Energy Harvesting
Also known as power scavenging, this solution addresses the problem of reliance on finite energy sources like batteries and external power supplies. This technology aims to capture ambient energy from sources such as solar, thermal gradients, vibrations, and radiofrequency waves.
Technology Life Cycle
Maturity
Sales growth slows as the market becomes saturated. The technology is well-established and competition peaks, leading to price drops and marginal improvements.
Technology Readiness Level (TRL)
Prototype Testing
Prototype is fully functional and ready for testing in industrially relevant environment.
Technology Diffusion
Early Majority
Adopts technologies once they are proven by Early Adopters. They prefer technologies that are well established and reliable.
Energy harvesting, a paradigm shift in powering small-scale devices and systems, addresses a critical challenge in modern electronics: the dependency on finite energy sources like batteries and external power supplies. Energy harvesting, also known as power scavenging or energy scavenging, taps into ambient sources – such as solar energy, thermal gradients, vibration, or radiofrequency waves – to generate electrical power. This self-sufficiency in energy generation enables devices to operate autonomously, often for their entire lifespan, without requiring external power or battery replacements.
The mechanism of energy harvesting varies depending on the source. For instance, photovoltaic cells convert solar energy into electricity, piezoelectric materials generate power from mechanical stress, and thermoelectric generators exploit temperature differences to produce electrical energy. These technologies capture otherwise wasted ambient energy, converting it into a usable form, through the use of wearables or stationed devices. This is particularly pivotal in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), where countless sensors and devices are deployed in remote or inaccessible locations. Equipping these devices with energy harvesters makes them self-sustaining, reducing the need for maintenance and the environmental impact associated with battery waste.
Environmentally, energy harvesting offers a sustainable alternative to traditional power sources, helping to reduce carbon footprints and electronic waste. From a digital perspective, it is a cornerstone in the evolution of smart, interconnected systems. As we advance towards the Internet of Everything, the ability to power devices efficiently and sustainably becomes crucial. Energy harvesting not only enhances the longevity and reliability of these systems but also drives innovation in low-power electronics and energy-efficient design.
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A self-powered system based on energy harvesting technology can be a potential candidate for solving the problem of supplying power to electronic devices. In this review, we focus on portable and wearable self-powered systems, starting with typical energy harvesting technology, and introduce portable and wearable self-powered systems with sensing functions. In addition, we demonstrate the potential of self-powered systems in actuation functions and the development of self-powered systems toward intelligent functions under the support of information processing and artificial intelligence technologies.
Ambient energy harvesting has great potential to contribute to sustainable development and address growing environmental challenges. Converting waste energy from energy-intensive processes and systems (e.g. combustion engines and furnaces) is crucial to reducing their environmental impact and achieving net-zero emissions. Compact energy harvesters will also be key to powering the exponentially growing smart devices ecosystem that is part of the Internet of Things, thus enabling futuristic applications that can improve our quality of life (e.g. smart homes, smart cities, smart manufacturing, and smart healthcare). To achieve these goals, innovative materials are needed to efficiently convert ambient energy into electricity through various physical mechanisms, such as the photovoltaic effect, thermoelectricity, piezoelectricity, triboelectricity, and radiofrequency wireless power transfer. By bringing together the perspectives of experts in various types of energy harvesting materials, this Roadmap provides extensive insights into recent advances and present challenges in the field. Additionally, the Roadmap analyses the key performance metrics of these technologies in relation to their ultimate energy conversion limits. Building on these insights, the Roadmap outlines promising directions for future research to fully harness the potential of energy harvesting materials for green energy anytime, anywhere.
Researchers have developed a high-performance energy management unit (EMU) that significantly boosts the efficiency of electrostatic generators for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. This breakthrough addresses the challenge ...
With the fast development of energy harvesting technology, micro-nano or scale-up energy harvesters have been proposed to allow sensors or internet of things (IoT) applications with self-powered or self-sustained capabilities. Facilitation within smart homes, manipulators in industries and monitoring systems in natural settings are all moving toward intellectually adaptable and energy-saving advances by converting distributed energies across diverse situations. The updated developments of major applications powered by improved energy harvesters are highlighted in this review. To begin, we study the evolution of energy harvesting technologies from fundamentals to various materials. Secondly, self-powered sensors and self-sustained IoT applications are discussed regarding current strategies for energy harvesting and sensing. Third, subdivided classifications investigate typical and new applications for smart homes, gas sensing, human monitoring, robotics, transportation, blue energy, aircraft, and aerospace. Lastly, the prospects of smart cities in the 5G era are discussed and summarized, along with research and application directions that have emerged.
