A new source of thermal power

Due to an increasing need to produce self-charging, portable, implantable and wireless electronics with extended lifespans, development of energy harvesting systems is becoming increasingly important. Much emphasis has been placed on scavenging for vibrational energy as an alternative power source. A recent notable breakthrough is the discovery that when relaxed, sheets of freestanding graphene exhibit a rippled morphology, in which adjacent regions alternate between concave and convex curvature. These ripples form due to self-compression.
Here, I will discuss modelling ripple curvature inversion dynamic of freestanding graphene using Langevin’s equation and fluctuation - induced current from freestanding graphene. I model one ripple as a Brownian particle in a double well potential with a minimum energy which corresponds to a ripple with concave and convex curvature. The particle is in contact with a thermal bath which is represented by an external white noise source. Interactions with the other ripples which occurs on longer time scales and keep the ripple out of equilibrium are mimicked by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck colored noise.