PI: Prof. Dipti Gupta, Department of Metallurgical Engineering and Materials Science

Tata Fellow: Sagar H. P. and Mohammed Ali Khan (2017-19)

With rapid growth in portable, personal and wearable electronic devices, relying on conventional energy sources like fossil fuels, wind mills, hydro-electric stations and so on is becoming impractical. They require large infrastructure, huge capital and time consuming government policies for establishments. Over the long run, these drawbacks create a lag in supply of energy for the growing demands. Moreover, with the emergence of internet of things (IoT) application space that encompasses sectors such as sensors for disease diagnostics, health monitoring, security/surveillance and infrastructure monitoring, a sustainable and distributed kind of power sources become essential that can be deployed even in isolated and inaccessible environments. In this project, this energy crisis for the larger population is addressed by designing a budget-friendly, sustainable, zero emission, portable energy harvesting device which should sufficiently charge any small electronic gadget, like a mobile phone by extracting energy from the ambient energy sources around us.

The proposed wind energy harvesting device targets a vast range of population from every income range, location, gender, age and health condition. Low power personal electronics have become an integral part of daily life, especially in the area of communication devices, sensors, diagnosis and monitoring and security. The future technological trends thus have to be towards having distributed and portable power sources so that they can be effectively used for low power electronics.