There's plenty of energy at the bottom (micro and nano scale nonlinear noise harvesting)

Abstract

The future of mobile Information and Communication Technology will be strongly affected by our success in solving the question of how to power very small devices. Ambient energy harvesting has been in recent years the recurring object of a number of research efforts aimed at providing an autonomous solution to the powering of small-scale electronic devices. Among the different solutions, micro scale vibration energy harvesting has played a major role due to the almost universal presence of mechanical vibrations mainly in the form of random fluctuations, i.e. noise. In this paper we briefly discuss the role of micro-energies and the possibility to harvest them by employing nonlinear dynamical systems.

Keywords:

• energy harvesting
• nanotech
• MEMS
• NEMS
• noise
• nonlinear

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledge useful discussion with themembers of NiPS Laboratory and in particular with H.Vocca, I. Neri, F. Cottone, F. Travasso, F. Orfei and the members of NANOPOWER project and specifically the group leaders of the participating laboratories: L. Worschech, J. Ahopelto, C. Sotomayor-Torres, M. Buttiker and F. Marchesoni. The results presented here were obtained thanks to the financial support from the European Commission (FPVII, Grant agreement no: 256959, NANOPOWER and Grant agreement no: 270005, ZEROPOWER), Ministero Italiano della Ricerca Scientifica (PRIN 2007), and Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Perugia (Bando a tema – Ricerca di Base 2009, Microgeneratori di energia di nuova concezione per l'alimentazione di dispositivi elettronici mobili).

Notes

1. From Latin: if it is allowed to compare the great things with the small ones.

2. As Feynman wrote in his famous lectures: ‘It is important to realise that in Physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is’. Feynman Lectures 4.1.

3. CMOS = Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor. It is the most common technology to build electronic integrated circuits.

4. The opportunity of transforming here one kind of energy into another should raise no concern about possible violations of the second principle of thermodynamics. In fact we are dealing with open systems that are not at thermal equilibrium with the environment. The implications of thermal fluctuations on the energy harvesting process are briefly discussed in Section 2.4.

5. ‘SMART 2020: enabling the low carbon economy in the information age’ is a report published by ‘The Climate Group’, an independent, not-for-profit organisation. The report is available from: http://www.theclimategroup.org/_assets/files/Smart2020Report.pdf

6. Clearly kinetic energy is not the only form of energy available at micro and nano scale. As an example light is a potentially interesting source of energy and nanowires have been studied also in this respect. See e.g. [38]. However, in this article we will focus on kinetic energy only.

7. This picture has been provided by C. Sotomayor-Torres, ICN Barcelona.

8. The oscillation angle is considered small when the terms following the first one in the Taylor expansion of the sine are negligible compared to the leading one.

9. It is often told that non-linear dynamics sounds pretty much like ‘non-Elephant’ zoology. Although I heard it the first time from D.K. Campbell, during a seminar, I cannot say who was the first to point this out. But I like it.