In this era of increasing energy costs and decreasing

supplies of fossil fuels, emphasis on protecting the environment and creating sustainable
forms of power have become vital, high priority projects for modern society. Thus we
developed the Energy Harvesting or the Energy Scavenging systems.

Energy Harvesting systems are used to harvest the

normally lost environmental energy and to convert it into electrical
energy. This approach can be attractive where
batteries are a bottleneck for the whole system (e.g. they have a finite
life time and their replacement or recharge is not feasible or too
expensive). An energy scavenging
system, instead, is a theoretically endless energy source. In literature
many papers describe methodologies to realize the energy-scavenger.
A lot of them focus on the conversion of the energy associated to
mechanical vibrations since they can be easily found in many
environments. This paper focuses on a Piezoelectric transducer since it
is one of the more efficient systems to convert the energy of
mechanical vibrations.

Piezoelectric devices are implements that use materials exhibiting piezoelectric

effects. "Piezo," in Greek, means "pressure," which explains that when you apply pressure to
piezoelectric materials, you get a charge separation within a crystal and a voltage across the
crystal that is sometimes extremely high. Quartz, Rochelle salt, and certain ceramics all
exhibit piezoelectric behaviors.

Piezoelectric materials (PZT) can be used as mechanisms to transfer ambient

vibrations into electrical energy that can be stored and used to power other devices. With
the recent surge of micro scale devices, PZT power generation can provide a
conventional alternative to traditional power sources used to operate certain types of
sensors/actuators, telemetry, and MicroElectroMechanical Systems(MEMS) devices. In
this paper, the dynamics of piezoelectric materials for the use of power generation
devices has been experimentally investigated. The objectives of this work are to estimate
the amount of power that PZT can generate, and to identify the feasibility of the devices
for real-world applications. The energy produced by the PZT was stored in two different
ways. The first was in a capacitor that allows for immediate access to the stored energy,
and the second method charged a nickel metal hydride battery. The power generated by
the vibration of the piezoelectric is shown to be a maximum of 2 mW, and provide
enough energy to charge a 40mAh button cell battery in one hour.

Piezoelectric materials form transducers that are able to interchange

electrical energy and mechanical motion or force. These materials, therefore, can be used
as mechanisms to transfer ambient motion (usually vibration) into electrical energy that
may be stored and used to power other devices. By implementing power harvesting
devices we can develop portable systems that do not depend on traditional methods for
providing power, such as the battery, which has a limited operating life.
 A Piezoelectric Harvesting or scavenging system could be utilized in a very
large number of methods. These systems could be utilized to generate electricity using
the Piezoelectric crystals, utilizing their property of converting mechanical stress into
electrical energy. Thus by using a number of such crystals the electricity generated could
be increased

Hence we can generate electricity from Foot traffic, road traffic and so on.
Utilizing the Piezoelectric harvesting systems, the airports and railway stations could
generate all the electricity they require without any need of outside sources.
Such a system could be used to power the various electronic Gadgets like i-pods or RFID
tags a person uses.

The scopes of Piezoelectric Harvesting circuits are very vast and they are to
be studied in detail as these circuits could provide a major breakthrough for the mankind
in this era, where the energy crisis is reaching the peaks.

In this seminar, I am trying to learn deep about the various methods of

Piezoelectric harvesting, the various developments is this field and the methods to
improve the power generated by these Harvesting circuits.