Energy harvesting system for intelligent tyre sensors

An intelligent tyre system enables the active chassis control system to directly access the information about tyre-road interactions. However, supplying power to the system is still a bottleneck which limits the applicability of the intelligent tyre system. This paper proposes a piezoelectric energy harvesting system with energy storage to address this issue. The system was installed to the inside of a car tyre and measured with a chassis dynamometer. The harvester was found to produce approximately 88 μW of power at a driving speed of 60 km/h, which is enough to supply energy for a low-power in-tyre sensor system with radio link connectivity such as a tyre pressure monitoring system.