Energy harvesting and storage for stand-alone microsystems

This chapter presents an overview of energy harvesting systems for powering stand-alone microsystems. The overview is not intended to be exhaustive, but comprehensive enough to catch the importance of energy harvesting in the context of distributed sensor networks. Applications for three types of energy harvesting sources are presented: thermoelectric, photovoltaic, and piezoelectric. This chapter ends by complementing the topic of energy harvesting, through the presentation of electronic conversion/management systems and energy storage technologies.