Why am I talking about ZnO at 5:30 with Alan Wong?
Or I guess when you see it, if you see it, 11:29 PM. No way in hell I’m watching it. Eesh.
Not that Alan and his cameraman Andrew were anything less that professional. I just had an hour to read a Nature paper, digest it, and try to explain it to people that don’t spend their days trying to thing about this.
So first and foremost, let me apologize to Yong Qin, Xudong Wang and Zhong Lin Wang. I didn’t do your work justice, but I’d like to take the chance to say how neat it is.
Long story short:
ZnO piezoelectric nanofibers have two big advantageous over traditional piezoelectric.
The signal is inherently DC because the ZnO forms a diode. Thus it’s self rectifying. This is huge: it’s the nano equivalent of building your wall wart into the wire itself.
The geometry makes frequency of vibrational almost irrelevant. Any motion, due to the number of fibers and their comb configuration produces a current.
Add on top the claimed mechanical stability, and it’s a good package. Now to make it waterproof….
However, you’re not going to run your iPod from this: the scale up produces 80 mW per square meter, max, and theoretically. Your iPod battery has over 5000 mWh (~2500 for a mini/nano) so it might take over a day of moving to charge the thing. I don’t know the average power draw for sure. But given a 14 hour lifetime on an ipod, that’s an average of over 300 mW, or 3x the power the shirt can deliver.
As I told Alan, and I hope made it to air, this is meant for low power wireless computers: 80mW goes a long way with these devices, hell, 8 mW goes a long way, and 800 µW, in conjunction with my batteries, is completely useable.
So I apologize for spazzing up the airwaves: Eep, for the love of all things holy please be gentle.