The Energy Harvesting Research Group at the University of Exeter is working on cutting edge academic research with a firm focus on needs of industry. We use a fully integrated system approach to address research challenges on the mismatch between energy harvested and energy demanded by wireless sensing systems in the areas of:

* Novel energy harvesting transducer designs
* Modelling and Simulation
* Power management with energy-aware architecture
*低功耗无线传感节点
* Integration of the above developed technologies for applications

Prof. Zhu’s group harvests energy from the vibration of aircraft in an active service and human walking movement energy and then convert the harvested energy into useable electrical energy to provide electrical power for low power consumption wireless communication sensor networks, making them self-sufficient in energy supply.

The developed system for aircraft potentially enables aircraft structural health monitoring systems to be completely autonomous to run without constantly maintenance because this technology is “fit and forget”, without the need for batteries and therefore without need to replace batteries and so it greatly reduces costs and time required for installation, replacement and maintenance. Logistic, military, and civilian aircraft transports will benefit from this development, for example, structural health monitoring of airframe, gearbox and micro and small UAV sensing.

The developed knee-joint energy harvesting uses a novel “Pizzicato excitation” to ensure piezo-harvester to be capable of working at a wide range of vibration frequency and increase the efficiency of piezo-harvesters for low frequency. This proposed Pizzicato excitation has overcome most piezoelectric energy harvester poor power harvested in real operational environment.

Prof Zhu will present her group research methodology and their developed two high performance “proof-of-concept” energy harvesting powered wireless sensor node demonstrator to harvest aircraft wing strain energy for structural health monitoring application and harvest human walking energy for battery-free solider applications.