Energy harvesting and management of continuously powered WSNs

Numerous methods to harvest and store energy from e.g. vibration of technical systems that is otherwise wasted have been developed by countless engineers around the world. All of them have some benefits as well as drawbacks that need to be overcome or at least to be reduced to a minimum especially when it comes to efficiently power a wireless sensor network (WSN). In this paper, it is shown what those drawbacks are and some techniques to minimize them are proposed. Furthermore, a possible way to manage the harvested energy in case of the source is not available permanently while the WSN needs to be powered constantly is presented. The given results are based on simulation as well as hardware prototypes.