Home > News & Analysis > Energy Harvesting in Action at the IDTechEx Energy Harvesting & Storage Conference and Exhibition in Boston, MA, 15-16 November 2012.

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Energy Harvesting in Action at the IDTechEx Energy Harvesting & Storage Conference and Exhibition in Boston, MA, 15-16 November 2012.

9th March 2012

IDTechEx Ltd

ES Admin

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Less than two weeks remain until the IDTechEx Energy Harvesting & Storage conference and exhibition and already exhibitors are prepared to demonstrate their capabilities and technology advances, and not just on paper. This year more than ever, the exhibition floor will be full of demonstrators, prototypes and products that incorporate energy harvesting, showcasing in the most vivid way the maturity level of the technology and the variety of possible applications that could become possible with further penetration of energy harvesting technologies.

Some of the examples are listed below:

Avnet will be demonstrating its activities in the energy harvesting and wireless sensor network space by having two separate demos that include energy harvesting nodes, one of which is a 2.4 GHz sensor network with nodes powered solely by thermal, vibration, light and RF induction.

Mide, an engineering company that develops, produces, and markets smart technology products and materials will have a complete energy harvestingsensor system operating, utilizing the Volture piezo-electric harvester developed by the company. It will harvest vibration energy from a small vibration source, power a microprocessor to take temperature measurements and send them wirelessly to a remote laptop.

The vulture energy harvester by Mide Technology

Cymbet , developer of thin battery technology will have several Energy Harvesting in Action demonstrators, including a significant demo with Dust Networks using solar harvesting to power an IPV6 based Wireless Router. This is the first time ultra-low power technologies have converged in order to achieve this. Cymbet will also have Wireless Sensor demos with Micropelt (thermal harvesting ), Mide (vibration energy harvesting) and RF Wireless Power with PowerCast. The SmartMesh product family provides a unique convergence with energy harvesting because all of their mesh network nodes can run on harvested energy, said Burkhard Habbe, Vice President of Business Development for Micropelt GmbH. With the further decreased power requirements of Dust's new SmartMesh IP technology we can now run even more applications on thermal harvesters at rather low gradients, eliminating both wires and battery maintenance.

The Fraunhoffer ISS will also have several working demos which will be several wireless sensors powered by thermal gradients and vibrations. KCF technologies will be featuring their heat harvesting technology in a small device attached to a hot plate and then powering a wireless vibration sensor, but will also display their solar harvesting technology in a small device situated in front of a 2000 lumen light and wirelessly powering vibration sensors.

Finally, be sure to take a glimpse of the ElectraFLyer e-trike, pictured below, a manned aerial vehicle utilizing regenerative soaring, a promising energy harvesting technology for the aviation sector.

The ElectraFlyer e-trike

Randall Fishman from ElectaFlyer will also be discussing the development of regenerative soaring during the conference sessions, highlighting the possibility of solar heating and regenerative soaring as power supply sources for aviation, avoiding the need to charge from grid connected power stations. He will also be discussing the concept of the photovoltaic hangar as a ground-charging suite for an electric airplane.