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The project comes out of the National Science Foundation’s Energy, Power, Control and Networks program. This collaborative research project (Mississippi State University and Clemson University) experimentally and numerically assesses a novel energy harvesting process termed as thermally-actuated piezoelectric transduction (TPT). The work will focus on realizing cyclic TPT by exploiting systems/environments with low-frequency, oscillatory temperature fields. With TPT, one can generate electrical power by temperature difference alone – without the need of thermoelectric materials, which have known heat transfer limitations. The investigated technology can be described as a thermally-conductive, Stirling-type engine which can be used in a variety of waste heat recovery applications.  Additive manufacturing will be investigated as a unique means to fabricate custom heat exchangers to optimize the performance and utility of TPT.

      

This award is from NSF’s EAGER program – Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER). The EAGER program supports exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches. This work may be considered especially “high risk-high payoff” in the sense that it, for example, involves radically different approaches, applies new expertise, or engages novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives.