Known as QMol (Quantum engineering of energy-efficient molecular materials), the five-year project is being funded by a £7m EPSRC Programme Grant. QMol will explore flexible organic thermoelectric (TE) materials capable of capturing waste heat from the body and other sources such as data centres, then converting it to electricity. The project is being led by Lancaster University’s Professor Colin Lambert alongside Dr Ben Robinson and Dr Sam Jarvis.
“Wouldn’t it be great if the health benefits of smart clothing and electrically stimulated wound healing could be delivered without the need to change a battery?” said Professor Lambert, a research professor at Lancaster’s Department of Physics. “Wouldn’t it be great if the huge amounts of energy wasted by computers and other low-grade heat sources could be reduced significantly or converted back into electricity?”
Demand for wearables has increased significantly in recent years, but the majority require regular charging of batteries or supercapacitors. Tapping into the body’s movement and heat is seen as a vital step for continually powering these devices, and this will be at the core of QMol’s research. Currently, the efficiency of the world’s best inorganic thermoelectric (TE) material is just five per cent. Lambert and the international team will look to develop organic “memristors”, low-power devices able to simulate the synapses in our brain and also act as sensors.
“We know that we can deliver these materials, because recently we discovered that quantum interference effects can be utilised to enhance the switching functionality and thermoelectric performance of single molecules and few-layer molecular films,” said Prof Lambert. “The aim now is to continue this trend to thicker films, which will allow us to exploit quantum interference in the third dimension.
“This is not a trivial step - in fact, we believe that moving from single molecules to functional films will be as transformational as the scaling up from single transistors to integrated circuits was in the 1960s.”
Other QMol project partners include the Autonomous University of Madrid, Barocal Ltd, Bruker, CNRS Group, Empa, Kratos Analytical Ltd, Kymira Ltd, Nu Nano Ltd, Quantum Base Ltd, University of Oklahoma, University of Oviedo, University of Santiago de Compostela, VITO- The Flemish institute for technological research and Xiamen University.
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