With new technological advancements every decade, devices are becoming smaller, faster, and cheaper. The latest advances in flexible and wearable electronic devices have opened myriad opportunities for applications in fields like robotics, safety and security, healthcare, and IoT devices like flexible smartphones. While this has provided an opportunity to add computational capabilities to everyday objects, it has also made us think about their environmental impacts. Unchecked manufacturing and disposal methods still remain a major challenge. Not to mention the harmful waste from batteries and the electronic waste generated every year. To tackle these challenges, we must think about sustainability as a metric beyond performance and functionality. We must talk about sustainability at every stage of the life cycle of a device. In this project, we introduce a Biodegradable Acoustic Triboelectric Sensor (BATS), a biodegradable flexible microphone based on triboelectric nanogenerators. This project focuses on using environmentally benign processes and chemicals for manufacturing, combined with battery-free operation and biodegradable materials like silk, PLLA, and paper for convenient disposal. Additionally, to make sustainability a consumer-centric subject, we present an Open Way to Look at Sustainability (OWLS), a visual representation of sustainability for our microphone, emphasizing chemical usage, emissions, material selection, and the manufacturing and disposal processes. This idea takes inspiration from nutrition labels on food packaging and energy ratings on electrical equipment that allow a consumer to make the right choices for better nutrition or to save energy and can be more broadly applied to other consumer products in the future.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-04)
Janoff, Anna; Gerhardt, Rosario A.
Polymers are extremely dynamic and widely used materials, with the ability to create new and exciting structures. One such example is the capability for the amorphous polymer to form a segregated, organized network when the polymer matrix is mixed with a smaller filler material. This project focuses on the formation of such a segregated network in Polymethyl Methacrylate (PMMA) and carbon nanotube composites and looks to compare the effects of long versus short nanotubes on the percolation threshold across a range of filler concentrations.