Advanced Materials for Miniaturised Energy Harvesting Systems

About this call

Expected Impact:

The main impacts of this Challenge will be:

A new generation of energetically autonomous systems enabling new services that will improve the life of European citizens through applications in areas such as point of care diagnostics, smart sustainable cities etc.

Supporting sustainability in energy consumption and production in keeping with the ambitions of RePowerEU [1] and the Green Deal [2] , and

Enhancement of the sustainability of IoTs and energetically autonomous systems in general.

Expected Outcome:

Ambitious proposals put forward under this call will:

identify a new generation of advanced materials for miniaturised energy harvesting modules, and

achieve TRL 4 for the resulting energetically autonomous systems.

Portfolio Approach

The portfolio of selected projects should lead to the development of a variety of advanced materials applied to a range of miniaturised energy harvesting modules and final integrated systems.

To achieve this objective, the following factors will inform the choice of projects in the portfolio:

Phenomena exploited to harvest energy from the environment (e.g. solar, thermoelectric, piezoelectric, nanotribological etc.)

Composition of the proposed advanced materials, and

Field of application (e.g. agriculture, automotive, health monitoring, wearables, smart city management, energy management, industrial monitoring etc.).

The selected projects will be assigned to lead and/or engage in portfolio activities centred on the following priorities:

benchmarking to compare proposed technologies, phenomena exploited, advanced materials used and approaches

sharing scientific considerations, results on the different physical/chemical phenomena studied to advance the knowledge and foster new disclosures in the field with potential shifts in the paradigm

sharing insights on integration of the modules to solve potential issues and help advance towards delivering effective operational energetically autonomous systems

developing an integrated approach with different complimentary energy harvesting modules for specific use-cases and to enhance the final energy harvested, and

communicating to target audiences such as corporates, investors, alongside the broader public to raise awareness on the topic with a view to accelerating the adoption of these radical innovations.

Objective:

Applicants to this Challenge must address all of the following objectives:

The identification and development of innovative advanced materials for energy harvesting, harnessing new physical/ chemical phenomena, leading to a radical shift in application range and performance while reducing the reliance on Critical Raw Materials (CRMs)

The implementation of the advanced materials in a miniaturised energy harvesting module, such as, but not limited to, miniaturised solar cells, thermoelectric generators (e.g. TEG), nanotribological/ piezoelectric devices, electromagnetic wave harvesting devices

Integration of the miniaturised energy harvesting modules in energetically autonomous systems (e.g. wireless integrated sensors) and

Benchmarking the harvesting modules in a representative use case in a laboratory environment (TRL 4) with a view to demonstrating significant efficiency improvements, in terms of energy harvested, compared to the state of the art.

Leveraging digital tools such as AI to accelerate the process of identifying, designing, fabricating, and characterising these new materials is encouraged.

All proposals should also identify potential markets and the associated impacts of their innovations.

Scope: