Buzz battery? Tiny rice-sized tech backpack turns bees into power generators
The use of nature-inspired designs has led to major advancements in powering insect cyborgs more efficiently.
A team of scientists has pulled off a tiny breakthrough by creating an ultralight piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) that taps into the buzz of bees’ thorax vibrations to generate electricity without clipping their wings.
The researchers from the Beijing Institute of Technology, and their colleagues from Sun Yat-sen University, both in China, designed the device to match the bees’ natural thorax vibrations, allowing it to harvest energy efficiently without disturbing their flight.
Built from flexible PVDF films and weighing just 46 milligrams, the harvester, which is lighter than a grain of rice, produces impressive energy outputs while letting the bees hover, flip, and fly as if nothing had changed.
By precisely tuning the device to match the bees’ thoracic vibration frequency and optimizing its center of gravity, the researchers achieved a notable energy output of 5.66 volts and a power density of 1.27 milliwatts per cubic centimeter.
A tiny energy harvester from bees
While recent advances in bio-inspired engineering have brought science closer to efficient energy harvesting for insect cyborgs, creating lightweight devices that don’t interfere with flight still poses a challenge.
To tackle the issue while introducing new design paradigms for micro-scale biological energy harvesting systems, the research team aligned the harvester’s resonant frequency with the bees’ thorax vibrations and optimized its center of gravity. With this, they achieved efficient energy conversion without disrupting the insect’s stability.