Renewable energy rain or sunshine - harvesting droplet kinetic energy on transparent thin films

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The grand vision of "Internet of Things" (IoT) behind a sustainable smart world requires billions of sensor nodes. This brings the urgency of developing self-powered devices with energy harvesting mechanisms that are sustainable, maintenance free, and with long lifetimes. However, there is still a lack of desired "all-rounder" 24/7 energy harvesting solution, efficient at mixed ambient conditions - raining or sunshine, day and night.The proposed method is to integrate transparent thin film (reported recently in journal Nature, page392, 2020) rain-drop energy harvesting technologies, making it possible to be integrated with solar energy harvesters to continuously power next generation sensor nodes rain or sunshine.In addition, thermal energy recovery (reported in Energy Sustainability in Built and Urban Environments, pp255, 2019) will also be investigated, to potentially power the device, or facilitate freshwater production from the water collected during raining.The core research will focus on creating and characterising electro-mechanical device configurations and thin-film material properties to improve overall energy harvesting efficiently.