Energy HarveStorers for Powering the Internet of Things

A breakthrough in micro-energy harvesting and storage technologies is required to cover the increasing demand of autonomous wireless sensor nodes (WSN) for the future Internet of Things (IoT), which is considered one of the five technologies that will change the world by connecting 27 billion devices and generating €2 trillion market by 2025. The HARVESTORE project aims to power these IoT nodes from ubiquitous heat and light sources by using nano-enabled micro-energy systems with a footprint below 1cm3. Using disruptive concepts from the emerging Nanoionics and Iontronics disciplines, which deal with the complex interplay between electrons and ions in the nanoscale, a radically new family of all-solid state micro-energy sources able to harvest and store energy at the same time will be developed. This new devices will be called “μ-harvestorers” (μHS). In order to enable this science-to-technology breakthrough, our nano-enabled μ-HSs will be integrated in silicon technology. This will allow reaching the highly dense features and scalability required for a real miniaturization and massive deployment that will show their viability as a new technological paradigm of embedded energy. The HARVESTORE project addresses this challenging objective by building an interdisciplinary research consortium that includes consolidated and emergent leading researchers in modelling, microfabrication, materials science and energy together with high-tech pioneer SMEs with unique capabilities to develop and deploy IoT nodes for real applications. Moreover, the structure and communication strategy have been designed to make HARVESTORE a lighthouse project for boosting this novel micro-energy paradigm and building around an innovation ecosystem founded on emerging Nanoionics and Iontronics applied to energy.