There's plenty of energy at the bottom (micro and nano scale nonlinear noise harvesting)

The future of mobile Information and Communication Technology will be strongly affected by our success in solving the question of how to power very small devices. Ambient energy harvesting has been in recent years the recurring object of a number of research efforts aimed at providing an autonomous solution to the powering of small-scale electronic devices. Among the different solutions, micro scale vibration energy harvesting has played a major role due to the almost universal presence of mechanical vibrations mainly in the form of random fluctuations, i.e. noise. In this paper we briefly discuss the role of micro-energies and the possibility to harvest them by employing nonlinear dynamical systems.

[1]  Igor Neri,et al.  The benefits of noise and nonlinearity: Extracting energy from random vibrations , 2010 .

[2]  Joseph A. Paradiso,et al.  Energy scavenging for mobile and wireless electronics , 2005, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[3]  V. Sundararajan,et al.  ENERGY SCAVENGING FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS , 2007 .

[4]  M. Büttiker,et al.  Transport as a consequence of state-dependent diffusion , 1987 .

[5]  G. A. Johnson,et al.  Stochastic resonance in coupled nonlinear dynamic elements. , 1998, Chaos.

[6]  Tom Quirk,et al.  There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom , 2006, Size Really Does Matter.

[7]  Massimiliano Esposito,et al.  Efficiency at maximum power of low-dissipation Carnot engines. , 2010, Physical review letters.

[8]  R. Mazo.  On the theory of brownian motion , 1973 .

[9]  Jan M. Rabaey,et al.  A study of low level vibrations as a power source for wireless sensor nodes , 2003, Comput. Commun..

[10]  Zhong Lin Wang,et al.  Piezoelectric-nanowire-enabled power source for driving wireless microelectronics. , 2010, Nature communications.

[11]  F. Ritort,et al.  The nonequilibrium thermodynamics of small systems , 2005 .

[12]  Xi Chen,et al.  1.6 V nanogenerator for mechanical energy harvesting using PZT nanofibers. , 2010, Nano letters.

[13]  Yi-Chung Shu,et al.  Efficiency of energy conversion for a piezoelectric power harvesting system , 2006 .

[14]  Charles M. Lieber,et al.  Coaxial silicon nanowires as solar cells and nanoelectronic power sources , 2007, Nature.

[15]  Cohen,et al.  Dynamical Ensembles in Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics. , 1994, Physical review letters.

[16]  F. Marchesoni,et al.  Artificial Brownian motors: Controlling transport on the nanoscale , 2008, 0807.1283.

[17]  Zhong Lin Wang,et al.  Piezoelectric Nanogenerators Based on Zinc Oxide Nanowire Arrays , 2006, Science.

[18]  Giulio Casati,et al.  Increasing thermoelectric efficiency: a dynamical systems approach. , 2008, Physical review letters.

[19]  D. Diamond,et al.  Chemo/bio-sensor networks , 2006, Nature materials.

[20]  K.S.J. Pister,et al.  An ultra-low energy microcontroller for Smart Dust wireless sensor networks , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37519).

[21]  T.C. Green,et al.  Architectures for vibration-driven micropower generators , 2004, Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems.

[22]  Yaakov Kraftmakher,et al.  Magnetic field of a dipole and the dipole–dipole interaction , 2007 .

[23]  Gregoire Nicolis,et al.  Stochastic resonance , 2007, Scholarpedia.

[24]  P. Mazur.  On the theory of brownian motion , 1959 .

[25]  Igor Neri,et al.  Nonlinear oscillators for vibration energy harvesting , 2009 .

[26]  C. Jarzynski.  Nonequilibrium Equality for Free Energy Differences , 1996, cond-mat/9610209.

[27]  Sang‐Woo Kim,et al.  Mechanically Powered Transparent Flexible Charge‐Generating Nanodevices with Piezoelectric ZnO Nanorods , 2009 .

[28]  R. Kawai,et al.  Inertial effects in Büttiker-Landauer motor and refrigerator at the overdamped limit. , 2008, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[29]  W. Wegscheider,et al.  Ratchet effects induced by terahertz radiation in heterostructures with a lateral periodic potential. , 2008, Physical review letters.

[30]  Mika Prunnila,et al.  Observations of confined acoustic phonons in silicon membranes , 2004 .

[31]  Ian F. Akyildiz,et al.  Wireless sensor networks: a survey , 2002, Comput. Networks.

[32]  Adrien Badel,et al.  A comparison between several vibration-powered piezoelectric generators for standalone systems , 2006 .

[33]  L. Gammaitoni,et al.  Nonlinear energy harvesting. , 2008, Physical review letters.

[34]  Work Fluctuations, Transient Violations of the Second Law and Free-Energy Recovery Methods: Perspectives in Theory and Experiments , 2004, cond-mat/0401311.

[35]  Rectification of fluctuations in an underdamped ratchet , 1998, cond-mat/9804215.

[36]  J. Groenen,et al.  Inelastic light scattering by longitudinal acoustic phonons in thin silicon layers: From membranes to silicon-on-insulator structures , 2008 .