Demo: Energy Harvesting Using Everyday Objects

Abstract

We present an energy harvesting technique that leverages readily available time-varying ambient electric field (EF) as source, and explore the utilization of surrounding everyday objects that are constructed from conductive materials. In this abstract, we describe the general concept and the circuit model of our approach. We showed that by incorporating energy store and release circuitry, we were able to deliver power to a usable level. To thoroughly test the technique, we developed Wireless Logger hardware module and conduct extensive one week-long power harvesting experiment. We show our ambient electric field profiler tool that checks the electrical properties of an environment. This tool is useful to obtain parameters to know whether our technique is feasible for a given environment. We highlight limitations that encourage us to refine our design, explore other grounding strategies, and implement techniques to extract the maximum harvestable energy in the future iterations of this strategy. We believe that the perpetual issue in Internet-of-Things is electrical power, and this research contributes as a simple, lightweight, thus usability-wise, a powerful solution for this issue.