Energy harvesting: State-of-the-art
Introduction
Energy (or power) harvesting or (scavenging) is without any doubt a very attractive technique for a wide variety of self-powered microsystems. Examples of such systems are wireless sensors, biomedical implants, military monitoring devices, structure-embedded instrumentation, remote weather station, calculators, watches, Bluetooth headsets. Recently, Nokia announced it is developing a mobile prototype that could harvest energy from ambient radio waves emitted from mobile antennas, TV masts and other sources [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6].
Energy harvesting has become of a growing interest in the last few years and research report number has kept increasing for the last decade. The scope of this paper is to provide the research community with an update of the state-of-the-art of energy harvesting from vibration, thermal, and RF sources. The principle of energy harvesting approaches can be found in Ref. [7].
In the following, we list the energy harvesting sources (Section 2), a brief history of energy scavenging (Section 3), state-of-the-art based on the review of several recently published papers (Section 4) and Conclusion.
Section snippets
Energy harvesting sources
Even though macro-energy harvesting has been around for centuries in the form of windmills, watermills and passive solar power systems, etc., they are not game changers for electronic designers whose mission in life is to snip the wires – including power cords and even battery powered systems where the perpetual device is the ultimate design goal [8]. Progress in ultra-low-power microelectronic technology with the advance in micro-energy Harvesting makes the number of battery charging cycles
History
The first observation of harvesting energy in form of current from natural source was in 1826. Thomas Johann Seebeck found that a current would flow in a closed circuit made of two dissimilar metals when they are maintained at different temperatures [15], [16]. For the following three decades, the basic thermoelectric effects were explored and understood macroscopically, and their applicability to thermometry, power generation, and refrigeration was recognized [17].
In 1839, as he was
Harvesting from vibrations
There has been much recent interest in using MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems) to scavenge energy from ambient vibration and transfer it to electrical load. Such device is mechanically modeled with the base excitation of an elastically mounted seismic mass moving past a coil [22]. A mathematical model of the transferred energy is developed in Ref. [22]. It takes into consideration the seismic mass amplitude, the magnitude and frequency of the excitation, the electrical analoge of the
Conclusion
As the ambient energy sources are much diversified (vibrations, RF, thermal, etc.), and the transducers are available in several types, many techniques to harvest and to convert to DC power supply energy from the available sources, have been presented.
A summary of the energy provided by the reviewed energy harvesters is presented in Table 3. It is hard to make a fair comparison because of the high number of parameters that affect the performance of the generators. Examples of these parameters
Acknowledgment
The author would like to acknowledge the support from the United Arab Emirates University.
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