After working in the IT industry for about ten years, a former master-degree student of Professor Junru Wu (pictured) expressed his desire to return to UVM to work on his Ph.D. in Materials Science in Spring 2007. While Robert Andosca discussed the possible topics of his Ph.D. thesis with his former Physics professor, energy harvesting became an obvious hot topic. "Energy harvesting" or "power scavenging" is a new emerging technology that converts the ambient "useless" energy to be useful electrical energy. Since nonlinear vibration is Wu's expertise in research and Andosca has extensive experience in micro-processing of Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) devices, they decided to develop a MEMS-based vibrational energy harvesting device after strenuous discussion. The energy harvesting device includes an array of many micron-size piezoelectric cantilevers that can respond to ambient random vibrations in a wide bandwidth of frequencies and turn the random vibrations to electric voltage. It, in turn, can be used to replace or charge a battery for powering wireless sensors.
A patent "Piezoelectric Vibrational Energy Harvesting Systems Incorporating Parametric Bending Mode Energy Harvesting," was filed on March 2008 and a spin-off company, MicroGen Systems LLC, was formed. In the past two years, Wu and Adosca obtained the following awards, grants, and contracts:
They have already produced a prototype device to successfully verify their patented innovative idea. To learn more about their second place win in the Rochester Regional Business Plan Contest, please click on the following:
www.mpnnow.com/news/x1655274466/Gillibrand-Local-tech-initiatives-have-extraordinary-potential
