Soon recharge your mobile by shouting at it

You heard it right. Researchers are working on an experiment where sound energy could be harnessed to recharge batteries, including that of smartphones.

Researchers at the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) along with Nokia have actually succeeded in creating an energy-harvesting prototype that uses everyday background noise – such as traffic, music, and your own voice to charge a mobile phone.

Which probably means that you could simple talk or shout at your handset for it to be charged. The louder you shout, the faster it gets charged.

According to Dr Joe Briscoe, Post-Doctoral Research Assistant at the University, “Being able to keep mobile devices working for longer, or doing away with batteries completely by tapping into the stray energy that is all around us is an exciting concept. This collaboration was an excellent opportunity to develop alternative device designs using cheap and scalable methods. We hope that we have brought this technology closer to viability.”

He along with Dr Steve Dunn, Reader in Nanoscale Materials at QMUL’s School of Engineering and Materials Science have been working on the project ever since they found that playing pop and rock music improves the performance of solar cells.

Dunn explains the details in this YouTube video:

According to Nokia, the starting point for the energy-harvesting prototype was nanotechnology; working with materials that are thousands of times smaller than a strand of human hair.

“At this minuscule size these materials behave very differently, for instance they can change colour, grow in strength or become much more chemically reactive. By breaking material down to a nano level it makes it easy to gather energy from movement and vibration – the key quality of sound that we wanted to utilise,” it said in a blog post.

The team used the key properties of zinc oxide, a material that when squashed or stretched creates a voltage by converting energy from motion into electrical energy, in the form of nanorods.

According to them the nanorods can be coated onto various surfaces in different locations making the energy harvesting quite versatile.

“When this surface is squashed or stretched, the nanorods then generate a high voltage. The nanorods respond to vibration and movement created by everyday sound, such as our voices. Electrical contacts on both sides of the rods are then used to harvest the voltage to charge a phone,” the university explained in a news release.

In order to make it possible to produce these nanogenerators at scale, the scientists found innovative ways to cut costs in the production process.

Firstly, they developed a process whereby they could spray on the nanorod chemicals – almost like nanorod graffiti – to cover a plastic sheet in a layer of zinc oxide. When put into a mixture of chemicals and heated to just 90°C, the nanorods grew all over the surface of the sheet.

Secondly, gold is traditionally used as an electrical contact but the team were able to produce a method of using cheap and cheerful aluminium foil instead.

The ultimate device was the same size as a Nokia Lumina 925 and generates five volts, which is enough to charge a phone.

Last year Nokia working with a team of researchers at the University of Southampton to successfully harnessed the power of lightening to charge a Lumia device.

Nokia tied up with Neil Palmer, a scientist at the University in the UK and with access to one of the world’s leading high voltage laboratories they started experimenting with a Lumia 925 to find out if energy from lightening could indeed be harnessed to recharge a phone.

“We were excited by this challenge presented to us by Nokia,” Neil explained. “Using an alternating current, driven by a transformer, over 200,000 volts was sent across a 300mm gap – giving heat and light similar to that of a lightning bolt. The signal was then stepped into a second controlling transformer, allowing us to charge the phone.”

What happened next surprised even the scientists, and Neil adds: “We were amazed to see that the Nokia circuitry somehow stabilized the noisy signal, allowing the battery to be charged.”

YouTube Video


In fact Nokia’s initiative is not new. In 2010, South Korean scientists had said that they could recharge batteries using sound via a piezoelectric effect, in which zinc oxide nanowires converted sound-caused vibrations into electricity.

According to Tech blog Gizmodo, scientists have been using piezoelectric materials in environmental sensors and speakers for years and the Korean researchers were interested in reversing this process however. “Just as speakers transform electric signals into sound, the opposite process – of turning sound into a source of electrical power – is possible,” said Young Jun Park and Sang-Woo Kim.

To what extent Nokia will be able to convert this into practically usable solution needs to be seen. If made fully operational, the technology could be used not just on mobile phones but to power multimedia units in crowded and noisy areas such as stadiums, railway stations, etc.

Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News.