scholarly journals Pyroelectric Energy Conversion and Its Applications—Flexible Energy Harvesters and Sensors

Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (9) ◽  
pp. 2170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atul Thakre ◽  
Ajeet Kumar ◽  
Hyun-Cheol Song ◽  
Dae-Yong Jeong ◽  
Jungho Ryu

Among the various forms of natural energies, heat is the most prevalent and least harvested energy. Scavenging and detecting stray thermal energy for conversion into electrical energy can provide a cost-effective and reliable energy source for modern electrical appliances and sensor applications. Along with this, flexible devices have attracted considerable attention in scientific and industrial communities as wearable and implantable harvesters in addition to traditional thermal sensor applications. This review mainly discusses thermal energy conversion through pyroelectric phenomena in various lead-free as well as lead-based ceramics and polymers for flexible pyroelectric energy harvesting and sensor applications. The corresponding thermodynamic heat cycles and figures of merit of the pyroelectric materials for energy harvesting and heat sensing applications are also briefly discussed. Moreover, this study provides guidance on designing pyroelectric materials for flexible pyroelectric and hybrid energy harvesting.

Author(s):  
Christopher Green ◽  
Karla M. Mossi ◽  
Robert G. Bryant

Wireless sensors are an emerging technology that has the potential to revolutionize the monitoring of simple and complex physical systems. Prior research has shown that one of the biggest issues with wireless sensors is power management. A wireless sensor is simply not cost effective unless it can maintain long battery life or harvest energy from another source. Piezoelectric materials are viable conversion mechanisms because of their inherent ability to covert vibrations to electrical energy. Currently a wide variety of piezoelectric materials are available and the appropriate choice for sensing, actuating, or harvesting energy depends on their characteristics and properties. This study focuses on evaluating and comparing three different types of piezoelectric materials as energy harvesting devices. The materials utilized consisted on PZT 5A, a single crystal PMN 32%PT, and a PZT 5A composite called Thunder. These materials were subjected to a steady sinusoidal vibration provided by a shaker at different power levels. Gain of the devices was measured at all levels as well as impedance in a range of frequencies was characterized. Results showed that the piezoelectric generator coefficient, g33, predicts the overall power output of the materials as verified by the experiments. These results constitute a baseline for an energy harvesting system that will become the front end of a wireless sensor network.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 3370-3379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu Ding ◽  
Xuelin Guo ◽  
Katrina Ramirez-Meyers ◽  
Yangen Zhou ◽  
Leyuan Zhang ◽  
...  

An innovative energy system integrating energy conversion and storage is designed to achieve cost-effective harnessing of solar energy and thermal energy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyun-Cheol Song ◽  
Deepam Maurya ◽  
Jinsung Chun ◽  
Yuan Zhou ◽  
Myung-Eun Song ◽  
...  

Abstract The magneto-thermoelectric generator (MTG) converts wasted thermal energy into electrical energy in two steps. The first step involves thermal to mechanical energy conversion through balance of magnetic and elastic forces and the second step involves mechanical to electrical energy conversion through piezoelectric effect. The requirements for soft magnetic material in improving the efficiency of first step were identified and met through the design of a composite architecture. The Curie temperature of La(1–x)SrxMnO3 can be engineered to be near room temperature by modifying the Sr content. Composite of La0.85Sr0.15MnO3 (LSMO) and Ni0.6Cu0.2Zn0.2Fe2O4 (NCZF) was found to exhibit high saturation (Ms) and remnant (Mr) magnetization magnitude while maintaining the soft magnetic nature. Two-step sintering was found to prevent the inter-diffusion of LSMO and NCZF phases and provided high density without grain growth. The LSMO-NCZF (70:30 wt%) composite exhibited a large variation in Ms with respect to the change in temperature near Curie temperature which meets the requirements for efficient operation of MTG. The fabricated MTG using LSMO-NCZF (70:30 wt%) composite reached 0.2 Hz operational frequency and generated electrical output voltage of 2 Vp–p and peak power of 17 µW under the thermal gradient of 80 °C (0 °C/80 °C).


2012 ◽  
Vol 476-478 ◽  
pp. 1336-1340
Author(s):  
Kai Feng Li ◽  
Rong Liu ◽  
Lin Xiang Wang

The concept of energy harvesting works towards developing self-powered devices that do not require replaceable power supplies. Energy scavenging devices are designed to capture the ambient energy surrounding the electronics and convert it into usable electrical energy. A number of sources of harvestable ambient energy exist, including waste heat, vibration, electromagnetic waves, wind, flowing water, and solar energy. While each of these sources of energy can be effectively used to power remote sensors, the structural and biological communities have placed an emphasis on scavenging vibrational energy with ferroelectric materials. Ferroelectric materials have a crystalline structure that provide a unique ability to convert an applied electrical potential into a mechanical strain or vice versa. Based on the properties of the material, this paper investigates the technique of power harvesting and storage.


Author(s):  
Lee Wells ◽  
Yirong Lin ◽  
Henry Sodano ◽  
Byeng Youn

The continual advances in wireless technology and low power electronics have allowed the deployment of small remote sensor networks. However, current portable and wireless devices must be designed to include electrochemical batteries as the power source. The use of batteries can be troublesome due to their limited lifespan, thus necessitating their periodic replacement. Furthermore, the growth of battery technology has remained relatively stagnant over the past decade while the performance of computing systems has grown steadily, which leads to increased power usage from the electronics. In the case of wireless sensors that are to be placed in remote locations, the sensor must be easily accessible or of disposable nature to allow the device to function over extended periods of time. For this reason the primary question becomes how to provide power to each node. This issue has spawned the rapid growth of the energy harvesting field. Energy scavenging devices are designed to capture the ambient energy surrounding the electronics and convert it into usable electrical energy. The concept of power harvesting works towards developing self-powered devices that do not require replaceable power supplies. However, when designing a vibration based energy harvesting system the maximum energy generation occurs when the resonant frequency of the system is tuned to the input. This poses certain issues for their practical application because structural systems rarely vibrate at a signal frequency. Therefore, this effort will investigate the optimal geometric design of two dimensional energy harvesting systems for maximized bandwidth. Topology and shape optimization will be used to identify the optimal geometry and experiments will be performed to characterize the energy harvesting improvement when subjected to random vibrations.


