A Concertina-Shaped Vibration Energy Harvester-Assisted NFC Sensor With Improved Wireless Communication Range

The explosive growth of wireless sensor platforms and their emerging wide range of application areas make the development of a sustainable and robust power source, an essential requirement to enable widespread deployment of these wireless devices. As a solution to this cardinal issue, this article reports the design and fabrication of a resonant vibration energy harvester (VEH) that comprises interleaved springs, manifesting a concertina-shaped structure that can enable large mechanical amplitudes of oscillation. Within a relatively small footprint (9 cm3), this concertina-VEH yields a large power density of 455.6 $\mu \text{W}$ /cm3g2 while operating at a resonant frequency of 75 Hz. Additionally, the feasibility of the implemented VEH to support near field communication (NFC)-based wireless sensor platform, that is yet uncharted, is also investigated in this work. A very low-power consumption NFC wireless sensor node has been designed and developed for this purpose. The developed concertina VEH has been employed to power the electronics interface of this NFC sensor. Using mechanical energy derived from as low as 0.2-g excitation, our study shows that the VEH can enhance the electromagnetic interaction between the transmitting antenna and the reader, resulting in a 120% increase in wireless communication range for the NFC sensor node. Such a high-performance energy harvester-assisted NFC sensor node has the potential to be used in a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms as a reliable and sustainable power solution.