish, one of the lead researchers behind this tech said in a statement, “We have developed a technique known as "graded poling" to enhance the power output of piezoelectric materials by more than 100 times.”
IIT Mandi said in a statement, “The results of this study and the enormous improvements possible through the graded poling technique offers an incentive for researchers to develop actual piezoelectric designs that implement the graded poling technique so that the applications can be realised. The researchers recommend possible steps to achieve these designs in practice, such as partially connecting the right face of the sample to ground and top faces being applied with an electric potential.”
