Shantanu Chakrabartty's research in energy harvesting sensors and processors has won him the NSF CAREER Award. During the last four years his AIM Laboratory (http://www.egr.msu.edu/aimlab) has been working on a revolutionary sensing paradigm that could change the way engineers monitor the health of any mechanical structure. This innovation called piezoelectricity driven hot electron injection (p-IHEI) enables energy harvesting sensors to be miniaturized to the size of a micropebble and can be embedded inside a structure like a wind-turbine, rotor-blades or even inside the human body like in a knee-implant or a heart-valve. Without the aid of any external powering source, a network of these icropebbles can continuously monitor the health of the structure allowing it to self-diagnose any catastrophic failure. This research has already spawned two pending U.S. and international patents and is being currently marketed by the MSU technologies.

In this CAREER award, Dr. Chakrabartty plans to investigate the fundamental limits of energy harvesting which will allow further miniaturization and long-range communication with this sensor. The hope is that once fully packaged, the sensor will become an integral part of any "smart" structure whether it be civil, mechanical or biomechanical.

More details of the CAREER award can be found at http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0954752