Bridge vibration energy harvesting for wireless IoT-based structural health monitoring systems: A review

Vibration energy has the advantage of abundant availability in the environment of the bridge structure due to consistent traffic flow and high-speed wind blowing. The vibration energy present at the bridge site can be harvested for powering the wireless sensors mounted on the bridge for health monitoring and making the system self-powered. The bridge vibrations are usually low frequency and low acceleration excitations, therefore, its transduction to useful electrical energy is a challenge. However, several techniques are being utilized to harvest the bridge vibration and a variety of bridge energy harvesters are being developed for this purpose. This work has reviewed energy harvesters claimed to be designed for bridge vibrations. The study is split into two categories, first section discusses the energy harvesters developed for bridge vibrations tested only in-lab environments. The second section is about the harvesters that have been characterized on real bridge structures to verify their effectiveness. The study reveals that the bridge energy harvesters can extract enough power to operate the wireless sensors for the health monitoring of bridge structures. Moreover, the architecture, fabrication, input excitation, and output performance of the reported harvesters with modeling techniques are discussed.