• Canan Dagdeviren, Byung Duk Yang, Yewang Su, Phat L Tran, Pauline Joe, Eric Anderson, Jing Xia, Vijay Doraiswamy, Behrooz Dehdashti, Xue Feng, Bingwei Lu, Robert Poston, Zain Khalpey, Roozbeh Ghaffari, Yonggang Huang, Marvin J Slepian, and John A Rogers.
• Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, and Departments of Chemistry, Mechanical Science and Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801.
• Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2014 Feb 4; 111 (5): 1927-32.

AbstractHere, we report advanced materials and devices that enable high-efficiency mechanical-to-electrical energy conversion from the natural contractile and relaxation motions of the heart, lung, and diaphragm, demonstrated in several different animal models, each of which has organs with sizes that approach human scales. A cointegrated collection of such energy-harvesting elements with rectifiers and microbatteries provides an entire flexible system, capable of viable integration with the beating heart via medical sutures and operation with efficiencies of ∼2%. Additional experiments, computational models, and results in multilayer configurations capture the key behaviors, illuminate essential design aspects, and offer sufficient power outputs for operation of pacemakers, with or without battery assist.

14 keywords...

hide…