Technology of electrical power harvesting has a long history of discovering different ways to convert mechanical, thermal, light or nuclear energy into forms suitable for powering electronic devices. Converters and transducers (e.g., electromagnetic dynamo and solar cells) are well known and have been long used in some consumer goods and industrial applications.

However, other applications (e.g., popular flashlights) require complex mechanical manipulations far beyond capabilities of already known battery-free designs.

Another attractive, albeit rare, technology utilizes capability  of piezoceramic elements to generate electrical charges under mechanical pressure - the so called piezoelectric effect – (see for technical details:
http://www.americanpiezo.com/piezo_theory/index.html).

Smokers use this effect every day when they push a button of a piezolighter to produce a spark for gas ignition. Unfortunately, application of piezoceramics for direct feeding of electric circuits is not effective since the value of generated charges is too small.

Solution comes from the observation that although value of piezogenerated charges is very small - their electric potential is as high as a few thousands volts.

To use piezogenerators, a designer needs to convert  the electrical energy of originally generated high-potential charges into the energy of charges with low potential. Due to the energy conservation law, the result is considerable multiplication of charges at the output of this converter.

Simple estimates show that the value of electric energy of charges generated by a single push of a piezolighter is enough to power up an electronic calculator for at least 1 minute!!

Qconverters is the name of a new line of electrical energy converters which use high voltage charge generators (i.e. piezoelements, triboelements or nuclear charge particles source) for easy and effective feeding of various electronic devices.

Application of Qconverters will result in elimination of  batteries in many autonomous electronic devices. It will lead to battery free electronic world with Green electronics.

Qconverters will let designers create revolutionary new  electronic devices and systems that would be completely hermetically sealed and will need no periodic maintenance for more than tens of years.

The concept of Qconverters is based on different technologies, including traditional electronic circuits, microelectronics and MEMS.