Metasurface Energy Harvesting for powering IoT devices

• Overview

  There is an abundance of waste heat energy in our society. The total amount of waste heat emitted from various sources accounts for 60% of the total primary energy, such as fossil fuels. Thus, reusing waste heat is an essential issue that can reduce fossil fuel consumption and contribute to decarbonization.

   While thermoelectric elements can be used to convert heat into electricity, conventional thermoelectric devices cannot recover and reuse waste heat diffused in an environment. This is because such environment will dissipate a temperature gradient across the thermoelectric element.

   To address this issue, we developed metamaterial thermoelectric conversion that generates electricity even in an environment with uniform thermal radiation by utilizing a metasurface to gather thermal energy from the surrounding environment. If this technology is implemented in our society, it is expected to be deployed as a power generation device supplying power to Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

   Therefore, we aim to realize metamaterial thermoelectric devices capable of supplying power to IoT devices by optimizing highly efficient metasurfaces.

  

Members

IWAMI Kentaro  (Institute of Agriculture / Associate Professor)