In the days of bright, beautiful displays and data crunching apps, it’s not a tall order to burn through your phone’s battery in a matter of hours. But constantly reaching for the wall plug is a bit of a bummer and means that your mobile device all of a sudden isn’t.
But what if our smartphones tablets could smarten up and start converting ambient energy—energy from our surrounding environment—into useable electrical energy?
It’s not fiction. Energy harvesting devices do just that—they use a transducer to convert ambient energy such as solar, wind, piezoelectricity and chemical energy into electricity. The amount of energy produced is (at the moment) small, but enough for low-power applications such as wireless sensor nodes, wrist watches, and solar-plated mobile phones.
The Global Energy Harvesting Devices Market is growing at a CAGR of 17 percent from 2041-2018, mostly due to the ability of these nifty devices to turn electronic products into contactless charging stations.
One major vendor in the market, Linear Technology, manufactures low power integrated circuits that convert energy from vibration (piezoelectricity), solar and thermal sources.
According to the company website, the applications for this technology stretch well beyond your smartphone.
“Boost converters that operate from as little as 20mV or battery chargers with Maximum Power Point capability expand the possibilities for a wide variety of industrial automation and control, wireless sensor, transportation, automotive and building management applications.”
However, the consumer segment of this market is still the driving force, holding nearly 60 percent market share. Since almost all consumer electronic products are currently run on batteries and other power supply sources that need frequent recharging, contactless charging looks like a pretty great improvement.
But don’t go throwing out your power cord yet. Electronics that can fully sustain themselves on ambient energy are still a ways off, and still very much in the research and development phase.
Making this technology a reality is expensive and time consuming. Not to mention, the technology that does exist is only really functional when it comes to low power devices. Further research is needed to develop energy harvesting devices that can generate enough power to enable them to be used for high power consuming applications.
While these challenges are no small hurdle for researchers and manufactures in the energy harvesting market, some big steps have been taken in developing the technology to make these devices viable for consumers. One big breakthrough was actually quite, well, small: Miniaturized energy harvesters. Creating tiny devices that can easily fit on any gadget, from wristwatches to smartphones, is essential for this technology to really take off with consumers.
And given our reliance on electricity, there is a pressing need to expand our energy resources beyond the wall socket, which will be a major factor in the growth of this market in the future.
For more insights, view our Global Energy Harvesting Devices Market 2014-2018 report.
