ASP projects

EVEH: Enhancing Vibrational Energy Harvesting

Our world and our lives are led by innovation. New brilliant solutions and break-through ideas dawn as answers to go further everyday obstacles or just to force mind set barrels. Among these novel projects, energy harvesting, which is the study of all those technologies capable of realizing the direct conversion of reduced amount of energy coming from the environment into electricity, represents a promising tool in the near future, thanks to their ability of making small devices as sensors self-sufficient, much 32 ASP PROJECTS ASP PROJECTS 33 reliable and efficient. Consider for a while a world in which it would be possible to recover energy from all those phenomena in which it would have otherwise gone lost: the vibrations caused by cars travelling on a bridge, the heat dispersed in our house when we are cooking, the motion provided by our muscles during a walk and consider how common these phenomena are. The widespread introduction of a new technology designed specifically to cover the leap between random, wasted vibrations or heat and useful power could have a deep impact for an extremely broad range of users. EVEH’s goal is not just to approach energy harvesting following methods and simplification purposed by the literature, but also to make a real step beyond studying and simulating the systems under other hypothesis and working conditions, purposing optimized solutions. In short, we had offered our engineering service and expertise to help vibration energy harvesting design and developing. Starting from an economical and user-oriented analysis, we have explored all the possible multidisciplinary sides of the subject such as the mathematical modelling of noisy systems and their simulation, the power management, that is the regulation of the harvested power to make it suitable for external load and battery, the energy conversion mechanisms, such as piezoelectric effect and electromagnetic induction, and the mechanical stresses to which the components are subjected to.

Principal Academic Tutor
Michele Bonnin, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino

Academic Tutors
Raffaele Ardito, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Paolo Maffezzoni, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano

External Institution
CNR-IMM

External Tutor
Sabina Spiga, MDM laboratory, CNR-IMM

Team members
Fabio Capogreco [Communication Coordinator], Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Torino
Barbara Cappello [Team Controller], Electronic Engineering, Politecnico di Torino
Luca Corinzia, Physics of complex systems, Politecnico di Torino
Alessandro Gallo, Automotive Engineering, Politecnico di Torino
Simone Ghio, Energy Engineering, Politecnico di Torino
Francesco Regazzoni, Mathematical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Alessio Russo, Automation and Control Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Tommaso Vanzan, Mathematical Engineering, Politecnico di Torino

Download the poster of the Project