Energy is everywhere in the environment surrounding us i.e. it is available in the form of thermal energy, light (solar) energy, wind energy, and mechanical energy etc. However, the energy from these sources is often found in such minute quantities that it cannot supply adequate power for any viable purpose. In fact, it has not been possible to capture such energy sufficiently to perform any us...

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...

Harvesting mechanical energy is becoming increasingly important for its availability and abundance in our living environment. Triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is a simple, cost-effective, and highly efficient approach for generating electricity from mechanical energies in a wide range of forms. Here, we developed a TENG designed for harvesting tiny-scale wind energy available in our normal li...

In this paper, we demonstrate a miniature magnetic-force-based, three-axis, AC magnetic sensor with piezoelectric/vibrational energy-harvesting functions. For magnetic sensing, the sensor employs a magnetic-mechanical-piezoelectric configuration (which uses magnetic force and torque, a compact, single, mechanical mechanism, and the piezoelectric effect) to convert x-axis and y-axis in-plane and...

The concept is to capture the normally lost energy surrounding a system and converting it into electrical energy that can be used to extend the lifetime of that system’s power supply or possibly provide an endless supply of energy to an electronic device which has led to power harvesting. One of the most interesting methods of obtaining the energy surrounding a system is to use piezoelectric ma...

Piezoelectric materials can be used to convert oscillatory mechanical energy into electrical energy. Energy harvesting devices are designed to capture the ambient energy surrounding the electronics and convert it into usable electrical energy. The design of energy harvesting devices is not obvious, requiring optimization procedures. This paper investigates the influence of pattern gradation usi...

Harvesting energy from multiple sources available in our personal and daily environments is highly desirable, not only for powering personal electronics, but also for future implantable sensor-transmitter devices for biomedical and healthcare applications. Here we present a hybrid energy scavenging device for potential in vivo applications. The hybrid device consists of a piezoelectric poly(vin...

In this paper, the interdisciplinary energy harvesting issues on piezoelectric energy harvesting were investigated using a ‘33’ mode (mechanical stress and/or electric field are in parallel to the polarization direction) lead zirconate titanate multilayer piezoelectric stack (PZT-Stack). Key energy harvesting characteristics including the generated electrical energy/power in the PZT-Stack, the ...