A pair of energy "catchers" make the invisible visible!

"Welcome to the Micro Energy Capture Laboratory, which is the stage of science. Scientific dancers dance here, and complex devices float in the air like music. Electronic hymns are played here, and invisible energy leaps here. With a brave heart, open a new chapter in this world, and find the truth of science between the tiny and the great." No matter who opens the official homepage of the research group of Gao Mingyuan, an associate professor at the School of Engineering and Technology of Southwest University, they will be "captured" by the vigor and vitality of this group of young people at the first time. A few sentences as relaxed and beautiful as poems fully describe their surging and passion. And the device in the photo, which is thinner than a page of paper, can capture the energy of 5G electromagnetic waves.

Gao Mingyuan

In 2020, when Gao Mingyuan first discovered that what he learned could serve the field of flexible electronics and life health, he secretly made a promise to continue to dive deep into the cutting-edge field of flexible wearable device power supply systems. Although it has only been three years, he and his team have reaped a lot of rewards. He said: "I am just lucky to stand on the shoulders of giants. From studying to working, my mentors Professor Liu Sheng, Professor Wang Ping, Professor Yuerui Lu and my predecessors have all given me very instructive and effective suggestions. With the joint support of many parties, wearable micro-energy systems have been born one by one."

In his first year at Southwest University, Gao Mingyuan's achievements were published in the academic journal Energy & Environmental Science. In the project, Gao Mingyuan and his team mainly carried out research on the important factor that restricts the popularity of wearable devices, namely battery life, and focused on breaking through the technical bottlenecks of flexible, green and sustainable energy supply, and achieved a series of innovative results. Next, they continued to work on the application of energy sources such as thermoelectricity, motion and radio waves in wearable devices, and for the first time proposed evaluation indicators for the power supply system of flexible wearable devices, which can more comprehensively evaluate the power performance, energy conversion mechanism, and power reduction under bending or stretching conditions of flexible wearable systems.

"This achievement makes it possible to standardize the power supply design of future wearable devices and make the power supply system more intelligent." Once the achievement was published, it was immediately reported by mainstream media such as Xinhua News Agency. Some industry experts believe that this research result represents the research focus and development trend of the power supply system of flexible wearable devices in the future. The evaluation indicators proposed in the study will help to select the power supply of wearable devices according to different application scenarios such as smart home, human health monitoring, and fine livestock and poultry breeding in the future, thereby promoting the design standardization and industrialization process of wearable devices.

Gao Mingyuan's team has never stopped its practice of "capturing" energy. In the past two years, they have developed a wireless power transmission technology that can collect the energy of radio frequency electromagnetic waves (such as 5G, Wi-Fi) around them, providing an inexhaustible supply of electricity for wearable devices that are inconvenient and cannot be charged. The research results have been published in the top journals in the field of physics, Applied Physics Reviews, and Device, a sub-journal of Cell. This is not only expected to help people who are not sensitive to electronic products (such as the elderly, infants, etc.) solve the trouble of frequent charging of wearable devices, and realize uninterrupted real-time monitoring of smart watches, bracelets, wearable medical devices, etc., but also enable such products to eliminate the health risks brought by chemical products such as batteries, so that human body temperature, heartbeat and electromagnetic waves in the environment, which are "invisible" but actually ubiquitous energy, can be reflected in daily equipment in a "touchable" form.

It is worth mentioning that this type of technology is also expected to be applied to railway monitoring in special environments. "There are sparsely populated areas along the Sichuan-Tibet Railway." They are listed as unsuitable for human habitation due to their "strength" and other climatic characteristics such as large temperature differences between day and night. Because of this, "maintenance" and daily inspections of the railway monitoring system have become huge problems. "If a system can be developed that can independently power supply and maintain real-time monitoring using only temperature differences, and reduce the workload of daily operation and maintenance, it can clear the obstacles for solving related problems." Aiming at the urgent needs of the industry, Gao Mingyuan has started a new round of sketching and describing in his career chapter.

Ambition is the beacon of life. Although Gao Mingyuan has only been committed to the cutting-edge technology research of micro-energy capture mechanism and micro-energy devices for a few years, he has published more than 20 academic papers in the first zone, cited more than 1,500 times, authorized 7 invention patents, and won 1 international innovation award. He is convinced that "those who are determined to travel thousands of miles should not stop halfway". Looking forward to the future, he said that he will continue to work with the team to keep down-to-earth and forge ahead until he reaches the other side of the free "capture" of energy in his heart.