Toward broadband vibration-based energy harvesting

L Tang, Y Yang, CK Soh - Journal of intelligent material …, 2010 - journals.sagepub.com
Journal of intelligent material systems and structures, 2010journals.sagepub.com
The dramatic reduction in power consumption of current integrated circuits has evoked great
research interests in harvesting ambient energy, such as vibrations, as a potential power
supply for electronic devices to avoid battery replacement. Currently, most vibration-based
energy harvesters are designed as linear resonators to achieve optimal performance by
matching their resonance frequencies with the ambient excitation frequencies a priori.
However, a slight shift of the excitation frequency will cause a dramatic reduction in …
The dramatic reduction in power consumption of current integrated circuits has evoked great research interests in harvesting ambient energy, such as vibrations, as a potential power supply for electronic devices to avoid battery replacement. Currently, most vibration-based energy harvesters are designed as linear resonators to achieve optimal performance by matching their resonance frequencies with the ambient excitation frequencies a priori. However, a slight shift of the excitation frequency will cause a dramatic reduction in performance. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of practical cases, the ambient vibrations are frequency-varying or totally random with energy distributed over a wide frequency spectrum. Hence, developing techniques to increase the bandwidth of vibration-based energy harvesters has become the next important problem in energy harvesting. This article reviews the advances made in the past few years on this issue. The broadband vibration-based energy harvesting solutions, covering resonance tuning, multimodal energy harvesting, frequency up-conversion, and techniques exploiting non-linear oscillations, are summarized in detail with regard to their merits and applicability in different circumstances.
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