Extracting energy from ambient vibration to power wireless sensor nodes has been an attractive area of research, particularly in the automotive monitoring field. This article reports the design, analysis and testing of a vibration energy harvesting device based on a miniature asymmetric air-spaced cantilever. The developed design offers high power density, and delivers electric power that is su...

Harvesting energy from the environment by using a thermoelectric generator (TEG) or photovoltaic cells provides a solution for battery-free sensor networks or electronic healthcare systems. In these systems, the harvested energy is supplied at a very low voltages, requiring a low-startup-voltage power circuit for kick-start from low voltage. A previous sub-100mV-startup-voltage boost converter ...

This paper reports a self powered smart sensor node (also called ‘smart tag’) consisting of a piezoelectric vibration energy harvester, a power conditioning circuit, sensors and an RF transmitter. The smart tag has dimensions similar to a credit card and can be easily integrated into various applications such as the ibration energy harvesting iezoelectric generator elf-powered ireless sensor no...

Energy harvesting has received growing attention over the last decade. The research motivation in this field is due to the reduced power requirement of small electronic components, such as the wireless sensor networks used in structural health monitoring applications. The ultimate goal in this research field is to power such small electronic devices by using the vibration energy available in th...

Energy harvesting for the purpose of powering low power electronic sensor systems has received explosive attention in the last few years. A common device uses the piezoelectric effect for a cantilever beams at resonance to harvest ambient vibration energy. However most of these devices have a rectangular piezoelectric patch covering all or part of the beam. This paper considers the optimum desi...

In this paper, size dependent beam type peizoelectric energy hardvester is investigated. For this goal, first nonlinear formulation of isotropic piezoelectric Euler-Bernoulli nano-beam is developed based on the size-dependent piezoelectricity theory then special beam type piezoelectric energy hardvester is probed for different parameters. Basic nonlinear equations of piezoelectric nano-beam are...

The process of capturing the energy from a system’s environment or surrounding and converting it into usable electrical energy is termed as energy harvesting. One form of energy harvesting is to employ piezoelectric materials to harvest energy from vibrating structures. These materials have the ability to absorb the mechanical energy and transform it into electrical energy that can be used to p...

We study a parallelized flapping piezo-leaf generator for harvesting ambient wind energy and demonstrate an initial design. We fabricated prototypes in various configurations and performed a series of experiments to study performance trends. We propose a novel vertical-stalk L-shape design that exhibits improved output power density over horizontal piezoelectric configurations. While a signific...