Water Enabled Electricity Generating Device

As part of the UCSD engineering curriculum, our senior year is concluded with an engineering project class where students work in teams of 5 to independently complete a project proposed by industry and academic sponsors.

The project that I picked was sponsored by a professor from UCSD, Dr. Prabhakar Bandaru, to advance/develop a proposed solid state electrokinetic technology to convert wave energy into usable power. The previous figure of merit that the campus laboratory achieved was 0.1 millivolts/pascal, with a test fixture only capable of supporting about 500 pascals of forced pressure through extremely small channels.

We demonstrated a significant improvement to this figure generating, at peak, over 1.6 volts, and recording nano-watts of power generation– which, compared to the previous pico-watt status-quo, represented a significant step forward for this technology. We achieved this through careful material selection, a uniquely designed micro-milled channel geometry, and a more modular test bed, capable of supporting greater variation in flow rates and more accurately simulating ocean-wave dynamics.