Through a challenge brought by Repsol to have self-powered and pre-service sensors, this design thinking project had a goal of elaborating an innovative prototype of energy production using nanomaterials that should harvest environmental wasted energy from movement, vibration, and pressure in harsh environments to feed low power electronic sensors and monitoring devices.
Through workshops and specialized business mentoring from Repsol’s executives, we sought different models to find a problem/solution fit.
Being specilized in the fabrication of nanomaterials, we used our infrastructure to build a proof-of-concept prototype.
The Technology Center of Repsol (CTR) high-standard infrastructure was critical to test and validate our working prototype.
After one year in this design thinking process, we were able to demonstrate our energy harvesting technology in a controlled relevant environment (crude at high pressures and temperatures), going from zero to a Technology Readiness Level 4.