Energy harvesting feasibility for safety belt buckle

Technology is to an increasing degree becoming spatially distributed, as Internet of Things or sensors in vehicles. With this comes challenges in power supply, with either cumbersome amounts of batteries or power cables. In this paper we examine the potential of energy harvesting for powering a safety sensor on a belt buckle. Concluding that that the vibrations on this site are impractically small, we propose an energy harvester for transducing human induced mechanical energy. The electromagnetic energy harvester converts vertical buckle-in/-out events into rotations of a circular array of magnets, varying the flux through a coil. Both measurements and simulations are performed, the later showing a potential energy of 4mJ for a single buckle-in event.