Technology is an increasingly pervasive and critical part of modern society.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has produced many products that are nearly indispensable.
From smartwatches to smartphones and even smart home tech, electronic devices have become a big part of daily life for many people around the world.
These devices can help everyone, from keeping homes secure and safe to tracking health measures in real time.
Using these devices is not always intuitive, however, and limited battery power and life can negatively impact the technology’s spread.
Even though many IoT electronics are small, they require sustainable energy in order to continue working in both the short term and long term.
When this power runs out, the batteries often end up in a landfill.
With an estimated one trillion sensors expected to exist in the world by 2025, battery waste quickly adds up and becomes unmanageable.
According to Mike Hayes, the head of ICT for energy efficiency at Ireland’s Tyndall National Institute, the number of sensors is rapidly increasing due to the sheer number of devices using them every day.
These include sensors in infrastructure such as railways and roads as well as those in smart tech related to vehicles, household management and personal electronics.
Hayes said that all of these sensors could add up to 100 million batteries discarded into landfills every day by 2025 unless battery life is significantly extended.
Another challenge related to batteries is the material needed to make them.
Billions of new batteries must be made due to the billions of batteries discarded each year, and Earth has finite resources.
Ambient temperature to fuel energy harvesters
The solution to battery life issues is to use energy harvesters instead of physical batteries alone.
Energy harvesters draw energy from things such as indoor solar panels or those with modest vibration and turn it into usable energy.
Ambient temperature energy harvesters could potentially fuel things such as watches, hearing aids, RFID tags, carbon dioxide detectors, and even light, humidity and temperature sensors.
However, this kind of power source faces a key challenge: power management.
Energy sources feeding ambient temperature harvesters might be intermittent and produce very small levels of energy (think microwatts).
Luckily, scientists and engineers are searching for solutions in increasing numbers to create usable and sustainable energy harvesters to power IoT devices indefinitely.
Today’s news was brought to you by TD SYNNEX – the UK’s number one solutions distributor.
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