World's thinnest electric generator is now a reality

A team of researchers from Columbia Engineering and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed world's thinnest electric generator.

The researchers have come up with a first experimental observation of piezoelectricity and the piezotronic effect in an atomically thin material, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), resulting in a unique electric generator and mechanosensation devices that are optically transparent, extremely light, and very bendable and stretchable.

Zhong Lin Wang, Regents' Professor in Georgia Tech's School of Materials Science and Engineering and a co-leader of the research, said that proof of the piezoelectric effect and piezotronic effect added new functionalities to these two-dimensional materials and the materials community was excited about molybdenum disulfide, and demonstrating the piezoelectric effect in it added a new facet to the material.

Hone's team placed thin flakes of MoS2 on flexible plastic substrates and determined how their crystal lattices were oriented using optical techniques. They then patterned metal electrodes onto the flakes. In research done at Georgia Tech, Wang's group installed measurement electrodes on samples provided by Hone's group, then measured current flows as the samples were mechanically deformed. The team monitored the conversion of mechanical to electrical energy, and observed voltage and current outputs.

Hone added that this was the first experimental work in this area and was an elegant example of how the world became different when the size of material shrinks to the scale of a single atom.

The study was published online in journal Nature.