SUINK

Project summary

Today a modern car is equipped with over 60 sensors to monitor essential aspects such as temperature, oil pressure, emission levels, speed, etc. This number is only expected to increase as self-driving and electric vehicles become more popular. However, these kinds of sensors need to be connected to a power source using cables and connectors, which add undesired weight, and lower the overall reliability of the vehicle.

SUINK aims to develop green solutions to produce innovative sensors able to create their own energy rather than needing electricity from the vehicle’s battery. These self-charging power systems (SCPS) are based on the combination of biobased, conductive, dielectric, and piezoelectric inks that will be applied by inkjet printing on biobased flexible surfaces. These innovative power systems rely on sustainable elements, including a piezoelectric energy generator, to harvest electrical energy from mechanical vibrations, and a rectifying system as a connection circuit with a supercapacitor as an energy storage component. This innovative technology is applied to produce temperature, humidity, and strain sensors used in the automotive sector, exploiting vibrations from the moving vehicle as a source of energy.

By reducing the weight of components, the SUINK project contributes to increase the productivity and energy efficiency of the automotive industry, following a fully circular economy approach: from design to the end-of-life of products, implementing new recyclability and reusability protocols.

The SUINK consortium is led by  Tekniker, the Spanish technology centre specialised in Advanced Manufacturing, Surface Engineering, Product Engineering and ICTs for manufacturing. The consortium brings together some renowned experts in the world on inks development, printing technologies and electronic components design and manufacturing.

Our role

In SUINK, Gemmate contributes to design Self-diagnostic autonomous systems for the early detection of defects in structural and semistructural composite parts (a.e. SMC battery cover, structural beams, etc). Such devices, integrated with the self-charging power system, are expected to improve prediction of failure of composites parts that can be subjected during driving to severe solicitation. Heavy solicitation during driving can cause local deformation of composite, apparently elastic, that can produce defects that evolve to failure at fatigue.

In parallel, Gemmate assesses the environmental and economic impact of the novel technology on the composite current manufacturing processes and its integration within the final lightweight component for automotive structural mission.