Every heartbeat, every footstep and every passing car carries energy that we waste. As the Internet of Things grows to billions of sensors, implants and wearables, changing and recharging billions of batteries is not a realistic plan. What if these devices could power themselves?

This keynote shows how polymer nanogenerators turn ordinary mechanical motion into electricity, and how ideas from basic polymer science, such as solution thermodynamics, phase separation and crystallization, become design rules for better energy harvesters. By building pores into electrospun PVDF fibers (0 to 45% porosity), we lowered their dielectric constant and greatly increased their output, enough to charge a mobile phone. Hybrid TiO2/ZnO fillers raised the voltage 13-fold and the power density 30-fold, turning a road surface into a self-powered vehicle detector. On a living heart, an implanted nanogenerator on the left ventricle produced 3.90 ± 0.65 V and ran a cardiac pacemaker whose batteries had been removed.

The talk also covers piezoelectric nylon-11 fibers, self-poled “sausage-like” PVDF nanowires, fluid-flow sensors and electronic skin that lets a robotic hand mirror human motion, and ends with a forward look at triboelectric acoustic sensing, wearable electronics and the road to truly self-powered systems.

Speaker bio: Dr. Abolhasani has worked on nanogenerators for about 15 years. He was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow and senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany, and an Endeavour fellow at Deakin University in Australia. His work on polymer energy harvesters has been published in Nano Energy, Advanced Science and Advanced Functional Materials.