Free e-book on nanogenerators

(Nanowerk News) Probably the leading team that is driving forward the work on nanogenerators for converting mechanical energy into electricity is Zhong Lin Wang's group at Georgia Tech. So far, we have covered their exciting work in at least half a dozen Nanowerk Spotlights about nanopiezotronics and nanogenerators.
Wang, Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Nanostructure Characterization at Georgia Tech, has now authored a comprehensive and coherent review about the development of nanogeneratos, organizing his book based on his group's published papers.
And best of all, rather than selling hard copies, he decided to distribute this book free of charge (download here: "Nanogenerators for Self-powered Devices and Systems"; pdf – 11.3 MB) through the internet so that it can benefit a wider range of readers (please note: although you may freely download this book and use it for non-commercial purposes, Wang's group own the copyright of the book and preserve the right of making any revisions and changes. The official publisher of the book is Georgia Institute of Technology.)
nanogenerators
Background
Ever since the wide range applications of laptop computers and cell phones, seeking of power sources for driving portable electronics is becoming increasingly important. The current technology mainly relies on rechargeable batteries. But for the near future, micro/nano-systems will be widely used in health monitoring, infrastructure and environmental monitoring, internet of things and defense technologies; the traditional batteries may not meet or may not be the choice as power sources for the following reasons.
First, with the increasingly shrinkage in size, the size of the total micro/nano-systems could be largely dominated by the size of the battery rather than the devices.
Second, the number and density of micro/nano-systems to be used for sensor network could be large, thus, replacing batteries for these mobile devices becoming challenging and even impractical.
Lastly, the power needed to drive a micro/nano-system is rather small, in the range of micro- to milli-Watt range.
To meet these technological challenges, the author proposed the self-powering nanotechnology in 2005, aiming at harvesting energy from the environment to power the micro/nano-systems based sensor network. Ever since they demonstrated the first nanogenerators using piezoelectric nanowires for converting mechanical energy into electricity ("Piezoelectric Nanogenerators Based on Zinc Oxide Nanowire Arrays"), a great interest has been excited worldwide for developing various approaches for energy harvesting. A key idea presented in the 2006 paper is the self-powered nanotechnology, aiming at powering nanodevices/nanosystems using the energy harvested from the environment in which the systems are suppose to operate.
To provide a comprehensive and coherent review about the development of nanogeneratos, Wang has organized this book mainly based on our published papers to provide a coherent coverage about the nanogenerators from fundamental materials, basic physics principles and theory, scientific approach, engineering-scale up and technological applications, so that readers can get a full picture about the development of this technology. The entire 139-page book is composed of 11 chapters with hundreds of figures.
Source: Wang Lab, Georgia Tech