Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Devices: An Alternative Energy Source for Wireless Sensors

By Action Nechibvute, A. Chawanda, P. Luhanga. 2012

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recent advances in ultralow power device integration, communication electronics, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology have fuelled the emerging technology of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The spatial distributed nature of WSNs often requires that batteries power the individual sensor nodes. One of the major limitations on performance and lifetime of WSNs is the limited capacity of these finite power sources, which must be manually replaced when they are depleted. Moreover, the embedded nature of some of the sensors and hazardous sensing environment make battery replacement very difficult and costly. The process of harnessing and converting ambient energy sources into usable electrical energy is called energy harvesting. Energy harvesting raises the possibility of self-powered systems which are ubiquitous and truly autonomous, and without human intervention for energy replenishment. Among the ambient energy sources such as solar energy, heat, and wind, mechanical vibrations are an attractive ambient source mainly because they are widely available and are ideal for the use of piezoelectric materials, which have the ability to convert mechanical strain energy into electrical energy. This paper presents a concise review of piezoelectric microgenerators and nanogenerators as a renewable energy resource to power wireless sensors.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/817dee81dc5327dc4ac95e3650cfdb48c409f846

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Denvid Lau
2. Sherali Zeadally
3. Qiwen Qiu

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Sherali Zeadally
2. Silviu Corneliu Folea
3. Teodora Sanislav
4. George Dan Mois

In Mechanical Engineering

1. Denvid Lau
2. Qiwen Qiu
3. Jiayu Chen
4. Yilong Han

Citations in the corpus

• Piezoelectric materials for sustainable building structures: Fundamentals and applications (2019, background): “Piezoelectric nanowire can be used to enhance the piezoelectric effects, mechanical properties, and sensitivity to small forces of existing materials [146].”
• A Review of Piezoelectric PVDF Film by Electrospinning and Its Applications (2020, unknown): “Among these, if we focus on the mechanical vibrations conversion into electrical energy, the devices based on piezoelectric properties have great potential [7,8].”
• A review of ceramic, polymer and composite piezoelectric materials (2022, unknown): “It is a challenge to use batteries for powering extensive wireless sensor networks (WSN) due to the fact that batteries are bulky and have to be replaced periodically [52].”
• Energy Harvesting Techniques for Internet of Things (IoT) (2021, background): “The works in [70]–[74] analyze state-of-the-art of energy harvesting using piezoelectric generators at micro and nano scale and highlight that this method is one of the most promising solutions to power IoT devices.”