Photomobile polymers in sunlight energy harvesting applications

Differentiating the energy harvesting technologies is a must to reduce pollution, slow down environmental degradation and avoid rare and raw materials monopolies. Mechanical energy harvesting technologies can help in this sense and are already applied in energy harvesting from renewable sources such as wind and water but not yet directly for sunlight applications. To achieve such an ambitious target, an appropriate strategy has to be adopted to obtain highly efficient photo-mechanical-electric conversion stimulated by sunlight, to open a new paradigm in the Energy Harvesting field. In this work, unconventional and innovative systems are fabricated to induce the oscillation of photomobile polymer material (PMP) under the flux of solar or artificial light and transfer the mechanical movement to a piezoelectric device (PZL). Targeting to the implementation of PMPs in real environment, under sunlight radiation, finalized to design Opto-Mechanical-Energy-Harvesting-Systems’ prototypes, we focused on manufacturing and experimentally characterizing systems that couple the PMP material with PZL devices. In our experiments, we used large area PMP (magnitude order of cm²) and commercial PZLs. The main aim was to investigate the feasibility of creating an innovative working prototype with appreciable performances that can pave the way for this type of technology.