A Summary of Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting for Autonomous Smart Structures

The technology of energy harvesting has great potential to enable energy autonomy of wireless sensors. The drop of power requirements of micro-electronic devices allows confidence that piezoelectric energy harvesting (PEH) is able to reliable power a wireless sensor network (WSN). The present work summarizes results of ongoing research in the field of PEH. With the aid of a performance metric a comparison between various devices is performed. A brief description of modeling a piezoelectric multilayer-beam as energy harvester is presented, followed by a concept of multi-objective optimization. This summary should give an idea of current state of the art and a rough guideline when designing a PEH.