Completed projects
We have completed a number of projects over the year. Please click below to find out more about each of them.
Professor Meiling Zhu, Dr Yang Kuang and Dr Zheng Jun Chew of the Energy Harvesting Research Group at the University of Exeter have awarded an Impact and Knowledge funding from the EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA).
The IAA grant will aim to accelerate the industrial uptake of the energy harvesting technologies developed at the Research Group. This project industrial partner is Babcock International Group in Bristol, UK.
Professor Meiling Zhu and Dr Zheng Jun Chew of the Energy Harvesting Research Group at the University of Exeter have awarded an ICURe – Innovation-to-Commercialisation funding from the SETsquared Partnership and Innovate UK, funded by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
This ICURe Award will aim to facilitate the group to develop a business case for commercialisation of their research.
Professor Meiling Zhu, Dr Yang Kuang and Dr Zheng Jun Chew of the Energy Harvesting Research Group at the University of Exeter have awarded Open Innovation funding from the University of Exeter. This Open Innovation Award will aim to develop energy harvesting system for battery-less remote monitoring. This project industrial partner is Dashboard Ltd. in Exeter, UK.
Professor Meiling Zhu of the Energy Harvesting Research Group at the University of Exeter is participating a TSB grant for research into “SENTIENT: SENsors To Inform & Enable wireless Networks”. The research grant is awarded from Competition for Collaborative R&D Funding January 2013 on “Highly innovative technology enablers in aerospace 2, worth almost £1.1 million.
The research grant will aim to develop a low/self-powered wireless sensor nodes for integrated vehicle health management (IVHM) using thermal/vibration energy harvested, and to create a ground demonstrator for a cost effective solution for IVHM that provides visualisation of the state of health of airframe and control systems”.
This project is led by HM Communications Ltd, and also participated by TWI Ltd, Airbus Operations Ltd, Ultra Electronics Ltd, NEDEAS Ltd, Cardiff University, BAE Systems (Operations) Ltd.
Professor Meiling Zhu of the Energy Harvesting Research Group at the University of Exeter has been awarded an EPSRC grant, worth £0.63 million, for research into “En-ComE: Energy Harvesting Powered Wireless Monitoring Systems Based on Integrated Smart Composite Structures and Energy-Aware Architecture”. This project is to respond to “the Application to BAE Systems ‘Persistent Green Air Vehicle’ Technology Challenge” by developing energy harvesting (EH) powered wireless data links and real time condition and environmental sensors nodes in an integrated smart composite airframe structure for monitoring. The nodes will operate in a truly energy autonomous manner, without the need for power supplies or batteries. The wireless interconnection offers multiple, interconnected sensor capability without the need for connecting cables and their added weight. The advanced composite material offers light weight and high strength-to-weight ratio so as to reduce power consumption and help increase resource efficiency.
The vision of the research is to develop a deployable technology demonstrator of EH powered WSCS in integrated smart advanced composite airframe structures to harvest strain energy from the vibration of aircraft wings for environmental parameter and structural health monitoring, and to provide wide scale monitoring capability for aircraft without imposing an additional power demand. This will free up power resources for other critical systems and contribute to the overall lean energy and weight targets.
Although tailored to the PERGAVE , the capability delivered by this project can find wide applications in other sectors such as remote and dispersed renewable energy installations (e.g. wind turbines), automotive and aerospace, and healthcare (body sensor networks and telemedicine).
The multidisciplinary research includes two additional academic collaborators: the Department of Engineering at Lancaster University (LU), and the School of Computing, Engineering & Physical Sciences at the University of Central Lancashire.
The project partners are BAE Systems, BAE Systems supply chains from Avionic Systems, AgustaWestland Ltd, TRW, dstl, EPSRC National Centres for Innovative Manufacturing in Through-life Engineering Services. These partners represents aerospace, defence and automotive sectors. There are Aerospace, Aviation & Defence KTN and Zartech Technology to Market organisations as dissemination partners to support the project impact activities.
More information can be found from the EPSRC website.
Professor Meiling Zhu of the Energy Harvesting Research Group at the University of Exeter has been awarded an EPSRC grant, worth £0.41 million, for research into “SMARTER: Smart Multifunctional ARchitecture & Technology for Energy aware wireless sensoRs”. This project is to respond to “CHIST-ERA call on “Green ICT, towards Zero Power ICT” for European Coordinated Research on Long-term Challenges in Information and Communication Sciences & Technologies.
The overall vision of the project is to develop comprehensive knowledge and an innovative methodology in the areas of energy autonomous wireless systems from a global system perspective, enabling self-powered, battery-free wireless sensing nodes to meet a wide range of structural health monitoring (SHM) applications.
The project partners are LAAS-CNRS in France and the University of Barcelona in Spain.
More information can be found from the EPSRC website .
Professor Meiling Zhu of the Energy Harvesting Research Group at the University of Exeter is participating a FP7 Marie Curie Actions People International Research Staff Exchange Scheme grant for research into “Smarter Sensor Networks with Energy Harvesting for real time monitoring in urban water infrastructure”, worth €157.5K.
The research grant will help to exchange the existing research work and develop new research in the above area.
This project is coordinated by Staffordshire University and also participated by Delft University of Technology in Netherland, and Harbin Institute of Technology, Dalian University of Technology, and Tsinghua University in China.