Startled by Static Electricity, and Learning About TENG Through a Daydream (feat. let's just hit the salon first)

Thanks to Covid? I grew out my hair for the first time in my life. About 20 cm? 

As it got longer, I felt like I was getting more static electricity than usual — mildly inconvenient. 

Out of nowhere this thought came: what about sheep? Don't sheep get a lot of static too?

And say.. this enormous — sometimes tens of thousands of volts — static electricity. Really, is there no way to use it in daily life? 

Not big stuff like solar or wind power..

Not hydrogen cars or EVs or advanced science..

Not those things — just electricity you could produce in everyday life, is there none of that? 

Oh~ there is!~ 

A nano-generator using triboelectric effects (TENG) blog.kepco.co.kr/1577

However, electricity harvested from static produces high voltage but very low current, so ongoing R&D is still needed. Research is progressing toward use in power supplies and flexible displays.

It's a good technology. Only.. I'm a bit worried about the technology's momentum in the adopted field getting carried away beyond development into applications. Since it's tech discovered in daily life, maybe — before looking for industrial applications — there are easier and faster paths within everyday-life use.  

— that's what I'd posted.. haha

Out of mild regret, I searched a bit more, and it turns out similar research results have been coming out starting this year. 

www.sciencetimes.co.kr/news/%EB%B0%94%EC%9D%B4%EB%9F%AC%EC%8A%A4%EB%8F%84-%EC%9E%A1%EB%8A%94%EB%8B%A4%EB%A7%88%EC%B0%B0%EB%8C%80%EC%A0%84-%EB%82%98%EB%85%B8-%EB%B0%9C%EC%A0%84%EA%B8%B0-%EC%B6%9C%EB%A0%A5-%EB%8C%80/

This kind of harvesting of scraps of wasted energy from everyday life — vibrations, heat, wind — as a power source is called Energy Harvesting.

That's a new keyword acquired. 

Looking at related research papers 2019, 2020, it seems there's also a lot of R&D happening around applying this to IoT. 

Finally, a TMI — my own two cents:

On the electricity side, generation matters, but I hope research goes alongside the corresponding nano-battery for storage and the distribution of that electricity. For IoT research to really take off, beyond considering always-on power we'd want parallel research on local networks using things like non-audible frequencies. 

Personally holding a bit of "K-pride" for our country's R&D, I have two wishes.

First, on the original-technology side — solo R&D and core-tech development are fine, but from the next stage onward, I wish there were more federated R&D between research organizations rather than refining only within the original one. I hope a new organizational unit is set up to combine and operate results across research institutions — a bridge or communicator department that fuses outcomes from other research groups. 

The second is about commercialization. Lately interest in DIY has grown — across industry, personal hobbies, and education. Arduino and Raspberry Pi are the most representative cases. While it's great to prepare paths for scaling up original tech into economies of scale, industries, or core infrastructure, producing outcomes like modules that plug into open-source projects like Arduino or Raspberry Pi is probably just as important.