Guest Editorial: Special Issue on “Energy Harvesting in the Instrumentation and Measurement Framework”

The rapid growth of the electronic industry in the field of novel solutions and low-power approaches for measurement systems is evident with the increasing development of novel materials, mechanisms, methods, and devices. In particular with the fast development of energy harvesting technology, various solutions have been proposed to address the autonomy of sensors, measurement systems, and sensing nodes. It is worth noting that IoT devices and systems are powered by batteries today. As a function of the specific battery, the electronics can run steadily for short periods of time. Through the adoption of external energy from the environment, the system could work almost indefinitely. Energy harvesting from ambient power captures small amounts of ambient energy, converting it into electricity; in particular, various forms of energy can be considered such as solar, hydro-electric, thermal, kinetic, radio frequency, wind, and acoustic. It is worth noting that several approaches have been exploited to optimize the amount of harvested energy useful from the environment, with particular emphasis on using novel transducers, extraction mechanisms, and suitable dynamics in the perspective to optimize the extraction capabilities to supply a specific measurement system.