Advanced Materials for Miniaturised Energy Harvesting Systems

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The challenge funds research on advanced materials for miniaturised energy harvesters that make sensors and IoT systems energetically autonomous. Projects must reach technology readiness level 4 in a laboratory use case.

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Scope

The rapid growth of Internet of Things systems and sensor networks will raise energy consumption and battery waste, with an estimated 80 million batteries to be changed each day. The challenge targets a new generation of advanced materials for miniaturised, integrated energy harvesting devices with much better performance than the state of the art, to give rise to energetically autonomous devices and systems. It supports the Commission's strategy on advanced materials for industrial leadership.

Objectives

Applicants must address all of the following:

• Identify and develop advanced materials for energy harvesting that use new physical or chemical phenomena, radically extend the range of applications and performance, and reduce reliance on critical raw materials.
• Implement the materials in a miniaturised harvesting module, for example miniaturised solar cells, thermoelectric generators, nanotribological or piezoelectric devices, or electromagnetic wave harvesting devices.
• Integrate the modules in energetically autonomous systems such as wireless integrated sensors.
• Benchmark the modules in a representative laboratory use case at technology readiness level 4, showing significant gains in harvested energy over the state of the art.

Using digital tools such as AI to speed up identifying, designing, making and characterising the materials is encouraged. All proposals should identify potential markets and the impacts of their innovations.

Expected outcomes

A new generation of advanced materials for miniaturised harvesting modules and energetically autonomous systems at technology readiness level 4. Impacts include new services in areas such as point-of-care diagnostics and smart cities, more sustainable energy consumption and production in line with RePowerEU and the Green Deal, and more sustainable IoT systems.

Portfolio approach

Projects will be chosen to cover different harvesting phenomena (solar, thermoelectric, piezoelectric, nanotribological and others), material compositions and fields of application such as agriculture, automotive, health monitoring, wearables, smart cities, energy management and industrial monitoring. Selected projects join portfolio activities on benchmarking, sharing scientific results, integration insights, combining complementary harvesting modules for specific use cases, and communicating with corporates, investors and the public.

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28. oktobra 2026

28 October 2026. This is a single-stage call.