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The scientific interest in piezoelectric micro-energy harvesting (PMEH) has been fast-growing, demonstrating that the field has made a major improvement in the long-term evolution of alternative energy sources. Although various research works have been performed and published over the years, only a few attempts have been made to examine the research's influence in this field. Therefore, this paper presents a bibliometric study into low-cost PMEH from ambient energy sources within the years 2010-2021, outlining current research trends, analytical assessment, novel insights, impacts, challenges and recommendations. The major goal of this paper is to provide a bibliometric evaluation that is based on the top-cited 100 articles employing the Scopus databases, information and refined keyword searches. This study analyses various key aspects, including PMEH emerging applications, authors' contributions, collaboration, research classification, keywords analysis, country's networks and state-of-the-art research areas. Moreover, several issues and concerns regarding PMEH are identified to determine the existing constraints and research gaps, such as technical, modeling, economics, power quality and environment. The paper also provides guidelines and suggestions for the development and enhancement of future PMEH towards improving energy efficiency, topologies, design, operational performance and capabilities. The in-depth information, critical discussion and analysis of this bibliometric study are expected to contribute to the advancement of the sustainable pathway for PMEH research.

During the last decade, countless advancements have been made in the field of micro-energy storage systems (MESS) and ambient energy harvesting (EH) shows great potential for research and future improvement. A detailed historical overview with analysis, in the research area of MESS as a form of ambient EH, is presented in this study. The top-cited articles in the field of MESS ambient EH were selected from the Scopus database, and based on articles published from 2010 to 2021, and the number of citations. The search for these top-cited articles was conducted in the third week of December 2021. Mostly the manuscripts were technical and contained an experimental setup with algorithm development (65%), whereas 27.23% of the articles were survey-based. One important observation was that the top 20 selected articles, which are the most-cited articles in the different journals, come from numerous countries of origin. This study revealed that the MESS integrated renewable energy sources (RESs) are an enhancement field of research for EH applications. On the basis of this survey, we hope to identify and solve research problems in the field of MESS and RESs integration, and provide suggestions for future developments for EH applications.

The Internet of Things (IoT) empowers the development of heterogeneous systems for various application domains using embedded devices and diverse data transmission protocols. Collaborative integration of these systems in the industrial domain leads to incompatibility and interoperability at different automation levels, requiring unified coordination to exchange information efficiently. The hardware specifications of these devices are resource-constrained, limiting their performance in resource allocation, data management, and remote process supervision. Hence, unlocking network capabilities with other domains such as cloud and web services is required. This study proposed a platform-independent middleware module incorporating the Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture (OPC UA) and Representational State Transfer (REST) paradigms. The object-oriented structure of this middleware allows information contextualization to address interoperability issues and offers aggregated data integration with other domains. RESTful web and cloud platforms were implemented to collect this middleware data, provide remote application support, and enable aggregated resource allocation in a database server. Several performance assessments were conducted on the developed system deployed in Raspberry Pi and Intel NUC PC, which showed acceptable platform resource utilization regarding CPU, bandwidth, and power consumption, with low service, update, and response time requirements. This integrated approach demonstrates an excellent cost-effective prospect for interoperable Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication, enables remote process supervision, and offers aggregated bulk data management with wider domains.

This paper reviews energy storage systems, in general, and for specific applications in low-cost micro-energy harvesting (MEH) systems, low-cost microelectronic devices, and wireless sensor networks (WSNs). With the development of electronic gadgets, low-cost microelectronic devices and WSNs, the need for an efficient, light and reliable energy storage device is increased. The current energy storage systems (ESS) have the disadvantages of self-discharging, energy density, life cycles, and cost. The ambient energy resources are the best option as an energy source, but the main challenge in harvesting energy from ambient sources is the instability of the source of energy. Due to the explosion of lithium batteries in many cases, and the pros associated with them, the design of an efficient device, which is more reliable and efficient than conventional batteries, is important. This review paper focused on the issues of the reliability and performance of electrical ESS, and, especially, discussed the technical challenges and suggested solutions for ESS (batteries, supercapacitors, and for a hybrid combination of supercapacitors and batteries) in detail. Nowadays, the main market of batteries is WSNs, but in the last decade, the world's attention has turned toward supercapacitors as a good alternative of batteries. The main advantages of supercapacitors are their light weight, volume, greater life cycle, turbo charging/discharging, high energy density and power density, low cost, easy maintenance, and no pollution. This study reviews supercapacitors as a better alternative of batteries in low-cost electronic devices, WSNs, and MEH systems.