This paper reviews the state of the art in piezoelectric energy harvesting. It presents the basics of piezoelectricity and discusses materials choice. The work places emphasis on material operating modes and device configurations, from resonant to non-resonant devices and also to rotational solutions. The reviewed literature is compared based on power density and bandwidth. Lastly, the question...

The concept of harvesting electrical energy from ambient vibration sources has been a popular topic of research in recent years. The motivation behind this research is largely due to recent advancements in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology specifically the construction of small low powered sensors which are capable of being placed in inaccessible or hostile environments. The main...

The current study examines the feasibility of placing a piezoelectric membrane or &&eel'' in the wake of a blu! body and using the von KaH rmaH n vortex street forming behind the blu! body to induce oscillations in the membrane. The oscillations result in a capacitive buildup in the membrane that provides a voltage source that can be used, for example, to trickle-charge a battery in a remote lo...

The cognitive sensor (CS) can transmit data to the control center in the same spectrum that is licensed to the primary user (PU) when the absence of the PU is detected by spectrum sensing. However, the battery energy of the CS is limited due to its small size, deployment in atrocious environments and long-term working. In this paper, an energy-harvesting-based CS is described, which senses the ...

In this study, an experimental approach is established to assess the performance of different beams coupled to a Voice Coil Motor (VCM) with the aim to maximize mechanically the energy harvesting in the inductive transducer that is included on it. The VCM is extracted from a recycled hard disk drive (HDD) and it is adapted for carrying out experimental tests of energy harvesting. Two individual...

The piezoelectric material selection and the circuit design in vibrational energy harvesting are discussed. The performances of the energy-harvesting unimorph devices that captured frequencies of 60 Hz by using piezoelectric PZT-based and BT-based ceramics were evaluated. Output voltages and power from the devices depend on the amplitude and the frequency of the oscillations, and depend on the ...

Motivation In traditional energy harvesting applications, sensor nodes are able to store any excess energy in a storage device such as battery or supercapacitor for future use. If correctly dimensioned, such a system will guarantee the node’s operation during periods of energy unavailability. More recently, a radically different research line has emerged which focuses on batteryless, energy-dri...

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...