Just look at your mobile phone or cycle computer and you will see current information about the tire pressure. This is not something of the future, the EU project “Symphony” – coordinated by the Graz research company Joaneeum Research – makes it possible. This is important for the energy efficiency of e-bikes and safety when mountain biking.
What has long been standard in cars – automated tire pressure monitoring – would also bring all kinds of advantages for cyclists. Tire pressure has a direct influence on rolling resistance, driving comfort, grip, but also puncture protection and therefore safety. For example, with e-bikes (3-8 bar), the rolling resistance affects the life of the battery. In triathlons (8 bar), rolling resistance is a crucial factor and in mountain biking (1.5-2 bar) the grip is strongly influenced by air pressure.
In all cases, regular pressure checks are useful. But where should the electricity for data transmission from the bicycle tube come from? This is what the EU project Symphony is concerned with: its aim is to generate energy as cost-efficiently and environmentally friendly as possible, without a cable connection or battery.
Energy Harvesting: Kinetic energy is converted into electricity
“The deformation of the tube while driving is converted into energy, which is used to transmit sensor data. This means: kinetic energy becomes electrical energy,” says project coordinator Jonas Groten of the Materials Institute. “For this you need a material with electromechanical properties as a converter.” Until now, lead compounds, which are poisonous, were often used for this purpose.
And now the ‘Materials’ institute comes into the picture: researchers here have been working on the piezoelectric polymer PVDF for more than ten years. The benefits: PVDF is non-toxic, cost-effective and can be printed on large surfaces. Under certain conditions, this polymer forms a structure in which the smallest molecular dipoles add up over a large surface area. This is then called residual polarization. If this polymer is now deformed, this polarization changes and thus also the number of electrical charges in the electrodes applied to the polymer.
When you connect these electrodes, electricity is generated when they are mechanically deformed. At the Viennese bicycle tube manufacturer Tubolito and the semiconductor manufacturer Infineon, the system was subjected to a mechanical load test equivalent to a ride of 5,000 kilometers.
Various application options
This technology not only makes the bicycle tubes ‘intelligent’, but can be applied wherever sensors generate data and a self-sufficient energy system is an advantage, for example because cabling is excluded or power supply with a battery or by means of photovoltaic solar energy is not possible. effective: in the walls of houses, in the bodywork of vehicles, in the floor, in toys or in agriculture.
As part of the project, two more application examples of the energy-converting polymer are being investigated: condition monitoring in a wind turbine and energy-efficient space heating. or cooling a smart home. The EU project Symphony (short for: Smart Hybrid Multimodal Printed Harvesting of Energy) has been running since 2020 and will be completed in April.
Source: Krone
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