Nonlinear energy harvesting

The proliferation of wearable and left-behind devices has raised the issue of powering such systems. While primary batteries have been widely used in order to address this issue, recent trends have focused on energy harvesting products that feature high reliability and low maintenance issues. Among all the ambient sources available for energy harvesting, vibrations and heat have been of significant interest among the research community for small-scale devices. However, the conversion abilities of materials are still limited when dealing with systems featuring small dimensions. The purpose of this paper is to presents an up-to-date view of nonlinear approaches for increasing the efficiency of electromechanical and electrocaloric conversion mechanisms. From the modeling of the operation principles of the different architectures, a comparative analysis will be exposed, emphasizing the advantages and drawbacks of the presented concepts, in terms of maximal output power (under constant vibration magnitude or taking into account the damping effect), load independence, and implementation easiness.