Rubbery power source makes electricity when it bends

by WILLIAM HERKEWITZ

IMAGE/Yi et. al./Science Advances

Use it to make a bracelet and the material itself could power flashing LEDs

It looks and feels like a cheap strip of silicone. Don’t be fooled. This soft rubbery material makes electricity when it’s bent, pressed, or stretched.

Make a wristband with it and it can power LED lights as you move your hands. Fold it into your shoe to create a self-powered sensor that can tell when you’re walk. The best part? It costs less than a dollar to make.”The most expensive part is adding the LEDs,” says Zhong Lin Wang, the inventor and a material scientist at Georgia Tech.

Wang and his colleagues just unveiled their new bendy generator in a paper today in the journal Science Advances. The device is a nanogenerator called a saTENG.Unlike previous attempts at creating these generators, Wang’s device is incredibly flexible and robust. In a test it was stretched up to 300 percent of its original size more than 55,000 thousand times with no damage.

The nanogenerator has three basic components: A rubber sheath, a liquid center made of salt or tap water, and a simple wire “of copper or iron or aluminum, for example” that reaches into the liquid center, Wang says. That’s it. Electricity is harvested as current flows up and down that wire. “It’s very, very easy to make. If you filled a water-balloon with saltwater, you could make one of these things, [albeit an exceedingly weak one,] and use your hands to press the balloon to generate power,” he says.

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