Renewable energy ideas presented at 2013 Talbot Lecture

The MechSE Department hosted the 2013 Arthur Newell Talbot Distinguished Lecture Tuesday, January 22. Hundreds braved the brutal cold to pack NCSA's auditorium for the event.

Zhigang Suo, the guest lecturer from Harvard University, presented "Soft Generators that Harvest Energy from Renewable Sources." Early in his lecture, Professor Suo noted that the world has more renewable energy than society needs, even in this high-energy era, but the challenge is to find ways to harness the energy cheaply and cleanly.

The abstract for the lecture said: "When stretched, a thin membrane of a dielectric elastomer expands its area and reduces its thickness. The deformation can increase the electric capacitance of the membrane over a thousand times. This electromechanical coupling is being developed as soft generators to harvest energy from renewable sources, such as human movements, ocean waves and waste heat. This talk describes recent theory and experiments to answer following questions. How much energy can be converted per cycle? What are desirable materials, circuits and setups? How do dissipative processes such as viscosity and leakage affect efficiency? We model a generator as a system of two degrees of freedom, represented on either the force-displacement plane or the voltage-charge plane. In such a plane, a point represents a state of the generator, a contour represents a cycle of operation, and the area enclosed by the contour represents the energy converted per cycle. The allowable states are determined by considering modes failure, such as material rupture, loss of tension, electrical breakdown, and electromechanical instability. Energy conversion of hundreds of joules per kilograms per cycle has been demonstrated."

Suo is the Allen E. and Marilyn M. Puckett Professor of Mechanics and Materials at Harvard. He earned his bachelor's degree from Xi'an Jiaotong University in 1985, majoring in Engineering Mechanics. Upon earning a Ph.D. degree in Engineering Science from Harvard University in 1989, Suo joined the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and established a group studying the mechanics of materials and structures. The group moved to Princeton University in 1997 and to Harvard University in 2003. Suo teaches courses in solid mechanics, applied mathematics and thermodynamics. His research centers on the mechanical behavior of materials and structures.

Arthur Newell Talbot was named Professor of Municipal and Sanitary Engineering in charge of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois in 1890. He served as head of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics until 1926, and he regarded teaching as the most important aspect of his work.

The Arthur Newell Talbot Distinguished Lecture is made possible through the support of the Talbot family, in honor of their ancestor’s commitment to learning and teaching.