SUMMARY

Energy harvesting has emerged as a viable means for powering low-power electronic devices. It enables energy collection directly from the environment to power electronics, or to recharge a secondary battery. Environmental energy harvested may include kinetic energy in the form of vibration and noise, electromagnetic radiation, thermal energy, etc. Harvesting of vibrational energy for low-power electronic components, such as wireless sensor networks, has been studied extensively over the past few years. A variety of transduction methods have been considered, to include piezoelectric, electrostatic, electromagnetic, and magnetostrictive transduction. Harvesting of wave energy has received little attention and is the subject of the presentation. An effective approach for wave energy harvesting may entail trapping a portion of incident energy in a subdomain, and then harvesting the subdomain's energy over a finite period of time. Trapping of wave energy is particularly useful in situations where the energy source is present during short intervals of time, such as non-stationary excitation, impact events, wind gusts, etc. A second effective approach may entail focusing using structures inspired by metamaterial. Acoustic metamaterials are the type of artificial materials and structures (AMS) in which, the phase speed of the constituent material is significantly lower than that of the matrix material. Due to the smaller size of acoustic metamaterials, they can generate a low frequency band which is more applicable for low-frequency vibroacoustic energy harvesting.