Flexible AlN flags for efficient wind energy harvesting at ultralow cut-in wind speed

Abstract

Wind and fluid flow represent some of the most attractive renewable energy sources for addressing climate change, pollution and energy insecurity issues. Wind harvesting technologies, in particular, are the fastest-growing electric technologies in the world because of their efficiency and lower environmental impact with respect to traditional energy sources, despite exhibiting major drawbacks such as big infrastructure investment and environment invasiveness, producing high levels of noise and requiring the need of large areas for their installation. A single wind turbine can produce megawatts of power and they have the potential to cover the entire world’s energy demand in the next few years, but they have a technological limit in a cut-in wind speed of about 4 m s⁻¹, below which the turbines do not operate, excluding them as an energy source for slow air flows. At the same time most of the wind available in the environment is below the turbines’ threshold speed. In this paper we show that small flags, made by piezoelectric thin film on flexible polymers and whose shape resembles the dry leaves of trees, can efficiently act as harvesters of energy from wind at extremely low speed, such as from a gentle blow or breath. We demonstrate that piezoelectricity on flexible polymers is achievable by depositing a thin film of piezoelectric aluminium nitride (AlN), sandwiched between metal electrodes with columnar grains coherent through the polycrystalline layers, on Kapton substrates. The prototype flags have a natural curling due to the release of the residual stress of the layers. While the curling is essential for the activation of the maximum flag oscillation, this system is so elastic and light that oscillations start at a cut-in flow speed of 0.4 m s⁻¹, the lowest reported so far, with an open circuit peak to peak voltage of 40 mV. The voltage increases to 1.2 V when the flag is flattened and parallel to the fluid flow lines, with a generated power of 0.257 mW cm⁻³.