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This paper presents an overall review of Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting, starting with the importance of the abundance of mechanical energy that can be harvested into electrical energy, and how piezoelectric materials can be part of this achievement. A clear description of the piezoelectric phenomenon is intended to be described, with the different structural configuration that piezoelectric energy harvesting gives. An elaborate information about the different piezoelectric materials that we can find nowadays is covered, intending to present a wide overview about the actual status of piezoelectric materials. The many applications that piezoelectric energy harvesting can have are considered in almost all possible fields, giving a clear perspective of the present and future areas where mechanical energy can be harvested by piezoelectric materials. This work reviews recent literature in the field of power harvesting and provides the current status of energy harvesting and the multiples options where this can be applied.
Energy harvesting (also known as energy scavenging) is the conversion of ambient energy present in the environment into electrical energy for use in powering autonomous electronic devices or circuits.
•The Wearable Energy Harvesters types, materials, and applications are reviewed.•The Comparison of Wearable Energy Harvesters are presented.•The Future Perspective of Energy Harvesting Systems for Wearable Technology are discussed.
•The current status of tidal current energy technologies is overviewed.•Technical challenges and trends of tidal current energy technologies are clarified.•Life cycle assessment can improve designs by reducing environmental impacts.•Future work of tidal current energy technologies and life cycle assessment are discussed.
There has been an explosion in research focused on Internet of Things (IoT) devices in recent years, with a broad range of use cases in different domains ranging from industrial automation to business analytics. Being battery-powered, these small devices are expected to last for extended periods (i.e., in some instances up to tens of years) to ensure network longevity and data streams with the required temporal and spatial granularity. It becomes even more critical when IoT devices are installed within a harsh environment where battery replacement/charging is both costly and labour intensive. Recent developments in the energy harvesting paradigm have significantly contributed towards mitigating this critical energy issue by incorporating the renewable energy potentially available within any environment in which a sensor network is deployed. Radio Frequency (RF) energy harvesting is one of the promising approaches being investigated in the research community to address this challenge, conducted by harvesting energy from the incident radio waves from both ambient and dedicated radio sources. A limited number of studies are available covering the state of the art related to specific research topics in this space, but there is a gap in the consolidation of domain knowledge associated with the factors influencing the performance of RF power harvesting systems. Moreover, a number of topics and research challenges affecting the performance of RF harvesting systems are still unreported, which deserve special attention. To this end, this article starts by providing an overview of the different application domains of RF power harvesting outlining their performance requirements and summarizing the RF power harvesting techniques with their associated power densities. It then comprehensively surveys the available literature on the horizons that affect the performance of RF energy harvesting, taking into account the evaluation metrics, power propagation models, rectenna architectures, and MAC protocols for RF energy harvesting. Finally, it summarizes the available literature associated with RF powered networks and highlights the limitations, challenges, and future research directions by synthesizing the research efforts in the field of RF energy harvesting to progress research in this area.
Internet of things (IoT: devices that connect to the internet) and machine to machine (M2M: devices that connect to each other) devices are finding more and more use in our everyday lives. By installing sensors and transmitters in various everyday objects, we can collect and analyze types of data as never before. We can also control devices remotely or operate them without human interventions.
The rechargeable battery is the conventional power source for mobile devices. However, limited battery capacity and frequent recharging requires further research to find new ways to deliver power without the hassle of connecting cables. Novel wireless power supply methods, such as energy harvesting and wireless power transfer, are currently receiving considerable attention. In this article, an overview of recent advances in wireless power supply is provided, and several promising applications are presented to show the future trends. In addition, to efficiently schedule the harvested energy, an energy scheduling scheme in the EH-powered D2D relay network is proposed as a case study. To be specific, we first formulate an optimization problem for energy scheduling, and then propose a modified two stage directional water filling algorithm to resolve it.
The global imperative for sustainable power generation has driven relentless research and development in renewable energy harvesting technologies. This paper presents a comprehensive review of recent advancements in solar, wind, hydropower, and geothermal technologies, analyzing their collective impact on the landscape of sustainable power generation. The exploration begins with an overview of renewable energy sources, delving into historical contexts and the current state of technology. Advancements in solar energy harvesting, including breakthroughs in photovoltaic and concentrated solar power (CSP) technologies, are dissected in detail. The paper then shifts focus to wind energy, exploring innovations in turbine design and the significance of offshore wind farms. A comprehensive review of advancements in hydropower and geothermal energy extraction follows suit. The integration of multiple renewable sources into hybrid systems is discussed, highlighting synergies that optimize efficiency and reliability. Additionally, the paper addresses smart grids and energy storage systems as crucial components in overcoming intermittency challenges. The review concludes by identifying persistent challenges and proposing future directions for research and development in renewable energy technologies. By synthesizing these advancements, this paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on achieving a sustainable and resilient energy future.