Ambient mechanical vibrations have emerged as a viable energy source for low-power wireless sensor nodes aiming the upcoming era of the 'Internet of Things'. Recently, purposefully induced dynamical nonlinearities have been exploited to widen the frequency spectrum of vibration energy harvesters. Here we investigate some critical inconsistencies between the theoretical formulation and applicati...

Dendrimeric polymers are the subject of intense research activity geared towards their implementation in nanodevice applications such as energy harvesting systems, organic light-emitting diodes, photosensitizers, low-threshold lasers, and quantum logic elements, etc. A recent development in this area has been the construction of dendrimers specifically designed to exhibit novel forms of optical...

Mechanically nonlinear energy harvesters driven by broadband vibrations modeled as white noise are investigated. We derive an upper bound on output power versus load resistance and show that, subject to mild restrictions that we make precise, the upper-bound performance can be obtained by a linear harvester with appropriate stiffness. Despite this, nonlinear harvesters can have implementation-r...

An important question that must be addressed by any energy harvesting technology is related to the type of energy available (Paradiso et al., 2005; Roundy et al., 2003). Among the renewable energy sources, kinetic energy is undoubtedly the most widely studied for applications to the micro-energy generation1. Kinetic energy harvesting requires a transduction mechanism to generate electrical ener...

Recent progress on high-performance polymer electrets based on CYTOP, novel charging methods using soft X-ray and vacuum UV, and development of MEMS energy harvesters are discussed. With the parylene high-aspect-ratio nonlinear springs and high-performance polymer electrets, we have successfully developed a MEMS electret generator for energy harvesting applications. With an acceleration of 1 G,...