To take advantage of applications where both light and vibration energy are available, a hybrid indoor ambient light and vibration energy harvesting scheme is proposed in this paper. This scheme uses only one power conditioning circuit to condition the combined output power harvested from both energy sources so as to reduce the power dissipation. In order to more accurately predict the instanta...

This paper studies the vibration energy harvesting characteristics of poled barium titanate (BT) unimorph cantilevers both analytically and experimentally. The unimorph cantilever consists of the BT layer and Cu shim, and the BT layer has sensing, grounding and driving electrodes. The output voltage of the cantilever excited by bending vibration was predicted by three dimensional finite element...

Mechanically nonlinear energy harvesters driven by broadband vibrations modeled as white noise are investigated. We derive an upper bound on output power versus load resistance and show that, subject to mild restrictions that we make precise, the upper-bound performance can be obtained by a linear harvester with appropriate stiffness. Despite this, nonlinear harvesters can have implementation-r...

Vibration energy harvesters are designed to gather parasitic energy from the motion of their host structures. In many germane scenarios, this motion is broadband; however, the preponderance of design criteria appearing in the literature for vibration energy harvesters considers sinusoidal base excitation at a single frequency. While this analysis often leads to analytical formulas for estimatin...

In this paper we investigate the capability of harvesting the electric energy from mechanical vibrations in a dynamic environment through a unimorph piezoelectric membrane transducer. Due to the impedance matrices connecting the efforts and flows of the membrane, we have established the dynamic electric equivalent circuit of the transducer. In a first study and in order to validate theoretical ...

The triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), a unique technology for harvesting ambient mechanical energy based on the triboelectric effect, has been proven to be a cost-effective, simple, and robust approach for self-powered systems. However, a general challenge is that the output current is usually low. Here, we demonstrated a rationally designed TENG with integrated rhombic gridding, which greatl...

The primary objective of this research is to develop a deploy-and-forget energy harvesting device for use in low-velocity, highly turbulent fluid flow environments i.e. streams or ventilation systems. The work presented here focuses on a novel, lightweight, highly robust, energy harvester design referred to as piezoelectric grass. This biologically inspired design consists of an array of cantil...