Having attended a school known for instilling critical thinking skills and academic excellence in students, Adyant was well versed in identifying challenges and taking the steps to address them. He followed his curiosity and began researching renewable energy sources. When he first read about triboelectricity and electrostatic induction, he had the idea to combine the two and build a reliable power source. TENGs are made using two thin objects that touch. When these objects are separated, or when they slide against each other, electrons transfer between them and create an electric charge.
To build his own TENG, Adyant sandwiched together two wooden planks separated by springs. Each plank held layers of different material pairings connected to electrodes. Those material pairings included glass with Teflon, Kapton with human hair, wool with PVC, and paper with cotton. He found that Kapton, a film used in electronics, paired with human hair produced the most electricity, and increasing the surface area increased the electrical output.
For his invention, Adyant won the 2023 Lemelson Award for Invention as part of Society for Science’s Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. Encouraged by his success, he continued his research on TENGs and entered his regional science fair that year, where he received a top prize from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). In 2024, when he graduated from eighth grade, Adyant was selected as his school’s valedictorian.
Currently a high school student at Bellarmine College Preparatory school, he’s a member of the Entrepreneurship Club and won first place at the 2026 California State Speech Championships in International Extemporaneous Speaking. He’s also published two fictional story books and plays piano, tennis, and basketball. He shares, “These hobbies enable me to express myself, gain diverse perspectives, and positively influence others with my ideas.”
With his inventive mindset and passion for creating positive change, he has his sights set on becoming an environmental engineer and contributing his skills toward solving big problems like deforestation and pollution. We have no doubt he’ll succeed.
Back in 2023, we interviewed Adyant.
How did you decide to invent around the issue of wildfires?
Wildfires are becoming common nowadays, especially with climate change, and a lot of days when you go outside, there’s smoke in the air. Last summer, we got an alert to be ready to evacuate from a wildfire that was close to our neighborhood. The whole experience got me thinking about how we could advance early monitoring for wildfires.
Why did you explore triboelectric nanogenerators as a sustainable energy source?
The area of renewable energy is something that I continuously follow, and the professor who pioneered triboelectric nanogenerators, Professor Zhong Lin Wang, has been really influential to me. It’s a new concept, and that’s why I picked it for my project. The data that I found in the correlation between certain materials and their properties could be useful to scientists if they’re looking toward finding that perfect pairing to optimize these generators.
What were your failures and successes like throughout the invention process?
My project didn’t go right the first time. Most inventions don’t always go correctly, but it’s important to see what went wrong and learn from that mistake. For me, that feeling of success was when I was able to prove my concept and actually light up an LED using electricity that I generated from my generator. It took a while and there were a lot of errors in building the generator, building a circuit, and connecting the two. But when that lit up, it was such an amazing moment for me because it showed that my invention could actually make an impact.
What impact do you hope your invention makes in the world?
Studies by NASA and other major organizations suggest that TENGs could power essential equipment in the near future, but only if they can be advanced and optimized to a point where they’re sustainable and preferable over other energy sources. I hope to work toward introducing TENGs to the market as a low-cost, reliable power source for disaster detection, and ultimately help optimize the output of TENGs to a point where they could replace most energy sources in our world.
Who have your mentors been?
I’ve been really fortunate to have a lot of great people in my life who either helped spark my interest in STEM or supported me throughout this project. My science teachers Ms. Chen and Ms. Rayaprolu, both of them have been emphasizing for us to look at problems in the world through a scientific lens. And then my principal Ms. Reinman, she was very supportive of all my endeavors.
And my parents, of course, have helped me a lot because both of them work in the technology field, and they helped foster my interest in STEM since I was very young. I think that’s played a significant part in who I am today.
What advice do you have for other young inventors?
Believing in yourself is a very important skill for an inventor because when you invent something, there are going to be a lot of challenges. Additionally, you need passion because if you’re determined to make something a reality, then no matter what hurdles come your way, you’ll be able to do it.
Just remember that you’re the next generation of scientists and brilliant engineers. You’re the ones who will be able to work together and help solve the problems of today, and create solutions for them to help humanity in the future.
Adyant Bhavsar, winner of the Lemelson Award for Invention (Thermo Fisher JIC 2023)