An investigation is carried out into how much energy can be harvested from the vibration of a passing train using a mechanical oscillator. The harvested energy could be used, for example, to charge sensors mounted on the railway track for structural health monitoring. The dominant frequencies due to a passing train are determined for a specific train and speed from a recorded acceleration time-...

When two fluids with different compositions are mixed, mixing energy is released. This holds true for both liquids and gases, though in the case of gases, no technology is yet available to harvest this energy source. Mixing the CO2 in combustion gases with air represents a source of energy with a total annual worldwide capacity of 1570 TWh. To harvest the mixing energy from CO2-containing gas e...

Efficient mechanical energy harvesters enable various wearable devices and auxiliary energy supply. Here we report a novel class of mechanical energy harvesters via stress-voltage coupling in electrochemically alloyed electrodes. The device consists of two identical Li-alloyed Si as electrodes, separated by electrolyte-soaked polymer membranes. Bending-induced asymmetric stresses generate chemi...

The macromolecular pigment-protein complex has the merit of high efficiency for light-energy capture and transfer after long-term photosynthetic evolution. Here bio-dyes of A. platensis photosystem I (PSI) and spinach light-harvesting complex II (LHCII) are spontaneously sensitized on three types of designed TiO2 films, to assess the effects of pigment-protein complex on the performance of bio-...

In this paper, we analyze and demonstrate a novel rotational energy harvesting generator using gravitational torque. The electro-mechanical behavior of the generator is presented, alongside experimental results from an implementation based on a conventional DC motor. The off-axis performance is also modeled. Designs for adaptive power processing circuitry for optimal power harvesting are presen...

Reduction in size and power consumption of consumer electronics has opened up many opportunities for low power wireless sensor networks. One of the major challenges is in supporting battery operated devices as the number of nodes in a network grows. The two main alternatives are to utilize higher energy density sources of stored energy, or to generate power at the node from local forms of energ...

*Correspondence: [email protected] Department of Electric engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Ren’ai road 111, Suzhou, People’s Republic of China Abstract A comparative study of the use of bio-inspired optimization technologies including the Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm, the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm, and Quantum-behaved Particle Swarm Optimization (QPSO) in the ...

Harvested energy makes it possible to deploy sensing devices long-term with minimal required upkeep. However, as devices shrink, unpredictable power supplies make it difficult for system designers to anticipate the behavior of these devices. Ekho is tool that records and emulates energy harvesting conditions in order to enable accurate and repeatable testing of these sensing devices. Ekho uses ...

Wireless sensor nodes have a limited power budget, though they are often expected to be functional in the field once deployed for extended periods of time. Therefore, minimization of energy consumption and energy harvesting technology in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are key tools for maximizing network lifetime, and achieving self-sustainability. This paper proposes an energy aware Adaptive S...

This paper presents a review of MEMS based piezoelectric energy harvesting for low frequency and low power applications. An introduction to MEMS and its components along with the concept of energy harvesting is presented. The paper also presents a device configuration of cantilever based basic components of MEMS energy harvesters, i.e. unimorph, bimorph. Results of different designs for MEMS en...