Sustainability via Energy Harvesting and Scavenging.

This article presents three novel concepts for energy harvesting and scavenging, demonstrating the outcome effectiveness of a program for energy harvesting at New Mexico State University. The design concepts cover a wide range of harvested power outputs from microwatts to kilowatts and illustrate a sampling of the breadth of potential energy harvesting and scavenging capabilities needed to create sustainable environments. The concepts have wide-ranging applications and demonstrate how off-the-shelf components can be integrated into reliable, cost-effective, and environmentally benign implementations for meeting essential energy needs of human society. The outcome clearly demonstrates the value of an experiment-based approach to train graduate and undergraduate students in conceiving, designing, building, testing, validating, and evaluating environmentally benign systems for harvesting and scavenging energy from ambient energy sources that can lead to sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]