Energy Harvesting from the Beating Heart by a Mass Imbalance Oscillation Generator

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Abstract

Energy-harvesting devices attract wide interest as power supplies of today's medical implants. Their long lifetime will spare patients from repeated surgical interventions. They also offer the opportunity to further miniaturize existing implants such as pacemakers, defibrillators or recorders of bio signals. A mass imbalance oscillation generator, which consists of a clockwork from a commercially available automatic wrist watch, was used as energy harvesting device to convert the kinetic energy from the cardiac wall motion to electrical energy. An MRI-based motion analysis of the left ventricle revealed basal regions to be energetically most favorable for the rotating unbalance of our harvester. A mathematical model was developed as a tool for optimizing the device's configuration. The model was validated by an in vitro experiment where an arm robot accelerated the harvesting device by reproducing the cardiac motion. Furthermore, in an in vivo experiment, the device was affixed onto a sheep heart for 1 h. The generated power in both experiments-in vitro (30 μW) and in vivo (16.7 μW)-is sufficient to power modern pacemakers.

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Energy Scavenging for Mobile and Wireless Electronics

J.A. Paradiso, T Starner (2005)

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Microfibre-nanowire hybrid structure for energy scavenging.

Yong Hua Qin, Xudong Wang, Zhong Wang (2008)

A self-powering nanosystem that harvests its operating energy from the environment is an attractive proposition for sensing, personal electronics and defence technologies. This is in principle feasible for nanodevices owing to their extremely low power consumption. Solar, thermal and mechanical (wind, friction, body movement) energies are common and may be scavenged from the environment, but the type of energy source to be chosen has to be decided on the basis of specific applications. Military sensing/surveillance node placement, for example, may involve difficult-to-reach locations, may need to be hidden, and may be in environments that are dusty, rainy, dark and/or in deep forest. In a moving vehicle or aeroplane, harvesting energy from a rotating tyre or wind blowing on the body is a possible choice to power wireless devices implanted in the surface of the vehicle. Nanowire nanogenerators built on hard substrates were demonstrated for harvesting local mechanical energy produced by high-frequency ultrasonic waves. To harvest the energy from vibration or disturbance originating from footsteps, heartbeats, ambient noise and air flow, it is important to explore innovative technologies that work at low frequencies (such as <10 Hz) and that are based on flexible soft materials. Here we present a simple, low-cost approach that converts low-frequency vibration/friction energy into electricity using piezoelectric zinc oxide nanowires grown radially around textile fibres. By entangling two fibres and brushing the nanowires rooted on them with respect to each other, mechanical energy is converted into electricity owing to a coupled piezoelectric-semiconductor process. This work establishes a methodology for scavenging light-wind energy and body-movement energy using fabrics.