Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2014
Introduction
Electronics is progressively penetrating more deeply into human lives: integration has made possible the wealth of many small mobile devices that society currently enjoys (e.g. smart phones, MP3 players, GPS navigation assistants, etc.). In this scenario, active RFID systems hold the promise of implementing smart environment and objects, and can ease processes in many applications fields, e.g. industrial processes, personal healthcare, environmental monitoring. Pervasive computing and wireless sensor networks are introducing their potential while power consumption has been greatly reduced thanks to energy-aware design techniques. The availability of low cost batteries has been one of the main drivers of these advances, even though it now represents one of the main limitations. In fact, power supplies still mainly rely on electrochemical cells with limited stored charge and are often impracticable to replace.
During the last years energy harvesting from ambient sources has proven to be a viable solution: the environment is an intrinsic source of low-density highly available energy [1] in either steady or intermittent and irregular forms such as, for example, vibrations [2], thermal gradients [3], indoor light [4], and electromagnetic radiation [5]. At the current state of the art, most energy harvesters can provide in practical cases an output power density of about 10–100 µW/cm3 [6]. In this scenario, mechanical vibrations represent a viable solution for powering low power electronic systems (e.g. wireless sensor nodes, personal healthcare devices, etc.).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.