Energy Harvesting Techniques for Monitoring Devices in Smart Grid Application

Energy harvesting is a process of capturing, storing and conditioning ambient and residual energies for future use. The amount of residual energy captured is very small and can be used for low power load such as wireless sensor nodes. Wireless sensor nodes are used to monitor physical parameters at diverse locations. They find extensive applications in military, health care industries, environmental monitoring and smart grids. One of the major constraints of Wireless sensor node is battery lifetime as battery gets depleted over a period of time. Energy harvesting techniques can be used to overcome this constraint and has the ability to make wireless sensor node self sustainable. This paper provides an overview of energy harvesting techniques used for wireless sensor nodes in smart grid application.