The fabrication and characterization of a thermoelectric energy harvester using the complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)-microelectromechanical system (MEMS) technology were presented. The thermoelectric energy harvester is composed of eight circular energy harvesting cells, and each cell consists of 25 thermocouples in series. The thermocouples are made of p-type and n-type polysilic...

A two-stage power conditioning circuit consisting of an AC DC converter followed by a DC DC converter is proposed for a vibration-based energy harvesting system. The power conditioning circuit intends to maximize the amount of power extracted from a piezoelectric energy harvester by matching the source impedance with the circuit by adaptively adjusting the duty cycle. An equivalent electrical c...

This paper presents a new energy-harvesting system with two identical piezoelectric energy harvesters in a tandem configuration. Each harvester consists of a piezoelectric beam and a circular cylinder. Experiments are performed to investigate the energy-harvesting performances of this system in water. It can be found that their energy-harvesting performances are all different from that of the s...

BACKGROUND Much research in the field of energy harvesting has sought to develop devices capable of generating electricity during daily activities with minimum user effort. No previous study has considered the metabolic cost of carrying the harvester when determining the energetic effects it has on the user. When considering device carrying costs, no energy harvester to date has demonstrated th...

In this paper a rotational, radial-flux energy harvester incorporating a three-phase generation principle is presented for converting energy from water flow in domestic water pipelines. The energy harvester together with a power management circuit and energy storage is used to power a smart metering system installed underground making it independent from external power supplies or depleting bat...

This paper compares performance of a piezoelectric vibration energy harvester, in terms of output power, under different types of vibration. The most common method used to characterize a vibration energy harvester is to excite the energy harvester under a sinusoidal vibration of its resonant frequency and measure the voltage across certain electrical loads. However, in practical applications, t...

Currently, wearable electronics are increasingly widely used, leading to an increasing need of portable power supply. As a clean and renewable power source, piezoelectric energy harvester can transfer mechanical energy into electric energy directly, and the energy harvester based on polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF) operating in 31-mode is appropriate to harvest energy from human motion. This pa...

AbstractWith the application of wireless sensor networks become widespread, supply energy for these wireless sensors proves to be a significant issue. Moreover, for the ambient vibration lies everywhere, the vibration can supply energy for the wireless sensor via energy harvester. The piezoelectric energy harvester becomes the research focus for the simple structure and higher energy conversion...

This paper presents a low-profile, planar electromagnetic vibration energy harvester integrated with a Halbach array. Halbach array is a special arrangement of permanent magnets that doubles the magnetic field on one side of the array while cancelling the field to near zero on the other side. Using this arrangement can improve electromagnetic coupling in a limited space. The energy harvester ha...