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IPFS News Link • Energy

Elastic, robotic generators open up strange new energy capture ideas

• https://newatlas.com, By Loz Blain

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is pushing to deploy them, first in a series of strange, bendy wave energy designs.

The NREL says its DEEC-Tec (distributed embedded energy converter technologies) designs will sit around in the water, letting the waves deform them in all directions, and harvesting electricity from "almost all physical motions or dynamic shape changes."

Rather than driving turbines, or combining to drive an external generator, they'll be built using lots of small, flexible generators, each acting a bit like a muscle fiber to produce its own output.

One such type of generator uses dielectric elastomers, which first surfaced in the late 1990s. According to a 2020 review published in Advanced Intelligent Systems, these essentially consist of a layer of deformable, elastic, dielectric material, coated with electrodes to form a variable capacitor.

These have their lowest capacitance in their unstressed state, and any deviation from their original state increases their capacitance, whether this is stretching, twisting, compressing or bending in any direction. At peak deformation, they're primed with a charge through the electrodes, bringing their capacitance up equal to their unstressed state, and the elastic works against the electric charge to bring them back to their state of lowest capacitance, producing more energy than was used to create the charge in the first place.

As with turbine-style generators, these things can work in both directions, either harvesting energy from externally-supplied deformation forces, or spending energy to work as actuators. They can also essentially act as sensors, providing constant feedback on how far they're stretched from their normal state and essentially giving a brain/battery unit information from which to deduce how much charge to apply at a given time.


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