The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), located in the northeast of the UK, has collaborated with the University of Bath and Silent Sensors to develop a key component for the future of intelligent tires, using piezoelectric energy harvesting. This component will be part of the Silent Sensors tire management system (TMS) for vehicles.
“The intelligent tire is our goal in the next two years and the piezoelectric materials that Bath University has developed show great promise,” said Marcus Taylor, CEO and co-founder of Silent Sensors.
“Within our TMS tire sensors we have energy harvesting and storage, micro-controllers, short range radio and sensor arrays that will enable future autonomous vehicles to use their tires to detect information about the environment. Our partnership with CPI ensures that we will be able to scale up as demand in the market for these components grows – as it inevitably will in the next five years.”
Professor Chris Bowen, University of Bath, stated, “We will explore a range of piezoelectric materials and composite systems to covert mechanical vibrations and strains into electrical energy for intelligent tire sensors.”
The collaboration depends on CPI’s manufacturing facilities at the National Printable Electronics Centre, for the scale up and commercialization of printed electronic products. The project will involve the creation of power management and sensing devices as well as a printed kinetic harvesting element. The novel active harvesting elements will be co-developed by Silent Sensors, the University of Bath and CPI. The practical work includes fabrication and testing to understand the power that can be harvested, the operating temperature window and the lifetime of the EH/S transducer.
Watch a video on the technology here.
