On a routine day, Ajay A. Pillai delivers the good-old snail mails to the interiors of Aranmula in Pathanamthitta. But when he left the labs of Christian College, Chengannur, from his much-preferred role of a researcher, for a permanent job, he did not completely ditch his efforts to develop a mechanism to produce cheap electricity. Nor does the college and the research team he worked with.
His determination and the research team’s effort finally culminated in them developing a low-cost triboelectricity generation mechanism that can function as self-powered sensors in medical devices, touch screens, wearable gizmos, sports equipment, and security systems.
The team consisting of lead researcher Mr. Pillai who is a postman in the India Post, Vinoy Thomas, associate professor, Christian College, and others developed the prototype of a free-standing triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) over a period of two years. The team’s work was published in the peer-reviewed international journal Materials Science and Engineering B.
