Microenergy Harvesting Applications for Outdoor Power Equipment

Energy harvesting has generated great interest in recent years due to its usefulness in powering Wireless sensor networks (WSN). Energy harvesters are capable of harvesting energies from the environmental sources such as wind, solar, noise and vibrations [1]. They are an alternative source of power as batteries have a limited life and need constant replacing [2]. In hazardous or hard to reach places, energy harvesters are a feasible option as they are capable of providing constant source of power without any maintenance. Many energy harvesters developed mostly work on vibrational kinetic energy as vibrational energy is readily available even in closed environments as compared to solar or wind energies. The kinetic energy harvesters developed so far have been electromagnetic, piezoelectric or electrostatic and are capable of producing energy from micro watts to mili-watts at various frequencies [3, 4].