The internet of things will revolutionise the way in which we interact with the world around us: sensors of temperature, presence, traffic density will measure data and communicate to a control unit for decision-making. Autonomous actions for process optimization, intervention, environmental safeguard will be taken without human intervention.
IoT is an universe in fast expansion. A countless number of applications can be imagined: smart cities, remote health care, automated production lines…. We expect 27 billion devices to be installed by 2025, but how will they be powered? Batteries are bulky and environmentally unfriendly, thus strongly limiting the possibility of device miniaturization, at the same time posing serious problems of sustainability. Embracing the IoT in our lives will require the advent of a new generation of portable power sources. For this, the project HarveStore aims to introduce a family of micro-energy sources (micro-Harvestorers) which will be autonomous, rechargeable and will offer high specific power for full integration with the nodes of the future IoT. The micro-Harvestorers will work on two steps: energy harvesting from ubiquitous heat and light and energy storage in the form of a fuel or of electric charge. Such two steps will be carried out at the same time and the total footprint of the device will not exceed 1 cm3. Harvestore will provide power on your fingertip.
The scientific and technological foundations of the project are related to the highly advanced concepts of Nanoioncs and Iontronics, for which new materials can be designed ad-hoc by taking advantage of local effects at the nanoscale. This way, surprising properties of fast conduction and high storage capacity can be obtained. The concepts behind Nanoionics and Iontronics have already been proven by advanced research experiments and, with HarveStore, we want to feed them into mainstream technology by taking advantage of silicon microfabrication techniques. Silicon ensures superior manufacturability, cost-effectiveness and the possibility to host dense structures in a seamless architecture; all in an environmentally friendly material. Silicon is the champion to bring micro and nano technologies to the economy of scale and is therefore the material of choice for the support of the micro-Harvestorers.
