Analysis of Energy Harvesting for Vibration-Motivated Wireless Sensor Networks

Extracting an electrical energy from various environmental sources, called energy harvesting (or energy scavenging), has been attracting researchers’ attention in energy replenishable networks. In particular, a piezoelectric device based energy harvesting from ambient vibrations is a promising technique for easy of battery energy replenishment in vibration-motivated wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we address two major issues of vibration-based energy harvesting: impact spread and energy conversion. A simple analytical model of the impact spread is proposed to estimate the impact over time and distance, in which diffusion equation is used for easy of analysis. Then we propose a modified inverse Bézier curve method for an explicit interpolation function to support a seamless energy conversion. The overall analyses and numerical results indicate that the proposed techniques are proven to be a viable approach for analyzing vibration-motivated WSNs.