Future deployment of wireless sensor networks will ultimately require a self-sustainable local power source for each sensor, and vibration energy harvesting is a promising approach for such applications. A requirement for efficient vibration energy harvesting is to match the device and source frequencies. While techniques to tune the resonance frequency of an energy harvesting device have recen...

Extracting an electrical energy from various environmental sources, called energy harvesting (or energy scavenging), has been attracting researchers’ attention in energy replenishable networks. In particular, a piezoelectric device based energy harvesting from ambient vibrations is a promising technique for easy of battery energy replenishment in vibration-motivated wireless sensor networks (WS...

The most promising method for micro scale energy scavenging is via vibration energy harvesting which converts mechanical energy to electrical energy. Using piezoelectric cantilevers is the most common method for vibration energy harvesting. Changing the shape of the cantilevers can lead to changing the generated output voltage and power. In this work vibration energy harvesting via piezoelectri...

In this chapter, the concept of vibration energy harvesting and its potential utilization as a power source for micro/nanorobots is introduced and discussed. While batteries are commonly used as power sources for electronic devices, the limited lifetime and relatively large dimensional structure of batteries constrain its applications in micro/nanodevices. On the other hand, while capacitors ha...

Devices that harvest electrical energy from mechanical vibrations have the problem that the frequency of the source vibration is often not matched to the resonant frequency of the energy harvesting device. Manufacturing tolerances make it difficult to match the Energy Harvesting Device (EHD) resonant frequency to the source vibration frequency, and the source vibration frequency may vary with t...

Ambient energy harvesting has been in recent years the recurring object of a number of research efforts aimed at providing an autonomous solution to the powering of small-scale electronic mobile devices. Among the different solutions, vibration energy harvesting has played a major role due to the almost universal presence of mechanical vibrations. Here we propose a new method based on the explo...

This paper presents a self-powered piezoelectric energy harvesting circuit using frequency conversion. A vibration energy harvesting principle is introduced. Due to a capacitive characteristic of the piezoelectric vibration transducer, an energy harvesting circuit is proposed for matching the capacitive impedance. The energy harvesting circuit consists of a matching circuit with up-conversion, ...

The abundant mechanical vibration energy in bridge road environment can be converted into electric energy by using the piezoelectric energy harvest technology, which could be an efficient way to provide energy required by the wireless sensor network in the bridge condition monitoring system. An autonomous energy harvesting system has been designed based on cantilever beams for sensing and acqui...

In designing for a system’s lifecycle considerations, longterm energy needs often become an important limiting factor. Shifting from conventional energy sources (e.g. fossil fuels) toward renewable sources (e.g. wind and solar) has become a popular means for focusing on the lifecycle of large-scale systems like automobiles and the national electrical grid. This same shift in small, low-power sy...

This paper presents a novel piezoelectric vibration energy harvester (PVEH) in which a high-frequency generating beam (HFGB) is driven by an array of low-frequency driving beams (LFDBs) using ropes. Two mechanisms based on frequency upconversion and multimodal harvesting work together to broaden the frequency bandwidth of the proposed vibration energy harvester (VEH). The experimental results s...