Nanoscale ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (43) ◽  
pp. 20527-20533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanggon Kim ◽  
Gerardo Ico ◽  
Yaocai Bai ◽  
Steve Yang ◽  
Jung-Ho Lee ◽  
...  

Magneto–mechano–electrical energy conversion in poly(vinylidenefluoride-trifluoroethylene) piezoelectric nanofibers integrated with magnetic nanoparticles in a particle-shape dependent manner.


Author(s):  
Lin Dong ◽  
Frank T. Fisher

Vibration-based energy harvesting has been widely investigated to as a means to generate low levels of electrical energy for applications such as wireless sensor networks. However, due to the fact that vibration from the environment is typically random and varies with different magnitudes and frequencies, it is a challenge to implement frequency matching in order to maximize the power output of the energy harvester with a wider frequency bandwidth for applications where there is a time-dependent, varying source frequency. Possible solutions of frequency matching include widening the bandwidth of the energy harvesters themselves in order to implement frequency matching and to perform resonance-based tuning approach, the latter of which shows the most promise to implement a frequency matching design. Here three tuning strategies are discussed. First a two-dimensional resonant frequency tuning technique for the cantilever-geometry energy harvesting device which extended previous 1D tuning approaches was developed. This 2D approach could be used in applications where space constraints impact the available design space of the energy harvester. In addition, two novel resonant frequency tuning approaches (tuning via mechanical stretch and tuning via applied bias voltage, respectively) for electroactive polymer (EAP) membrane-based geometry energy harvesters was proposed, such that the resulting changes in membrane tension were used to tune the device for applications targeting variable ambient frequency environments.


Materials ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 1433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ravi Kishore ◽  
Shashank Priya

Combined rejected and naturally available heat constitute an enormous energy resource that remains mostly untapped. Thermal energy harvesting can provide a cost-effective and reliable way to convert available heat into mechanical motion or electricity. This extensive review analyzes the literature covering broad topical areas under solid-state low temperature thermal energy harvesting. These topics include thermoelectricity, pyroelectricity, thermomagneticity, and thermoelasticity. For each topical area, a detailed discussion is provided comprising of basic physics, working principle, performance characteristics, state-of-the-art materials, and current generation devices. Technical advancements reported in the literature are utilized to analyze the performance, identify the challenges, and provide guidance for material and mechanism selection. The review provides a detailed analysis of advantages and disadvantages of each energy harvesting mechanism, which will provide guidance towards designing a hybrid thermal energy harvester that can overcome various limitations of the individual mechanism.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Omar A. Saraereh ◽  
Amer Alsaraira ◽  
Imran Khan ◽  
Bong Jun Choi

The Internet-of-things (IoT) has been gradually paving the way for the pervasive connectivity of wireless networks. Due to the ability to connect a number of devices to the Internet, many applications of IoT networks have recently been proposed. Though these applications range from industrial automation to smart homes, healthcare applications are the most critical. Providing reliable connectivity among wearables and other monitoring devices is one of the major tasks of such healthcare networks. The main source of power for such low-powered IoT devices is the batteries, which have a limited lifetime and need to be replaced or recharged periodically. In order to improve their lifecycle, one of the most promising proposals is to harvest energy from the ambient resources in the environment. For this purpose, we designed an energy harvesting protocol that harvests energy from two ambient energy sources, namely radio frequency (RF) at 2.4 GHz and thermal energy. A rectenna is used to harvest RF energy, while the thermoelectric generator (TEG) is employed to harvest human thermal energy. To verify the proposed design, extensive simulations are performed in Green Castalia, which is a framework that is used with the Castalia simulator in OMNeT++. The results show significant improvements in terms of the harvested energy and lifecycle improvement of IoT devices.


Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (20) ◽  
pp. 3873 ◽  
Author(s):  
Syeda Adila Afghan ◽  
Husi Géza

This paper presents a simulation-based study for characterizing and analyzing the performance of a commercially available thermoelectric cooler (TEC) as a generator for harvesting heat energy along with a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) power management integrated circuit (PMIC); LTC3108. In this model, the transformation of heat was considered in terms of an electrical circuit simulation perspective, where temperature experienced by TEC on both cold and hot sides was incorporated with voltage supply as Vth and Vtc in the circuit. When it comes to modeling a system in a simulation program with an integrated circuit emphasis (SPICE) like environment, the selection of thermoelectric generator (TEG) and extraction methods are not straightforward as well as the lack of information from manufacturer’s datasheets can limit the grip over the analysis parameters of the module. Therefore, it is mandatory to create a prototype before implementing it over a physical system for energy harvesting circuit (EHC) optimization. The major goal was to establish the basis for devising the thermal energy scavenging based Internet of Things (IoT) system with two configurations of voltage settings for the same TEG model. This study measured the data in terms of current, voltage, series of resistive loads and various temperature gradients for generating the required power. These generated power levels from EHC prototype were able to sustain the available IoT component’s power requirement, hence it could be considered for the implementation of IoT based applications.


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