Periodic Reporting for period 3 - SYMPHONY (Smart Hybrid Multimodal Printed Harvesting of Energy)
Período documentado: 2023-05-01 hasta 2024-04-30
The SYMPHONY project is addressing all these challenges with the development of an innovative energy autonomous sensor system. The energy supply in this system is made of printed, recyclable, and non-toxic materials including the ferroelectric polymer P(VDF-TrFE), printable Si-based rectifiers, redox polymer batteries and cellulose-based supercapacitors. The SYMPHONY project develops cost effective and scalable methods to print these materials on flexible films and to combine them with energy efficient electronics and sensor technologies. The SYMPHONY project demonstrates the application of the self-powered sensors for room occupancy detection in smart floors, for condition monitoring on rotor-blades of wind turbines and for pressure monitoring in bicycle tubes.
For each use case a dedicated energy autonomous sensor system was developed taking out the mechanical energy in the respective environment and transforming it to electrical energy. The energy is stored in a small capacitor accumulating a certain amount of energy sufficient to power a small microcontroller triggering a sensor measurement and wirelessly transmitting the data, via BLE, or RF protocols. The focus was set on the durable integration in the environment, which in turn means that the system has to survive the mechanical load from the actuation. This was a special challenge since all the use cases provided a harsh mechanical environment. A constantly deforming bicycle tube, a rotor blade of the wind turbine exposed to hail, sun, and ice, as well as a floor deformed beneath each footstep.
We showed that our devices are able to withstand these conditions and are able to generate enough energy for data transmission even after extended durability testing. It was our goal to produce low-cost and scalable devices by printing and coating technologies from solution. This requires the hybrid integration of electronic components on flexible substrates, which made good progresses. We aim to apply for an EIC transition project to further, develop the smart bicycle tube by overcoming current limitations regarding energy output especially at elevated tube pressures.
We promoted the project results through 7 OPEN ACEESS publications, sharing of lessons learnt during the participation to 14 international conferences, and communicating with broad public via project website (https://www.symphony-energy.eu/) press and social media (https://www.youtube.com/@energy-symphony; https://www.linkedin.com/company/energy-symphony/). We prepared for the exploitation of the project results through the organization of a specific SYMPHONY workshop, publications in 6 specialized magazines, participation to 22 industrial oriented events and definition of commercialization roadmaps for 8 results.
The SYMPHONY printed technology can be integrated cost effectively in stretchable and flexible devices, representing a huge potential for usage in a wide range of further IoT-supported applications, as wearables, industrial machines, or rail tracks.
In a rigorous LCA analysis we have compared the SYMPHONY technologies to battery powered comparative systems or PZT nanogenerators, showing the reduced emission of CO2 and toxic waste in the production. As the P(VDF-TrFE) based harvesters already today show a 50% reduced price compared to commercially available PZT nanogenerators, the SYMPHONY system outperforms existing solutions in terms of economic and environmental aspects, with the potential for further price reduction in the future.
SYMPHONY will have impact not only in the field of applications for nanogenerators, but also at the material level since several material concepts developed in the project can also be applied for other purposes than energy harvesting.
The SMEs in the project have a strong interest to bring the developed energy autonomous sensor systems to market within the next 2-3 years.