Date: March 26, 2015

The field of energy harvesting is growing rapidly. The advancements are not only evident from the work reported by the research laboratories around the world but also from the off the shelf-energy harvesters that have become available recently. Personal electronics, portable electronics, bio-implants, intelligent robots or health monitoring devices, are all dependent on a constant source of energy for their operation especially to make these devices self-reliant. Battery technology despite of providing high energy density, impose certain limitation on the size and weight of the portable devices. In addition, a battery needs to be charged or replaced, disposed and has limited lifetime. Roundy in 2005 demonstrated that batteries as a source of power are adequate if the operating lifetime of the sensors/actuators is 1year or less and suffer from drop in the power output for long-term operation. Everyone who has used a laptop will testify that batteries need to be replaced as they have limited life cycles. Hence there is a definite need to look into harvesting energy from the environment. The research on integrating energy harvesters into existing system has seen tremendous growth.  Energy harvesting from light, vibration and heat have been considered. This presentation will provide audience an insight into the existing energy harvesting technologies using smart materials.

Biography: Rashi Tiwari is currently working as Associate Researcher in the New Business Development in the Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics. She is currently leading global implementation team on the PacXpert^TM Technology which includes working with regional leads and Dow licensees to enable products on the shelf. Rashi’s key area of focus is project management, stakeholder management, maintaining business relation, project initiation, product design, and characterization and testing. In her previous role, Rashi has been instrumental in increasing collaboration between MS&E and Plastics business in Dow by initiating 8 projects in 2014 and adding 12 projects to the pipeline for 2015.

After receiving her PhD from the University of Nevada in Mechanical Engineering specializing in electroactive polymers, she completed post-doctoral research at the Cornell University where she focused on sensors, actuators and energy harvesting.  Rashi has been an inventor on 1 patent application and 4 provisional patent applications and has co-authored 2 books, 1 book chapter, over45peer-reviewedtechnicalpublications, 25whitepapers,proposals,and proprietarytechnicalreportsandover40conferencepresentations. She was elected to the senior membership (only 10% of the total membership) of IEEE in 2014 for her technical contribution. Rashi was also elected on the B-40 standards committee in ASME that forms standard for harsh environment temperature and pressure sensors. Rashi is also on the editorial board for J. of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures.

Rashi is very active in Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and is currently on one national committees, co-chair for the mentorship committee for Region C and VP external in SWE-HA section.  Rashi has been actively involved in mentoring students at Cornell University, University of Houston, Rice University and Texas A&M. She was also the focal point for SWE- HA for Expanding Your Horizon effort and arranged for volunteers at the event from SWE-HA to mentor student and demonstrate engineering through experiments in 2014. Rashi has also been leading the effort with the key leaders at Dow on increasing awareness on women issues at workplace to increase women retention, recruitment and promotion. Rashi recently won the Emerging Leader Award at the Society of Women Engineer’s Region C conference for the gulf coast region. When not at work, Rashi enjoys painting, writing, and travelling.