Autonomous low-power wireless sensors via graded elastic metamaterials

Abstract

The reduced power requirements of recent small electronic components, makes on chip energy harvesting solutions a promising alternative to batteries or complex wiring. Amongst others, vibration-based energy harvesting schemes are particularly attractive due to the numerous and continuous sources of vibration present in the environment. However, due to the low amount of energy involved in common ambient vibrations, it is interesting to focus, or trap, waves from a larger region outside the device into a confined region in the near vicinity of the sensor. Advanced multi- resonator designs are able to dramatically increase the energy available for harvesting, and the operational bandwidth, as compared with the current state of the art.

After an introduction to piezoelectricity and the control capacity of graded metamaterials, the talk will present innovative energy harvesting solutions based on the introduction of piezoelectric materials inside graded arrays of resonators. At the same time, the purpose is to link two separate bodies of research, namely metamaterials and energy harvesting, providing the basic theory to understand the physics of piezoelectric multi-resonator devices.