CAM-IES Industry Workshop: Energy Harvesting for Wireless Sensors and the Internet of Things, Thursday 12 April 2018

On 12 May 2018 the first CAM-IES Industry Workshop was held at Trinity College, Cambridge. The workshop brought together academic experts, with backgrounds in energy materials and devices, with industrial partners from a range of industries including IoT, autonomous sensors for environmental sensing and healthcare, wearable electronics etc. The workshop was successful as a platform for academic and industrial researchers to discuss common goals, to assess the effects of different working conditions on harvester performance for sensing and IoT applications. 

Wireless sensors and other autonomous IoT devices need to harvest sufficient energy from their environment so that they can operate reliably over years without requiring maintenance or battery changes. To ensure reliable energy supply under changing environmental conditions this may require combination of different forms of energy harvesting including light, electromagnetic, vibrational or thermoelectric energy harvesting, as well as careful design of the energy system including the battery and the energy harvester so that their operating characteristics are well matched to the low power microcontrollers used for recording and transmitting the relevant information.

The workshop started with a session of presentations from both industrial and academic speakers, outlining the state-of-the-art for energy harvesting, and summarising the main technological and research challenges. Very animated discussion followed, where some key research opportunities and potential collaborations were identified.