We are surrounded by significant amounts of energy which goes to waste; heat, sound, vibration, RF, solar, etc.  AdaptivEnergy’s Joule-Thief™ products convert otherwise wasted mechanical energy such as impulse shock, vibration, and footfall into usable amounts of electrical energy.  This converted electrical energy can then be used to directly power electrical devices, be collected for intermittent higher power devices, or stored for later use.

These products are based on piezoelectric elements; ceramics and thin films.  Piezoelectric materials generate an electric potential in response to applied mechanical strain or stress.  Joule-Thief™ technology exploits this physical characteristic by extracting this electrical potential and converting it into electrical energy via our Energy Key™ electronics.  The Energy Keys™ are a series of low or zero power, low leakage, high efficiency energy conversion and collection circuits with the right energy storage selected for capacity, current delivery, and environmental extremes.  Piezoelectric materials allow for scalability to very small size while being sensitive enough to perform under barely perceptible levels of motion (vibration down to 10 milli-g’s).

In all applications, the stress state of the piezoceramic materials is controlled in the compressive regime for high reliability.  These products have been tested to billions of cycles with all components controlled below their endurance limits.  They also function well over a wide temperature range of -40 C to >+85 C.  The result is a “forever” power solution. 

Joule-Thief™ products are powering a wide variety of low power microelectronics (microcontrollers, RF chipsets, low power sensors) which are used extensively in wireless sensor and active RFID applications with supported wireless protocols such as 6loWPan, Zigbee, Zigbee Pro, 802.15.4, 802.11 (Wi-Fi), and ISO 18000-7 (DASH7).