Feasibility of wave energy harvesting in the Ligurian Sea

A series of short and mid-term guidelines have been established due to the pursuit to offer clean energy and reduce the environmental impact in the Mediterranean and European environment. Currently, the scientific community and the industrial sector promote to find new technologies and means to achieve these regulations. Efforts to provide...

Bracelet+: Harvesting the Leaked RF Energy in VLC with Wearable Bracelet Antenna

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is widely considered a promising technology for the coming 6G networks. Recent studies show that a VLC transmitter not only emits visible light signals but also leaks RF signals during the transmission. In this work, we devote effort to harvesting the free leaked RF energy from VLC transmissions. We observe that...

Tuning the Dynamics of Bistable Mechanisms by Introducing Travel Limits

Vibrations are a promising source for powering wireless sensors, for example in low-frequency environments like human motion. These environments suffer from unpredictable vibration spectra and their low-frequency and large amplitude characteristics offer great possibilities for mechanisms with double well potential energy characteristics. The...

A Reconfigurable Cold-Startup SSHI Rectifier with 4X Lower Input Amplitude Requirement for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting

Synchronized switch harvesting on inductor (SSHI) is an efficient active rectifier to extract energy generated from piezoelectric transducer in piezoelectric energy harvesting system. Unlike passive rectifiers, SSHI rectifiers require a power supply to drive synchronized switches. Unfortunately, there is no stable supply when the system starts...

A PV-assisted 10-mV Startup Boost Converter for Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting

This paper presents a boost converter for thermo-electric energy harvesting with photovoltaic (PV)-assisted startup. The converter employs a new two-phase startup architecture and the PV cell is used in the first phase to provide an initial high voltage for startup. This high voltage drives the boost converter to charge a startup capacitor,...

Intermittently-powered bluetooth that works

We present an architecture for intermittently-powered wireless communication systems that does not require any changes to the official protocol specification. Our core idea is to save the intermediate state of the wireless protocol to non-volatile memory within each connection interval. The protocol state is then deterministically restored at...

A 2-Mode Reconfigurable SSHI Rectifier with 3.2X Lower Cold-Start Requirement for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting*

Synchronized switch harvesting on inductor (SSHI) rectifier has been verified as an efficient active rectifier to harvest kinetic energy in piezoelectric energy harvesting (PEH) system. Compared with passive rectifiers, active rectifiers including SSHI rectifier require a stable power supply to drive switches. However, when the system starts...

A Highly Efficient Fully Integrated Active Rectifier for Ultrasonic Wireless Power Transfer

Ultrasonic wireless power transfer (WPT) has been proved to be a promising approach to power biomedical implants. To extract the energy generated from the transducer, a rectifier is typically required. Previous inductor-based rectifiers (SSHI and SECE) require a large off-chip inductor to achieve good performance, which is not desired for...

A 10-mV-Startup-Voltage Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting System With a Piezoelectric Starter

An ultra-low-startup-voltage thermoelectric energy harvesting system assisted by a piezoelectric generator (PEG) is presented in this paper. When the energy harvesting system is implemented in a place where there is mechanical vibration, the associated PEG can generate a stable clock signal and drive the boost converter to start from the cold...

Analyse or Transmit: Utilising Correlation at the Edge with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Millions of sensors, cameras, meters, and other edge devices are deployed in networks to collect and analyse data. In many cases, such devices are powered only by Energy Harvesting (EH) and have limited energy available to analyse acquired data. When edge infrastructure is available, a device has a choice: to perform analysis locally or offload...

Time-sensitive intermittent computing meets legacy software

Tiny energy harvesting sensors that operate intermittently, without batteries, have become an increasingly appealing way to gather data in hard to reach places at low cost. Frequent power failures make forward progress, data preservation and consistency, and timely operation challenging. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art systems ask the...

Continuous sensing on intermittent power

The main obstacles to achieve truly ubiquitous sensing are (i) the limitations of battery technology - batteries are short-lived, hazardous, bulky, and costly - and (ii) the unpredictability of ambient power. The latter causes sensors to operate intermittently, violating the availability requirements of many real-world applications. In this...

Adaptive Buck-Boost Converter for RF Energy Harvesting and Transfer in Biomedical Applications

The continuous improvement in reducing the power consumption of electronic devices, including biomedical ones, makes the use of energy harvesting systems instead of batteries attractive. Conventionally, energy harvesting systems are optimized to operate in a single worst-case scenario. However, it is often the case that the available input power...