Toward broadband vibration-based energy harvesting

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 desi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tang, Lihua, Yang, Yaowen, Soh, Chee Kiong
Other Authors: School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/99680
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/24061
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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Summary: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.