There’s no question that electric cars are the future of the automotive industry. And now, a team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has created a prototype nanogenerator that would help to extend the battery life of such cars by recouping energy typically lost as friction between a car’s tires and the road.
“The friction between the tire and the ground consumes about 10% of a vehicle’s fuel,” lead researcher Xudong Wang explained to Phys.org June 29. “That energy is wasted. So if we can convert that energy, it could give us very good improvement in fuel efficiency.”
The device that allows for that conversion is a single-electrode triboelectric nanogenerator, which turns mechanical energy into electrical energy. Essentially, it harvests the energy that is always transferred between surfaces when they’re brought into contact and then pulled apart — something that happens constantly as a car’s tires rotate on the ground. That electricity can then be fed back into the car’s system, allowing it to drive for longer on a single charge.
Wang’s team has only made a prototype for a toy car at this point, so the next step would be to build a model for a full-scale car tire. But the wattage generated appears to increase along with the size and weight of the tires used, meaning that the technology could be even more successful on actual car tires.
“There’s big potential with this type of energy,” Wang said. “I think the impact could be huge.”
Of course, even now, how consumers maintain their tires — even if those are basic tires from a local car repair shop — can have a significant impact on how efficient their cars are.
The UW-Madison team has published a paper on its progress in the journal Nano Energy under the title “Single-electrode triboelectric nanogenerator for scavenging friction energy from rolling tires.”