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ISR Director Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR) is one of three guest editors of the ?Special Proceeding? March 2010 issue of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics. The issue focuses on energy harvesting from ambient energy resources. This field is emerging as a potential solution to conventional oil and gas resources and is especially suited for powering low-power electronic devices.
Alireza Khaligh of the Illinois Institute of Technology and Patrick Lyle Chapman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign join Ghodssi as guest editors of this issue.
Several energy harvesting projects are ongoing in the A. James Clark School of Engineering.
A team led by ISR-affiliated Professor Neil Goldsman (ECE) has developed a novel circuit with excellent RF power harvesting efficiency that could make the recharge of portable wireless electronic devices off ambient RF energy sources feasible. A system using this circuit could operate indefinitely off of the RF energy in the environment due to cellular/television networks and wireless consumer electronics.
Researchers including Maryland NanoCenter Director Gary Rubloff (MSE/ISR) and his Ph.D. student Parag Banerjee are developing energy harvesting and energy storage devices using conventional semiconductor processes as well as self-assembled techniques for nano-fabrication.
In the MEMS Sensors and Actuators Laboratory, Ghodssi and his students are developing a vibration-capturing energy harvester that can dynamically adapt to the requirements of its environment. The harvester relies on resonance of a mass-spring system; motion in the resonator can be captured through piezoelectrics or a mechanically driven charge pump.
March 3, 2010
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