Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have thus far succeeded in fabricating the parts for such a micro turbine out of six etched and stacked silicon wafers, and are working toward combining them into a functioning engine about the size of a U.S. quarter coin.
[3] Researchers at Georgia Tech have built a micro generator 10 mm wide, which spins a magnet above an array of coils fabricated on a silicon chip.
[6] The National Academies' National Research Council recommended in a 2004 report that the U.S. Army should investigate such micropower sources for powering electronic equipment to be carried by soldiers in the future, since batteries sufficient to power the computers, sensors, and communications devices would add considerable weight to the burden of infantry soldiers.
[10] Arman Hajati and Sang-Gook Kim invented the Ultra Wide-Bandwidth micro-scale piezoelectric energy harvesting device by exploiting the nonlinear stiffness of a doubly clamped microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) resonator.
The stretching strain in a doubly clamped beam shows a nonlinear stiffness, which provides a passive feedback and results in amplitude-stiffened Duffing mode resonance.
[11] Professor Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology said his team of investigators had developed a "nanometer-scale generator ... based on arrays of vertically aligned zinc oxide nanowires that move inside a "zigzag" plate electrode."
[12] Per an account of the device which appeared in the journal Science, bending of the zinc oxide nanowire arrays produces an electric field by the piezoelectric properties of the material.
It is essentially an aeolian harp, except that it exploits the motion of the string produced by aeroelastic flutter to create a physical oscillation that can be converted to electricity.
Researchers at Stanford University are developing "eTextiles" — batteries made of fabric — that might serve to store power generated by such technology.
In a small demonstration device created by chemical engineering professor Michael Strano and seven others at MIT, a 10 degree celsius daily change produced 350 millivolts and 1.3 milliwatts.