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Researchers are looking towards airwaves to power batteries in airplanes and automobiles.
The device, about half-inch by an inch in size, may be mounted on the roof or tail of a car or on a plane fuselage where they would vibrate inside a flow, producing an output voltage.
The power generated would be good enough to run a subsystem like batteries to charge control panels and mobile phones.
The researchers, headed by Yiannis Andreopoulos, Professor at the City College of New York (CCNY), are making an attempt to optimise these peizo-electronic devices by modelling the physical forces to which they are subjected.
When the device is planted in the wake of a cylinder - such as on the back of a truck - the flow of air will cause the devices to vibrate in resonance, says Andreopoulos.
"These devices open the possibility to continuously scavenge otherwise wasted energy from the environment," says Andreopoulos.
These studies were presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics.
