MIT Delivers New Findings on Energy-harvesting Sensors

This post centers around new findings coming out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on microelectromechinaical systems, or MEMS. Energy harvesting has been a very interesting topic of conversation within manufacturing because it supposes that mechanical vibrations from motors or other industrial equipment can produce a consistent energy source for other devices. For example, wireless sensors networks could be powered by vibrations from a pipeline in the field, instead of battery power. That's been a big issue in the adoption of wireless sensor networks. Past developments with energy harvesting have relied on piezoelectric (PZT) technology or multiple PZT layers on a microchip. However, PZT technology depends on mechanical vibrations within a certain frequency and outside of it, no power can be generated. Some have pushed for more "layers" on a chip to pick up more vibrations (or more energy), but that drives up costs and sensors need to be inexpensive for large deployments. These new MIT findings see a design that increases the device's frequency range or bandwidth, while maximizing the power (energy) density. MIT researchers put it through a series of vibration tests and have calculated that the device was able to generate 45 microwaves of power with just a single layer of PZT--an improvement of two orders of magnitude compared to current designs, says MIT. The MIT team published its results in the Aug. 23rd online edition of Applied Physics Letters. >> Click here to read the MIT ENERGY-harvesting research paper.