Metamaterials for energy harvesting

Abstract

Metamaterials offer significant potentials for numerous applications due to their unique acoustics, electromagnetic, optical, and mechanical properties. The increasing interest in the development of metamaterials is also driven by the inability of traditional architecture to offer novel functionalities offered by metamaterials. Recently it has been shown that the metamaterial phenomenon can be exploited for the development of energy harvesting devices especially in the field of energy scavenging at low intensity. Approaches include algorithmically arranged building blocks at the sub-micron level to achieve the desired order of response against incident energy. Furthermore, the ease of customisation with regards to metamaterials in alignment with energy sources such as acoustic, mechanical, optical and microwave offer numerous avenues for energy harvesting. For the development and selection of suitable energy harvesting metamaterial a critical understanding of their classifications, fabrication, and opportunities for customisation with respect to size, shape and lattice spacing is required, which this paper aims to provide. Furthermore, various concepts and experiments implemented to demonstrate and assess energy using metamaterials from sources such as sound waves, solar waves and mechanical vibrations are also covered.