Connecting Nanogenerators to the Internet of Things Unlocks the Potential of Next-Gen Energy

  The concept of human-motion-based energy harvesting has huge technological interest in accordance with the growing popularity of portable smart electronics. It is becoming more feasible, due to advanced research in nanoelectronics, to operate at extremely low power consumption, so that energy scavenged from the environment may be sufficient to meet the working mode. However, these types of energy are time and location dependent. Especially for personal electronics, mechanical energy is the most-likely reliable and independent energy source, since human activities are based mostly on mechanical movement, regardless of the environment. Harvesting energy from body motion or human activity has a strong potential, which can untie modern personal life from the messy connections of wires for electric power supply. According to such a concept, nanowire-based nanogenerators (NGs) built on textile fibers or solid substrates have been demonstrated for the harvesting of mechanical energy produced by the friction-motion of two fibers or ultrasonic waves. Until now, for scavenging of energy from mechanical movement, especially human activity, it has been important to explore wearable and sustainable technologies that work at low frequencies and at various amounts/directions of deformation, and that is based on flexible and durable materials.  

  If you are interested, please read these further articles below,

Low dimentional materials: fabrication, characterization, and applications.

  As the scaling trend of the microelectronics continues, one-dimensional nanowires are attractive materials for nanoelectronics owing to their peculiar morphology as well as unique electronic, magnetic and piezotronic properties. Nanostructured-metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFET) devices have been made in integrated circuits comparable to the macroscale devices fabricated from the same materials. Accordingly, there have been numerous studies in the literature dealing with the interface between semiconductors and metallic electrodes, in which metal silicides have attracted much attention for their low resistivity serving as device-to-device interconnects and nanocontacts in silicon complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices.

  If you are interested, please read these further articles below,

in situ Environmental Electron Microscopy Technology.

  in situ electron microscopy (e.g. SEM, TEM, and STEM) investigation and other advanced electron microscopy technologies (e.g. EELS, tomography, and holography) in physics chemistry and science.

​  As the restriction of hazardous substances is emerging as a major issue, the development of lead-free piezoelectric materials has attracted considerable interest. As a strong candidate to replace lead-based piezoelectric materials such as Pb(Zr, Ti)O3, alkaline niobates with perovskite structure such as (K, Na)NbO3 have received great attention due to their high piezoelectricity, high Curie temperature, and electromechanical coupling constant.3 Until now, however, the reported piezoelectric coefficients of alkaline niobate bulks and thin films are inferior to those of the Pb(Zr, Ti)O3 counterpart, probably due to the volatilization of alkaline ions at high temperature. On the other hand, alkaline niobate nanomaterials are free from the volatilization problem due to low temperature synthesis, such as hydrothermal method, through nonequilibrium process. Moreover, the relatively easy control of morphology, size, and shape through nonequilibrium process enables us to investigate the quantum size effects and to widen the applications of alkaline niobate nanomaterials. One of the remaining and challenging issues of alkaline niobate nanomaterials is the increase of piezoelectricity to realize the high performance of lead-free piezoelectric nanodevices. Among alkaline niobate nanomaterials, one-dimensional NaNbO3 nanowires are obtained through the unique crystallization. 

  If you are interested, please read these further articles below,