Energy Harvesting in Substations for Wireless Sensors and a New Arc Converter Structure

With the development of wireless sensor networks, energy supplying problem become critical. One solution method is energy scavenging technology which harvest energy existed in environment, such as solar, vibration, air flow, temperature difference, ambient electromagnetic fields and etc. In substations, the method harvesting energy from the electric field to power sensor nodes is adopted because it's more viable than other energy sources. The principle of electric field energy harvesting was analyzed, and a new type energy converter was proposed which can improve the harvesting efficiency.